MARGARET ASSUMED BILL called her Sylvia only because he could clearly see how it aggravated her. In all these years it had never once troubled her that he might sometimes remember Sylvia and their life together in the privacy of his thoughts, because how could he not, but when he said, “Thank you, Sylvia, that was very nice,” or, “Why don’t you drive down and get us some corn for supper, Sylvia,” she would flinch in spite of herself, never expecting it, never quite getting used to that one thing. She had indeed adjusted to the rest of it, as you would adjust to anything that happened with such regularity.
She had read things, pamphlets from the young nurse up at the clinic, magazine articles slipped to her by her old friend Norma Fawcett, who had more time for such things now that her own husband had succumbed to Parkinson’s. These were serious articles written by apparently qualified people. So she did have the queer comfort of knowing she was just one among many.
And she’d watched the talk-show carnival on television, wondering as she watched what she might think to say if she found herself up there on the platform with Bill beside her, wondering how they could possibly capture the idiotic attention of the audience, how they could make their own peculiar lives sound satisfactorily sad or terrible or ridiculous in the short time allowed between commercials for Rogaine and adult diapers and Walk Fit machines.
She had learned from her reading and watching that there were specific words to put to her situation, passive aggression, codependency, patterns of negative behaviour, dementia, victim, but she was not at all sure of their meanings. Lots of words seemed to her to have taken on new meaning, or they were used differently now, to mean new things. She much preferred an old word, one she remembered from her first years here with Bill when the kids were studying Shakespeare at the dining-room table, asking each other the hardest questions out loud, looking up and defining words like melancholy and gentlewoman and equivocation, repeating the definitions over and over, back and forth, memorizing them. The word was tragedy. It was a plain word and it told you plainly that there was no solution in sight.
When she could manage, to lighten her day a little or to pull herself right up out of her day, she thought of his attacks on her simply as a suddenly compelling new hobby, like black-and-white photography or car mechanics taken up late in life.
* * *
THEY’D BEEN MARRIED now for thirty-nine years and Bill had had all that time to discover ways to get under her skin, as had she, under his. But where he thoughtfully used to avoid doing so, for the last few years, and with more and more relish, he had been spending his time sitting in his chair in the living room going haphazardly back in time to collect scattered bits of ammunition.
He conjured incidents that no one else could quite remember, or home in on, and when he told things, he told them with a twist. His little stories were such a tangled mess, such a chaos, that no one could even begin to sort them out. He revised scenes and comments and behaviour to make everyone but himself look not very good. And he would not be corrected. If he sensed correction coming, he’d just say, “Now, I’m sure about this,” or “I remember that a little differently.” His sentences were brief and shaped, had been carefully shaped before he spoke them, always with a bite on the best words and a cocky challenge to anyone who would dare contradict a man who had lived so long and seen so much.
Although most of the other surviving vets still donned their navy blazers and their proud grief on grey November 11 mornings, and although he was as physically capable as any of them, Bill refused the observance of the walk to the cenotaph now, and when a small, informal delegation, the men who still could be heard to say that they had come of age together, the men who missed his presence in their thinning ranks, came over to the house to try to boost his spirits, he refused the gift of their faded camaraderie. He did talk as he had never talked before about the specifics of the war, about the North Atlantic, the soaking cold and the black distance, which he said was utterly unimaginable to the rest of them, the rest of you, he called them. He unearthed his stiff wool uniform, which had been buried on its half-a-century-old wooden hanger at the back of the upstairs hall closet, displayed it for admiration on the swinging dining-room door, where it stayed for a week, tainting all the rooms with the bitter smell of the mothballs that had been dropped, each of fifty springs, into its pockets. He pulled Sylvia’s old atlas down from its shelf and traced his war through the wide blue ocean with a red Magic Marker, circled quarter-sized areas of water off Iceland and at the entrance to the English Channel. He talked about his ship, its size and its smell, explained to them how steel could hold the cold forever. He could not remember the ship’s name. Didn’t matter, he said. He could and did name several of the men who had been over there with him, an Alex, a George, a Frank, and he named without fail the men who had not gone overseas at all, many of whom were still alive. He called these men the untouched.
He had concrete evidence that the people closest to him were idiots. He slammed his fists on the upholstered arms of his chair, they were flattened with his slamming. He said wisdom would never be given its due, not in his lifetime, said the truth was evidently not valued, that he was a fool to think it would be. He said he was ready to vote Reform, just give him the chance, and he cursed Margaret when she told him she was equally ready to cancel his vote.
Sometimes he was sly, sneaky, oblique. When he complained to visitors about Margaret’s stupidity, how she couldn’t seem to stop blowing fuses, how she would use nothing but cushy expensive toilet paper, how she wasted his gas making small trips back and forth all over town, he couched it all in a late-twentieth-century concern for waste. He looked right at Margaret and called her she.
Standing at her sink or sweeping the back porch or sitting waiting for Doctor Mang to save two more of her teeth, Margaret was very thankful for the healthy function of her own brain, which she could still count on to click into gear more or less as it was meant to. She would rather be dead a thousand times over than live on the way he did. But of course that’s what he would have said too, before. When she thought these words she heard his young man’s voice, content again with an ordinary young man’s strength, speaking them, “I’d rather be dead a thousand times over.”
As it was, he didn’t mean to die at all. He talked about death’s avoidance matter-of-factly, as if the ending of a life was a virus that smart people could protect themselves from, given enough common sense. He gathered what he called the relevant information. He went to the doctor almost weekly, had himself thoroughly checked over even if it was only heartburn that had got him his appointment. He boldly printed the number 911 on a piece of cardboard he’d stapled to the cupboard above the phone in the kitchen, in case he was struck, he said, when she’d left him on his own. He told her that her main job was to protect him from stress, from other people’s nonsense. He said it could kill him.
After Paul was gone they had faded off in their nighttime attentions to each other, settling instead for the occasional comfort of sleeping warmly bum to bum. When he’d started up again, started to grab at her like some randy kid, snorting when she tried to settle him down, apparently propelled by her resistance, she left their bed to sleep in Daphne’s room. And then she had decided it might help. She returned to him, tried to teach him his own forgotten style, the ways and means. He would have none of it. When she tried to cuddle into him, as he used to urge her to do, he took her by the shoulders and pinned her to her pillow, his strength recalled abruptly, as if he’d had it just yesterday. He prodded her and moved her limbs around to suit himself, turned her over and over again, slapped her rear not playfully but hard.
Margaret had lived a very long time without a rough hand on her body and now here it was. She moved permanently into Daphne’s room, bought herself a new, firm mattress and a thick duvet, filled the empty closet and the dresser with her clothes and her mementoes, with the few pieces of nice jewellery she hardly ever wore now, most of them gifts from the kids. She slipped away during a shopping trip to Sarnia with Andy to buy a dead-bolt lock, which she kept in its box under the bed until one day she got the nerve to take the drill and the screwdriver upstairs. Bill followed her up, sat on her bed and watched her struggle with the instructions until the thing was secured on the door. She kept the key on a long string around her neck, wore it wet in the bathtub.
He had struck her only once, otherwise. She’d told him she was taking the car down to the garage to get the oil changed, that she was going to leave the car and they would bring her back right away. When he called from his chair to say that it was his car, he would decide when the oil needed changing, she picked up the keys from the basket on the counter and said he mustn’t worry about it, she had arranged that they would keep the car for only an hour or so, and then she heard him leave his chair. He came into the kitchen and charged her. When he grabbed the keys, she’d told him, only firmly, she thought, kindly, “I’ll take those keys, thank you.” And then the slap.
It was the sound that would stay with her, loud for a simple smack, that and the heat of his open hand on her cheek. The pain wasn’t much. She’d banged her hip bone harder on the counter going out the door too fast, many times. But she could feel her skin burning with the rush of blood and she expected him, seeing it, to feel her shock, perhaps to cry. When he didn’t she pried the keys loose from his clenched fist, digging her nails into his flesh to give him something else to think about. At the door she turned back, said, “You go and sit down.” And he did.
Uptown she stopped at the grocery store to buy him a half gallon of Butter Brickle ice cream. When the Vanderlinde boy dropped her off home she quickly presented it to him, soft in the bowl the way he preferred it, and he reached for it eagerly. “How nice, Sylvia,” he said. “Just the thing for a day like today.”
For the first while, old friends still came to see him with some regularity. A few men, a few women. He was during that time unaccountably affectionate, generous, and false. He began to kiss women on the cheek when he shook their hands, women he had just seen the week before, women who had never been particularly important to him but who had the time now to visit around town. No one knew where he’d seen this gesture or why he took it as his own.
After the kiss he would graciously offer a chair and then sit down himself and begin to talk, looking, as he talked, up at the ceiling as if it was all recorded there to prompt him. If visitors interrupted him with a possible change in direction for the conversation, mentioning perhaps their own grandchildren, or a recent, unusual trip, or a slight variation on something he’d said, he would resume, undaunted. “Anyway,” he’d say. If he was interrupted once too often, he would stop talking altogether and listen intently, hating every word spoken, and at the end of it, before the door was fully closed, he would call out to Margaret in the kitchen, “Lock up if you see that particular battle-axe coming my way again.”
Once the McKellars from down the street brought over their only great-granddaughter, who was a nurse in training in Kitchener. She had driven two hours to see them because the McKellars always helped her with a small cheque at Christmas. This pretty young nurse in training sat down beside Bill on the couch to look at the Florida pictures and, perhaps thinking that what she offered was compassion, perhaps thinking that here was the chance for a practical application of what she’d learned, she took his hand. When she called him “honey,” Margaret wanted to lean over and slug her. Because there was absolutely nothing else she could do to stop it.
The first two times the young woman said the word, Bill stopped talking, stopped turning the pages altogether, which was meant to be a clue, and after the third time he threw her hand off his own, looked directly at Stan McKellar, and said, “Honey, my ass.”
Oh, Margaret thought, you bet, Bill. This one you can have. Then she made an offer of more tea, which the McKellars gratefully took as their chance to go home.
* * *
PATRICK AND MURRAY and Daphne and Sarah believed it was Paul’s death. They had said this to Margaret alone and in pairs and all together. They said psychological shock was a phenomenon that was little understood and they seemed happy to take their comfort from this. But she knew it was not Paul’s death. It was Bill’s brain cells, so minuscule they couldn’t even be imagined, his brain cells collapsing inside his skull, dying off, exploding as silently as the stars she had seen dying on television. It was his death, enjoying itself coming slowly.
At eighty-one Margaret understood death’s ways and means with a clarity she would never have anticipated and she half surrendered herself to this understanding, as if the surrendering could go some way toward appeasement. Death could come hard and fast, as it had come to Paul, ensuring that nothing could get done, nothing could get said before and not much after that was any use to anyone. Or it could come over a few decent months, as it had come all those years before to Sylvia, giving everyone time but not too much of it, not so much you couldn’t get through it. It could come with the thunderous, bloody repetition of slaughter on the other side of an ocean, having itself a heyday in the muddy fields of France. Or it could come in slow time, taking show-off, brazen, slow-march strides. It could let you watch, knowing with cocky confidence that you wouldn’t look away.
Margaret missed Sarah. Sarah’s absence was almost the hardest thing on her plate. After their first few years out west, unable to discipline herself to silence, she had asked about the possibility of a transfer back for Rob, his company was national and had sent him out there in the first place, but Sarah had said no, it didn’t look like they could come back. They were going to make their life in Vancouver.
They did return every two or three years to visit and Sarah came immediately for Paul of course. And Margaret still had her open invitation. But she had never gone, never flown out, never flown anywhere in her life. They’d got to Florida all those years ago on their own, driving, and they had taken the car to Expo, too, just the two of them, she and Bill fighting through the Montreal traffic, staying at the private home of an older French couple who had opened very pleasant rooms to paying visitors. Although they had liked what they saw, especially liked trying all the food, some of which they had never even heard of, when they got back home, very tired and disorientated, they decided they weren’t really travellers. The crowds especially had got to Margaret. So those two were the only trips they’d taken, except for a half-dozen times over to Detroit to see a ball game and of course once in a blue moon in to Toronto.
Sarah was disappointed that Margaret wouldn’t get on a plane and fly out to Vancouver but she knew enough to stop coaxing. She said what they didn’t spend on airfare they should spend on pictures and phone calls, so there were albums filled up and regular Sunday telephone visits. Margaret made notes for herself before the phone calls so she could be sure to give Sarah just the most significant news. Sometimes, if she’d called after eleven when the rates dropped, she would relax maybe a bit too much and talk about people Sarah didn’t remember at all and Sarah would bluff her way through it, saying, Yes, she remembered Norma Fawcett and yes, she remembered the damage from that November storm, and then she’d kick in with her own news and complaints and modest boasting: the extended deck, seven-year-old Natalie honoured at school for her confidence, her brother Jake, so old for nine, playing the guitar, imitating some kind of music from Seattle, the bonehead neighbours with their yappy dog.
Margaret had early on asked Sarah to draw her a floor plan of their never-painted wood house in Vancouver so she would know what she was looking at when she saw the pictures, know where Sarah stood with the phone in her hand. And for Christmas, two years earlier, they’d sent a VCR, which meant that Margaret now had tapes to watch in the afternoons: Sarah’s kitchen with not a thing out of place, not one stray crumb, their living room, all glass and leather and chrome like something in an expensive magazine, Rob cutting the grass, diagonally, making a nice pattern; Sarah on her treadmill, her hair a helped-along blond, her middle thick like Margaret’s own but her legs still as finely shaped as Betty Grable’s; Natalie lying in a chaise in her bathing suit, reading a paperback book, showing little enthusiasm for the camera; Sarah and Rob dressed up to go out for the evening with the neighbours with the yappy dog; Rob bare-chested in tartan boxers, scraping moss off the deck, getting ready to treat it with something or other.
Watching with her, Bill said, every time, “He won’t win against that moss. Any halfwit could see they have no business living there. It’s not a fit place for housing. It’s always been a forest and that’s what it means to be.”
Sarah could read between the lines as well as anyone and she’d had several long phone calls from Patrick, just so she would know what was happening, he told her when he called. She did understand that her father was going through something extremely difficult but it was all entirely in the abstract for her because there was nothing she could do except listen to whatever got said and babble on about life as she knew it. Life as she knew it a continent away in a magnificent city tucked between the mountains and the ocean, with friends and neighbours and colleagues more likely to be called Wong than Chambers.
Although Daphne was settled into the McFarlane house, she didn’t come over any more, ever. She was almost worn out, driving back and forth from the hospital in Sarnia, still working shift. She did welcome Margaret into her own kitchen and she did send the girls to visit Bill, Maggie occasionally when she was home from university for the weekend, Jill more often with jars of rhubarb jam or marmalade or loaves of lemon bread.
* * *
DAPHNE HAD CELEBRATED her fifty-fifth birthday in March and the girls had given her a party. They’d sent invitations far and wide and opened the doors of the McFarlane house to over a hundred people. By all reports it was a blow-out affair. Murray and Kate drove up from Toronto, stopping in London for Patrick and Stephanie and Meg, from the home, and Andy came, and most of the kids. Friends came from Daphne’s old apartment in the city, people who had known the girls when they were small, and from all three of the hospitals where Daphne had worked and from her years in training.
Some of Maggie’s and Jill’s own friends turned up a few days early to help get the house ready and several of Daphne’s oldest friends, from town, from her own time as a girl, the people she had been getting to know again since moving back, helped the girls with the planning and the preparation of the food. The younger women stood around the dining-room table listening as the menu and its attendant complications were discussed, waiting for instruction, and soon, chopping a bag of onions or taking a cloth and a bottle of furniture polish to one more deep, dusty windowsill, they began to imitate these older, relaxed women, their confidence in the face of a big party, their casual talk of recipes for fifty, doubled. In particular, the younger women began to take as their own the much-repeated phrase “Just leave that to me,” laughing as they said it, assuming they’d screw up and hoping it wouldn’t be noticed.
Halfway through the evening, when the McFarlane house was pulsing for the first time in fifty years with music and wine and with the raucous noise of conversation, with stories and anecdotes and praise and questions and lies, when the air was filled with the steamy temptation of good food well prepared, chicken pot pie and beans and ribs and curried shrimp and stir-fried vegetables and paella and leek and potato and squash pie, which was the new recipe, because there was always a new recipe waiting to be tried on a crowd, someone lifting freshly laundered sheers to look out a window noticed a March blizzard gaining strength under the streetlights, so many of the guests who had come from out of town stayed for hours after the party was supposed to end, stayed the night, filled the beds and couches and slept on the floors in sleeping bags like middle-aged kids, pulling each other upright in the morning and stretching and complaining about their lower backs as Jill carried a large tray of orange juice through the rooms, loving it.
Margaret and Bill had been invited to the party but Margaret had declined for them, as she was expected to. Instead she sent a wild-rice casserole and a big silver tray of miniature lemon tarts and, at the last minute, two dozen glads from the new flower shop uptown, the card saying what she always said on cards, “With all our love, Your Dad and Margaret.”
When Bill finally got a partial description of the evening out of Maggie and Jill, the gory details, he called them, he said to the girls, “I expect they were all drunk as lords. What else do they know how to do?”
The next night he turned off a debate about a Gay Pride Parade and phoned Daphne to give her hell. “If they were too drunk to get home, why didn’t you send them over here to sleep?” He listened to her scrambling for a response and, fed up, overspoke her. “If you’re fifty-five, you’re old enough to know that not even drunks like sleeping on the floor.”
Maggie and Jill sometimes brought one boyfriend or another to meet Margaret and Bill, young good-looking men who had been well warned on the way over, prepped to listen and nod and lie according to their best judgement, which was, on the whole, surprisingly reliable.
Margaret had sat Daphne down just once to ask her to forgive her father, simply because she knew she was the only one to do it and she would hate herself later if she didn’t make some effort. She did not believe for a minute that Daphne would be able to offer this imagined forgiveness. Like any daughter, Daphne had never seen her father up close and defenceless, not the way a wife does, so she didn’t have that to fall back on. And his words had been obscenely cruel and said in front of the girls, just after Daphne had moved them back to town.
Right out of the blue he’d asked her, “So where’s the father?” As if this information could make any difference now. “In all this time,” he said, “you’ve never shared that with us.”
When Daphne stood to leave he got up from his chair and followed her through the kitchen to the door. “Just took what he wanted,” he said. “And you too stupid and ugly to deny him.”
They had all spent a good part of their lives, Bill as much as the others, more than the others, much more, trying to help Daphne believe that she was not ugly, not “dee-formed,” as she used to like to put it. Her load was plain when she was still a teenager, you didn’t have to be a brain surgeon. Margaret thought now that Daphne was like a small boulder pushed almost to the top of a hill by a dozen willing hands, and then comes a sneaky well-placed kick. Premeditated, guaranteed. The bastard, she thought. And that’s what she’d said to him at the time, playing rough, breaking for once the firm promise she had made to herself. “You bastard. You God damned bastard.” Knowing it would do no good, except that Daphne and the girls would have those words too, as a modest entitlement from her.
She marked his words to Daphne as the first outside attack. Until then no one would have believed what he could say. But Daphne had taken it to heart. She apparently thought it was real.
Andy came over regularly, as she always had. Once in a while she would have Neil or Carol in tow, or their kids, or Krissy, who was married now and the mother of three boys, the little hellers, Bill called them, taking them back to explore the creek, his control of their loud, confusing play firm but not unkind. He didn’t scare them. For nearly a year, Carol and Krissy had been sharing a dark green Jag XJS. They’d bought a Dream of a Lifetime ticket together, partly because Carol’s mother had won a thousand dollars in the previous draw but mostly to support the hospital, and then they’d won the car. Everyone expected them to sell it and split the money but they didn’t. They’d taken the train in to Toronto to pick it up and they traded it off month by month, loading their kids into the back seat, which was not intended for kids, and taking Bill for a short spin around town whenever he asked, which was often.
When Meg was brought home from London for a visit, she and Andy would come in and stay for part of the afternoon. Meg had needed a hysterectomy soon after Paul was killed and the surgery had frightened her, subdued her more than any of her drugs. She hadn’t been herself since.
Bill still tried to make a big fuss over Meg, although one afternoon when they were at the kitchen table playing their version of crib, he laid down his hand and backed away from her and scowled and barked at some little thing she’d said. Not understanding at all what she had done wrong, Meg stood up and started to bawl, loudly, and then she banged the table with her fists, which made the cards and their glasses of Coke jump.
“Just like old times,” Andy said, coming in fast from the living room.
Margaret steered Bill out of the kitchen quickly so Andy could tell Meg that her grandfather must be very tired, that sometimes old people just got very tired, and then it was over, forgotten. In ten minutes the two of them were sitting on the couch together, one on each side of Andy, looking at the pictures from Florida.
Andy didn’t farm any more, she leased to a neighbour, putting most of that money aside, but she was still managing the mill, wisely, still getting her living from it. Neil, who was thirty-four now and, like his father, tall and fast and sometimes funny, worked for her, and between the two of them they knew almost everyone around, who could be trusted, who shouldn’t be. Over the past five or six years she had been going to Europe for a few weeks every spring. The first time, she took Krissy and Carol to England, another year Daphne and Maggie and Jill flew over to join her for a week in Italy and then a few days in Spain. And one year Mary went with her, although this was long after Mary had divorced Patrick, so it went without saying that the pictures of the two of them, standing on the Pont Neuf looking down at the Seine or sitting at a sidewalk café having breakfast or drinking wine, would not be shoved under anyone’s nose. The last time she was over, so much more confident than she’d been when she started, she had gone to Italy again, with Meg, just for a week. After Meg recovered from her jet lag, which had made her cry with confused exhaustion, they’d got along fine. Meg had liked Rome best, the hot slices of pizza bought right on the sidewalk from dark men who flirted with her, the narrow winding streets she walked holding her mother’s hand, the women who could run across these streets on very high heels. She had liked the churches especially, their thick stone walls, the high, dark emptiness inside, the echo if you shouted.
Andy didn’t seem to be bothered by anything Bill said or did. Nothing fazed her, not even Bill’s insinuations that she and Neil were spending far too much money, that they were running Paul’s mill into the ground. One morning, after a visit when Bill had been tired and thoughtful, when he had talked for a long hour, for which she was thankful, about Paul, jumping around in time but still so obviously and painfully filled with love for his dead son, she went to Daphne under the full steam of nervy anger to tell her that she thought anything was better than having your father die so young your kids had no actual memory of him. “Do you even remember my father?” she asked. “Does anyone?”
Daphne told Andy yes, she did remember her father. She remembered dancing with him at the wedding and out at the Casino in the summers, many times. She said he was the one who first took her out onto the floor to teach her to dance. This wasn’t true, he had been only one of the first, but Daphne thought, It’s true enough.
Murray came. He had always come up to visit a few times a year. During Charlotte’s reign he came alone, the reasons for her absence usually having a nice ring of truth to them, but Charlotte was almost forgotten now. For the last twelve years he had been bringing Kate.
He often looked tired. Well dressed, impeccable in his habits and manners, but tired. His hair had thinned and finally disappeared from the top of his head, although from the ears down it was as thick as when he’d been a boy. Standing behind him, rubbing his hand over Murray’s pate, Bill said, every time, “Your father’s hair. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
Murray never went near the mill, although Bill had been pushing him lately. “Let’s go on over,” he’d say five minutes after Murray was in the door. “Let’s go see how they’re pissin’ away my son’s money now.” He especially despised the newly purchased computer, which he’d never seen.
Bill enjoyed asking Murray about his trips and about the paper he’d quit and the one he worked for now, the corporate world, he called it, and about the stories he said Murray supposedly wrote. He wanted to know what was really going on in Ottawa and at NATO and in the Middle East, said he was after the inside dope, the truth of it, the story the average man would never get to hear. He hated every move Ottawa made and had messy files of clippings to back up his many suspicions, which he would set out on the dining-room table if he knew Murray was coming. He told Murray every time he sat him down that the real story, the unwritten story, was the occupation. The whole country, right down to every God damned song in every God damned elevator, taken over by American this, American that, and why the hell wasn’t anyone writing about it? Exposing it? So maybe people would sit up and take notice? And the stand-off at Oka had convinced him that it was high time the government settled properly and fairly and finally with the Indians and stopped all this bloody screwing around, because in the blink of an eye bloody screwing around could lead to war, and who in his right mind didn’t know that? You didn’t need to have fought a war to know that, he said. Anyone who’d cracked a history book knew it. He said if he was lucky enough to be writing for some big paper, he would be inclined to tell the truth, which was that Ottawa was at war with its own people, that NATO had become a scam, and that the factions in the Middle East had been at some kind of war one with the other from the beginning of time, so what’s newsworthy there?
Murray’s wife Kate charmed Bill, because she was new and had the energy and the inclination. She asked each time to look again at the pictures from the family’s big trip to Florida. She brought him glossy magazines dedicated to sports and hunting and fishing, although she would have known if she’d asked that when Bill was young he’d never had time to play much of anything and had gone hunting up north only once or twice before the war, when he still had his trigger finger. And she brought him thin butterscotch medallions in a fancy foil bag which he held on his lap while they talked, taking one candy after the other into his mouth, not waiting or savouring but biting down hard with his good left molars.
She asked about his garden, allowed him to lead her through it and name for her the plants and the insects and the small anticipated blights. One evening they took the lawn chairs down to sit at the edge of the creek and when he began to complain that something was getting at his sweaty ankles she went back up to the house and returned with the Off! and two empty bread bags, which she slipped over his shoes and tightened on his calves with elastic bands. As she knelt to do this, he reached down to touch her hair. He told her she was the prettiest of the bunch, and the kindest. He said she should have been with them in Florida instead of what’s-her-name, that other cold little fish. He warmed to his metaphor, laughed quietly, intimately, said Murray had been smart to throw the first one back, set his hook again.
After she had the bags secured, Kate straightened and took his hand into her own as a nun might or a mother. He pulled his hand back as if he’d got a small electric shock, and then he leaned down and snapped the elastic bands, kicked the bread bags from his feet, and staggered off. He walked along the creek bank through three of the neighbours’ yards and then stopped, confused, to yell for her to come and get him.
Some of this Kate shared with Murray in the car on the way back to Toronto. She was a fine little storyteller, although she usually kept the coarsest things to herself. The first time, after telling Murray that Bill had squeezed what he called her fanny as she turned to get into the car, when she’d suggested, “Why not laugh?” Murray had taken his eyes off the road for a few deliberate, unsafe seconds. “What a concept,” he’d said. “I’ll get you a bumper sticker.”
After she’d apologized, and she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to do anything except perhaps make getting through these visits something less than grievous, he told her it was obviously harder if you’d known him for a long time, if you’d known him when he was young and clear, that was all it was.
Once, after Murray and Kate had pulled out of the driveway to return to Toronto, Bill said to Margaret, “I never took Murray for an ass man but, then again, you can learn something new every day if you keep your eyes open.”
* * *
IN HIS BUSIEST years, Patrick had come only intermittently, sending Mary and the kids in his place, but he visited fairly often now. Although he had watched the disintegration from the beginning, it was all just small changes to him, first this, then that, too much of something, too little of something else. He decided it could be managed and he didn’t want to spend much time giving it a name. His experience with clients divorcing and squabbling over money and children had long ago convinced him that if people could just handle the small things as they came, complete breakdown could often be prevented. He used words on Margaret like adapt, thinking only to help her. She didn’t bother to try to spell things out for him.
Stephanie, Patrick’s second wife, almost always accompanied him on his visits and once in a while they’d bring Teresa, Stephanie’s poised and beautifully made-up daughter from an earlier marriage, who called herself Tess and who was of all things a fashion model. Sometimes Margaret turned on the VCR and they watched Sarah’s tapes from the coast. The movies, Bill called them.
And Stephanie, too, was asked to sit down to look through the old pictures from Florida, even though she was not the tanned and voluptuously pregnant wife who stood beside Patrick on a balcony in the sunset, brilliant in a white linen dress that exposed her bare and bony Jackie Kennedy shoulders. Not much effort had been made to eradicate this first, much-admired wife and Stephanie understood how this could happen with a woman who was the mother of grandchildren. She understood, too, that Mary had experienced some bad luck with her health and she was careful to take no offence when her name came up, naturally and casually, as if she were just someone they used to know.
Looking through the pictures with Bill, she said what a good idea it had been, going away together for a big holiday, and as he turned the pages she put a name to everyone, pointing to this person or that as if the others didn’t know who they were. “There’s Sarah,” she said. “What a pretty teenager she was.” And, “Daphne always tans so well, I envy her.” And, “I can’t believe Murray would be caught dead in those ridiculous sandals.” She said she could see an easy resemblance between Bill and Paul, whom she had never met, she said anyone would see it. No one corrected her. Paul had never looked like any of them, least of all Bill, although his long tall son Neil was clearly his own.
If Mary had still been involved, still the one coming to visit an elderly father-in-law, she would have put up a resounding struggle. She would have talked to her own doctor and to a specialist or two, she would have read every recent article on dementia and stroke she could get her hands on, and not in the Ladies’ Home Journal. She would have called Bill’s doctor up at the clinic, made an appointment for herself, talked to him frankly about the evident debilitating strain on Margaret and about the possibility of a drug regimen to take the edge off. But, although one or two or all three of Patrick and Mary’s grown kids still arrived once in a long while, Margaret and Bill no longer received visits from Mary, understandably.
Mary had come up to see them the last time on her own. It was in 1987, the summer after Paul died, just when Margaret, at least, was beginning to adjust herself to his terrible absence, to accept his absence as an ever-present, always visible scar across all their lives. She had known there were people who had to live that way, people who grieved daily. And now she and Bill were among them.
Although neither of them had formed even half a sentence to indicate their concern one to the other, for some time Margaret and Bill had both noticed, had separately believed, something was very wrong in Patrick’s marriage, something worse than the usual kind of thing that people had to live through.
In the ten minutes before Mary stood up from her favourite lawn chair to leave them herself for the last time, she’d said what she’d driven an hour to say.
“Six months ago,” she said, “I found an earring in Patrick’s car. A big cheap earring. So I cornered him, I nailed him and made him tell me who she was. She is twenty-two. He met her when she came into the office for a job interview. A job for which she was not even slightly qualified.”
“Oh, Mary,” Margaret said, thinking, This is going to be an awful story.
“I tracked her down last month,” Mary said. “I interviewed her myself. She was appallingly confident for someone so unqualified, sitting in her tawdry little apartment with the sentimental posters taped all over the walls, the pink walls that matched the pink coverlet on the bed that matched her rosy cheeks. She was very soft-spoken, very polite as she advised me that I do not really know my husband, that if I’m not careful, I am going to be his wife in name only, and perhaps not even that. She isn’t even pretty. She is a plain, sentimental, stupid little mouse of a girl. I don’t know why I didn’t slap her down. I don’t know how I stood it. But apparently he can cry in her capable arms. He rides up her elevator to cry in her arms and she gets to pretend that she is a wise young woman. Theirs is not a very complex affair.”
“Perhaps the loss of a brother…?” Bill said, dropping his head back heavily, staring straight up at the empty sky.
Sitting between them in her lawn chair, Margaret concentrated on the willows moving in the breeze above the creek. For days she had been watching a pair of cardinals settle in, although there was no sign of them now.
“Miss Rosy Cheeks was keen to share with me something Patrick should have told me himself,” Mary said. “I think in fact it might be the one thing, the only thing, he’s never told me. She said it should be obvious to me that he has worked so hard and so long because he wanted so badly to live up to his mother’s wish that he use his time and energy, his life, to help people. She told me that in her experience, her experience, men like Patrick almost never get the credit they deserve. And she was kind enough to reassure me that I don’t really have anything to worry about because he is going to continue on, he doesn’t even want out. He is just very tired. She said he needs a place for himself. A safe, separate place where he is not needed.”
“She said that to you?” Margaret asked, lifting the pitcher to refill Bill’s glass and then her own.
Mary appeared to be winding down a little and very soon Margaret would be expected to have something to say to her about this business, something useful perhaps or, at the very least, not hurtful. But sitting there so close to Mary, waiting for the cardinals to appear, and where did they go when they stayed from their nest so long, out to the fields for grain, for the simple pleasure of the flight? she could think of nothing honourable to say.
At the time, after the war but before Sylvia’s death, before she’d imagined the possibility of Bill, when for almost three years she herself had so gladly comforted and taken comfort from a man who had a perfectly good wife, a wife he never spoke of because she would not allow it, she had believed that what she’d given and received truly was, in its essence, a kind of love. She had believed that even in its secret, sneaky, rushed articulation, there was a legitimacy to what she’d done. That those heavy, middle-of-the-night footsteps on the stairs that she’d listened for with such patient, sympathetic hope had been legitimate steps. That there had been a necessity.
Although she had been more than old enough to fear the possibility of consequences, there had been no consequences. Certainly she’d felt heartache when it ended but she’d understood from the start that it would have to end, and the heartache was only for a time, and it was as nothing against his presence in her narrow bed. She could not have known then that the only cost to her would be the requirement for a difficult, respectful silence on an afternoon such as this, an afternoon that could not have been anticipated.
“I’ve invited him to cry at home,” Mary said, “where the rest of us cry. Apparently it’s not going to happen.” She shook her head to Margaret’s offer of more lemonade. “But really,” she said, “she is nothing. She is only the thing I can describe.”
Oh, Margaret thought, she is not nothing. Such women are rarely as little as that. You could ask Daphne, for instance.
“I am asking him to leave,” Mary said, “not because he’s been soft and weak and stupidly self-serving. I’m almost sure I could have lived with that. But because of the thing that must have driven him, the thing that prompted the recklessness of his needing such a vacuous, stupid young woman, which is not nothing, not at all. Of course he remembers whatever it was his mother said to him, of course he has been a helpful man, an extremely strong, cold-blooded, steadying influence on his miserable clients, hundreds of them, year after year after year, but he has taken his pay-off. He has taken the right to stand tall on his own self-satisfied moral high ground. And he’s very much enjoyed overlooking everyone, judging everyone. I am sure you’ve noticed that Patrick and I have both been playing around at righteousness, for years. And now he’s got himself locked in. Even with his own kids. Often with his own kids, who should not be expected to bear it.”
She stood up from her chair. “I think it’s a simple addiction,” she said, “like any other. And now that I’ve said the word, I would guess you have noticed he’s drinking more than he should.” She leaned down to kiss Bill’s forehead. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the drinking is only a predictable, secondary repercussion.”
The cardinals had returned to the willows, had soared in, the male arriving a few long minutes behind the female, and with their return, with the evidence of their deep red devotion so plain, Margaret was able to understand things differently. She understood that if all of this had happened before Paul’s death, before the ground had shuddered and then gone out from under them, she and Bill might have tried to help Mary change her mind, or counselled her to at least give it some time. They did like her so much and they certainly did not have to be convinced that Patrick was not perfect. If Paul had been still alive, still among them with his laughter and his long legs and his quick movement from a chair to a door, from a truck to a back porch, they might have invited Mary to settle into her lawn chair for the afternoon and just let it pour out, hoping as mothers and fathers almost always do that the difficulties could be examined, could be broken apart and fixed one by one by one. If everything had been different, without a moment’s hesitation she would have turned traitor to her own past self, would have argued for the rightness of Mary’s cause just as fiercely as she’d fought for the rightness of her own when she herself was a proud, young bit-on-the-side. And she would not have wallowed, as some might, or paused to deplore the slippery nature of her fidelity. She would not have slowed down to acknowledge the fraud.
But neither of them had the strength for it, not that year. Soon after Mary’s kiss, Bill left them to go into the house alone, to go up to bed, and Margaret, hearing Mary’s rage fade from humiliation down to a mute, humbled grief, felt only regret for her own exhaustion. She was ashamed of her exhaustion.
Walking out to Mary’s car she’d thought, It’s true what they say about timing. So much in this life depends on timing. And then, believing that, whatever had transpired in their marriage, which surely was, like any marriage, beyond the comprehension of those outside it, Patrick had a very large responsibility to this woman, and believing too that perhaps this was the one way she could help, she asked Mary a normally never-asked question. “Will you be all right for money?” she asked. “Will you keep your wonderful house?”
But Mary assured her that money would probably be the least of her worries. She said she was going to dust off her M.A., and if it turned out to be as useless as she suspected, she would go back for another, more relevant degree. She said Patrick had agreed to help until she had established herself.
“I think the kids are old enough to live through this,” she said, opening the car door, assuming that Stephen and John and Rebecca would be on Margaret’s mind, would be claiming their proper place there. “You and Bill will still see them,” she said, “as often as always. I promise you that.”
When she turned away to get in behind the wheel, Margaret pulled her around and hugged her tight, aware as she patted the thick Jackie Kennedy hair that she took the embrace not for Mary but for herself, both for the young, loving, deliriously happy adulteress she’d briefly been and for the lifelong wife she had so unexpectedly, so thoroughly become. When she said goodbye, for the first time in her life she used the word dear, thinking, I’m an old woman now and I’ll never be anything else. Except dead.
“I came because I thought you and Bill were entitled to an explanation,” Mary said. She was not even close to tears. “I’ve worked as hard as he’s worked. I have a right to be happier than I am.”
“Yes,” Margaret had said, helping Mary close the door and then standing back from the car. “I agree.”
And so, eight years later, they had in their midst Stephanie, a lovely, grown-up woman who was all you could ask for in a second wife. Neither Bill nor Margaret had ever spoken of Mary’s visit that last afternoon, not to each other or to Patrick or to anyone else, and the soft-spoken girl who had been nothing, who had no name, had disappeared without a trace, had sunk like a stone, had become by now, possibly, some young man’s affectionate, trusting young wife.
Stephanie appeared to be more even-tempered, more relaxed than Mary, but maybe this was because they didn’t know her so well. They would never have the time now to know her so well. She seemed to assume, not quite correctly, that everything that could be done for Bill had been done. Patrick told Margaret that she had watched a favourite aunt go in some similar way.
* * *
PATRICK HAD BEEN the force behind the garden, which they’d just put in that spring. Years before, when all but one of the big hickories had come down, soon after Sylvia’s death, a garden plot had been marked off and worked and Margaret had laid out her rows of potatoes and corn and broccoli and tomatoes and lettuce and cukes. Then everyone but Sarah was gone and the three of them simply didn’t need all that food. And it was hard work, Margaret told Bill she found it lonely work. Over time, because no shape will hold forever, because lawn grass like any grass will want to spread, the hard garden rectangle had been reduced to a barren, rounded pond of earth. No one had put any effort into taking it back, it had never been rolled and properly reseeded, although Bill did go at the weeds once or twice a summer with 2,4-D.
And Margaret had found a use for the old plot. Soon after the town council had invoked the new bylaw against any kind of private burning, tired of raking the leaves all the way down to the burn patch at the creek, she had begun to gather them onto the plot and put her match to them there, usually taking the trouble to sink a few chestnuts, listening like a kid for the hot pops in the smouldering piles. And almost every fall a small pack of neighbourhood kids who had smelled the smoke in the air would arrive with their rakes to help her, to watch her break the law, and when it was finished she would hand out quarters or, more recently, loonies, from her apron pocket.
It was her habit too in very late winter to watch from the kitchen window for the pond of brown earth that always appeared a week or so before the sun took the snow from the grass, and a little later, in the true spring, she watched as the plot became a mucky, muddy mess, a good measure of the rain they’d had, and, more enjoyably, a soft brown platter that drew the birds to worms.
Patrick had arrived on a May Friday afternoon with a second-hand wagon hitched to his newest Lincoln. In the wagon he had a Rototiller and a wheelbarrow, two bags of sheep manure and three of peat, and a bunch of long-handled garden tools, which were not made of ordinary steel but some kind of hard green plastic.
Margaret and Bill went out to the gravel driveway to meet him, and when he began to explain that they had discussed this the last time he was up, putting in a good garden, sharing both the work and the results, Bill insisted that he had no memory of any talk about a garden. “You talked maybe,” he said.
Unloading the tools while Patrick and Margaret set up a make-do ramp to get the Rototiller off, holding up the business ends of the shovel and the hoe and the fork for inspection, he proclaimed them too damn weird for words.
“No rust,” Patrick said.
When he asked just how much was all this going to cost him, Patrick told him, “Zilch, Dad. Father’s Day.”
Patrick was fifty-eight. His very short hair had lost all traces of colour, it was no longer mottled but pure steely grey, and the creases on his face, deep rays of them back from his eyes and two sturdy grooves from his nose down to his jaw, were set, he could no longer erase them with a change of expression. He claimed he had earned the lines. “Those lines and a few hundred thousand more than you’re worth,” Bill was fond of telling him.
This was one of Bill’s steadiest rages, the amount of money Patrick made. “I cannot comprehend,” he announced one Sunday, “where all this money is coming from.” When Patrick talked about proportions, the high price of housing and cars and insurance and education and hospitals, Bill said the real problem was that people were being educated beyond their intelligence. “Can you tell me who’s going to do the shit work?” he asked. “Can you tell me who’s going to be satisfied living on the wrong side of the tracks?” When Patrick ignored him, left the living room for the kitchen, Bill raised his voice and made sure it carried. “If there ever is another war,” he called out, “no one will be willing to go. No one will be able to go, everyone’s so blessed soft. Then we’ll see where all this improvement got us.” He loaded everything he had on the word improvement.
Patrick had held on to a squash player’s fitness, which Bill said was a city fitness that fooled no one. He liked to remind Patrick, as he sometimes reminded other men, that his hands hadn’t been dirty in thirty years.
After the unloading and a short visit in the kitchen and a beer for Patrick, Bill sat on the garden bench with his arms folded while Margaret walked the plot with Patrick to find and collect any bits of refuse. Margaret told Patrick if he came across a rare coin, it was his to keep but she’d take any diamond rings. The first thing she found was an ash-smeared length of tartan ribbon similar to the ones mothers used to tie into the hair of their pretty little girls. “I didn’t chuck this out here,” she said, suspecting the birds. Within a few minutes she had picked up several bits of tangled wire, a half-buried pop can, and three good-sized spikes, old and crusted with rust, that must have been left behind when the fence had come down, soon after the war. Margaret knew that Bill and Sylvia had bought the house in part because of the picket fence, she had seen pictures of the kids climbing it, but when Bill got home from overseas he’d declared it rotten and pulled it down.
Patrick had found only stones, and when he said he guessed they were finished, Bill got up from the bench to walk every inch himself, to double-check them. On his second pass he found an open diaper pin with a faded pink head. As he dropped the pin into Margaret’s hand, she told him it must have been extremely hard to spot.
“I’m going to put in corn and asparagus,” he said. “Nothing else.”
When Margaret insisted that she would like a few potatoes and some broccoli, he grabbed the strange bright green hoe and cut a line through the earth, marking a section off. “That’s yours,” he said.
Patrick had found some ancient stakes in the shed and after he got the four corners established, he slit the bags of manure and peat and emptied them across the dirt with the new shovel. When he had it all spread he fired up the Rototiller. He slowly covered the ground once and then again, as if he’d read about this somewhere, at a right angle. Margaret brought him lemonade, his mother’s recipe, made from a boiled concentrate and loaded with ice. She stood beside him while he drank it and said very loudly above the noise of the Rototiller, didn’t the soil look rich and cared for?
Bill had decided to open the croquet set he’d bought at Canadian Tire for the great-grandkids. He pushed the loops into the ground at long intervals stretching down to the creek and then he got out a mallet and a few balls, dropping the balls randomly at his feet. When Patrick finally turned off the Rototiller, the absence of the sound of its whiny engine filled the yard with a slightly unnerving silence that was broken only by Bill’s determined knocking of croquet balls toward the creek.
Watching his father swing the mallet, too hard, Patrick called out, “Are you winning, Dad?” Bill ignored him and Margaret shook her head, firmly. No jokes today. Then she helped Patrick load the Rototiller onto the wagon, and after they got it on and tied down, she led him over to the barbecue. The barbecue had been an anniversary present, from everyone, and it had not had a good cleaning since the ribbon had come off five years earlier. “I want you to show me how to thoroughly clean this thing,” she said, lifting the rain cover. “I’m not that anxious to get blown to smithereens. So what exactly do I disconnect?”
Patrick opened the lid. The barbecue hadn’t been used much so it wasn’t really that bad for char or grease but they watched together as several dozen earwigs paused on the grill and then quickly scrambled away from the daylight. Margaret leaned closer, counting as fast as she could. “Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.” And then she said, “Maybe I’ll get you to show me how to clean it another time.” As she bent down she recited the instructions. “Turn on the gas. Open the burner valve. Push the starter button.” Watching until she was sure of the flames, she closed the lid.
With the earwigs cooked, the three of them went inside for a supper of Margaret’s recipes: whipped potatoes and jellied vegetable salad and baked beans and, Patrick’s favourite, the thing he claimed to like better than anything, breaded pork tenderloin. After supper Margaret took care of the dishes while the men changed the filter on the furnace and then they all sat down to watch Jeopardy! together, Patrick and Margaret leaning back comfortably into their corners of the sofa and competing without shame, calling out the questions to the answers with either dead, but often conflicting, certainty or with wild, educated guesses.
“Oh, you two are smart,” Bill said. “You don’t need to convince me.”
Halfway through the program he stood up and headed through the kitchen in a huff, calling back through the bang of the screen door that if they couldn’t rouse themselves to get at the planting, he could do it himself. He said if they’d decided that this was his part of the work, that was fine, but he was going to get at it now while there was still some daylight left.
Patrick went out after him to tell him they had no seed, they were going to buy seed tomorrow. Hearing this bit of reality, Bill stopped at the garden bench and sat down hard. “There are days when I believe my brain is haywire,” he said. Then he dismissed Patrick with a sharp head-jerk toward the house, so Patrick left him there. He stayed until dusk, until Margaret took him his sweater. And then he got up and followed her in and climbed the stairs to bed without a word.
After a while, just as Margaret and Patrick were settling down in the living room for one of their tired, interesting talks, Bill came halfway back down the stairs and called out to them. When they came into the hall he stood over them and asked, “After you’re gone, how am I expected to manage? I am without my best fingers, you know.” He held up his hands. “The tools seem not very heavy, but how lightweight can they be when you’re the one doing the work?” Patrick told him not to worry himself over it, the tools were not heavy and would not get heavy, that’s why he’d bought them. He said it would be fine. He said, “Go back to bed, Dad.” Bill turned on the stairs and started up, but they heard him, as he meant them to. “Get it all talked through, now. Talk it all through.”
* * *
PATRICK AND MARGARET had been enjoying their little talks for some time. Some of the others seemed to be puzzled by this, as if Margaret was secretly teaching Patrick how to knit, or can peaches. It had begun soon after the morning they’d gone to the hospital together to see Mary, not long after Patrick had married Stephanie. Patrick’s son Stephen had phoned him at his office to tell him about his mother’s breast cancer, not before, but two days after Mary’s surgery, which had been fast and major, a double mastectomy, and, without thinking, Patrick had immediately called Margaret, to let her know.
“Well, then we’re going to go and see her,” she’d told him. “You and I. Today.” When Patrick hesitated, because he was not prepared, not quite ready with a legitimate defence, she didn’t sit quietly on the other end of the phone as was her considerate habit. She spoke quickly and with not a hint of patience. “Not loving each other any more is no excuse.”
He had waited for Margaret at a window table in the cafeteria, drinking a tolerable cup of coffee and looking out at the ugly rooftops of the office buildings that surrounded the hospital, at the bright winter sky and the streaks of clouds, which were still so white above the filth of the city air. He knew many of the office buildings he was looking at but more usually from the street-level perspective of their elaborate, arched entrances, their heavy plate-glass doors, their hushed, serious lobbies. Although it should not have been, it was a bit of a surprise, and an offence, this complete absence of architectural finish to the rooftops. Looking at the flat gravelled surfaces and the blown garbage and the old chimneys and the air shafts and the filthy pigeons flying from one building to another, concentrating on the pigeons, counting the pigeons, fighting it off but not nearly hard enough, not hard enough to stop it, he remembered the warmth of Mary’s breasts and her undiminished modesty about her breasts, which had been so unexpected and so beautiful and, a long time ago, twenty years ago, so heavy with the tracing of veins, with the blue-white nourishment that he himself had taken, more than once, carefully, listening in the midnight quiet of the house to the sound of her soft, patient laughter, like a mother’s laughter, drifting above him, through his hair. He imagined the breasts now, disembodied. Carried away with other breasts. Burned?
To kill the image, and his one true hope for Mary was that it would never come to her, he pulled back hard to the cup of lukewarm, tolerable coffee in his hands and allowed himself to become doubly worried, about Mary and what this diagnosis might mean for her and for the kids, and about Margaret, who had turned seventy-five in the fall and was now driving alone on the snow-covered highway.
When Margaret sat down at the cafeteria table and began to pull off her gloves finger by finger the way she always had, he asked her to promise him that she wouldn’t drive the highway any more. She did promise him and she’d stuck to it, as far as he knew that trip behind the wheel had been her last beyond the town limits.
Riding down to Mary’s room on the elevator with a nurse who was attending to a hairless but still cheerful child on a stretcher, a boy who held his X-rays in his arms, Margaret told Patrick, “She won’t want anything from you but your support. And you should be able to give her that with no disrespect to Stephanie.” And just before she pushed Mary’s door open, with an obviously willed authority, as if this fight was now her own as well as Mary’s, as if, three years after Paul’s death, she had finally rediscovered some small part of her strength and was happy to see a chance to put it to use, she’d told him, “It’s not always the death sentence it used to be. Mary can live through this.” And so she had, fighting like hell all the way, seizing her luck.
Now Patrick often found himself talking to Margaret. This too could be done with no disrespect to Stephanie, whom he enjoyed and loved with almost no reservation, partly for her solid and unheralded accomplishments as a lawyer, partly because she was full of lusty wit and shameless in the dark, and partly, and perhaps this was the largest part, because she had far too much respect for her own difficult history to launch an assault on his.
And when he did talk with Margaret, usually quietly over a cup of tea or a drink of Scotch, she never hesitated to make an honest comment if one came to her.
* * *
MARGARET HAD MADE a big pot of tea. She had asked Patrick for an update on his son Stephen and he was telling her that Stephen had finally got on with the symphony, that he was at thirty the youngest French horn player the orchestra had ever hired and how proud they all were. “Whatever divorce does,” he said, “it does not diminish pride.”
Then he confessed that he felt quite bad for the times he had wished Stephen would set the horn aside and go out for a baseball team or sign up to be a camp counsellor or something. He said he hadn’t mentioned this to anyone, only thanked God he hadn’t pushed the kid any harder than he had. He said he had no idea what stopped him.
Taking this in, Margaret told Patrick that he wasn’t about to hear her say he was a model parent. “You’ve got lucky,” she said. “Good parenting is just watching for your luck, trusting it to make an appearance once in a while, and sitting up straight when it does.” She poured him his cup of tea. “Bad parenting is mostly bad luck,” she said. “I believe that.”
Listening to Patrick go on about his thoughts, his secret achievements, his small feared badness, had turned out to be one of Margaret’s old-woman pleasures. It wasn’t like hearing guilt or hesitant pride or regret from a woman. It was, in her experience, much more rare. She watched him talk the way you might watch an animal grooming himself in the dark of night. She kept still, maintained a certain distance.
As he talked this time, Margaret was getting ready to make her own confession. She had decided after Patrick’s last visit that she was going to own up to the lie she’d fed him when he was a boy, just after Sarah was born, the lie about his mother and the ball games. She was not inclined to tamper with their other lie, his pretence that he had never faltered, never spent his evenings crying in the arms of a mousy, loving young woman. Which had been the only place for it he could find. Obviously. Although she was willing to expose herself as a self-serving liar, a woman who would lie to a belligerent, grieving boy, she was by no means finished with restraint, with the shelter provided by restraint.
“When I first came here I didn’t know your mind,” she started. “I just knew that you’d lost your mother and had this new woman in your house. Me. You were so very quiet, not sulky exactly, but too quiet for my taste. So I lied to you about something.”
Patrick put his cup down and briefly closed his eyes. “Sulky would be the word,” he said. “I know I wasn’t helpful to you. Like Paul, for instance. Paul always turned up when he was needed.”
“He must have been born with his easygoing heart,” she said. “I never once saw it fail him.”
They were quiet for a minute. This was the thing given to Paul, a quiet space around his name.
“Anyway,” she said. “About the ball games. Truth be told, your mother and I hardly knew each other when we were young. She was one of the girls who finished high school, which was supposed to guarantee you the chance for a different kind of life. I didn’t, of course. My family was on the outside of things. Rougher. Not much money. No one educated. So your mother and I did not play on the same ball team. But I do remember her when she was young. When the men were away. And I remember you kids on the park bleachers, already bathed and ready for bed, you running loose, Paul and Daphne wrapped in blankets in your grandparents’ arms.” She waited a little while before she continued, as if she had made a picture they could look at together.
“They’d just put in the lights for night games, sometimes there were two a night, and I remember warming up behind the bleachers, glancing over once in a while to see how the other game was going, seeing your mother on first base, slamming a fist into her glove, yelling ball talk with the other women, jumping funny little jumps on the bag to keep herself revved up. I remember this so clearly.”
“She wasn’t very big for first base,” Patrick said.
“No, she wasn’t,” Margaret said.
“She was a showy player,” he said.
“Showy and funny and very determined to win,” Margaret said. “That’s what people would have thought.”
“And the purpose of the lie?” he asked.
“Only to give you something,” she said. “Or maybe to win you over. Maybe I was just covering my bases, or my ass.”
“Well, it worked,” Patrick said, smiling because he liked it when she swore, which was not very often any more. “Perhaps I can tell you a lie some day.”
“That would be nice, dear,” she said.
He sat up straight to finish his tea and then he asked, “You never thought of getting married before you came to us?”
“Thought about it all the time,” she said. “I was lonely. Take my word, it’s not good to be alone.”
“I’d know that,” Patrick said. He got up and walked into the dining room and opened the buffet door to find the Scotch, his own bottle, his own brand, kept there and replaced as needed. He sat down again and lifted Margaret’s cup from the saucer to drink the last of her tea. Then he poured them both a healthy shot.
“Your dad saved me,” she said. “Asking me.” She lifted the teacup and the saucer together to take a sip. “A life wants work.”
“There must have been others,” he said. “Before.”
“Almost all the men were married,” she said, “all the good ones. And that didn’t appeal to me much. Sneaking around.” These were the necessary words, the lies that betrayed nothing. “It could have got known.”
“But before,” he said. “Before everyone was married.”
“I was very tall,” she said. “About as tall as I am today. Most men then didn’t even like to stand beside a tall woman. Let alone lay her down.”
Patrick laughed, leaned his head way back. In the middle of his pleasure he noticed for the first time in his life the array of fine spiderweb cracks in the plaster ceiling. He thought maybe he should acknowledge the cracks out loud and offer to fix them or to have them fixed, but then he thought he would probably let them go. It had to stop somewhere.
“Men your age have had to learn to hide their egos,” Margaret said. “I’ve noticed this. And it’s a good thing. But they didn’t hide them then. A woman had to have a certain look about her. Not weak exactly, but if you looked like you could make it on your own, mostly they let you make it on your own. The last thing wanted was a partner.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” Patrick said, watching her face.
“And pretty true,” she said. “In my judgement.”
“Too harsh,” he said, shaking his head, refusing to believe.
“Your dad needed a partner,” she said. “Because he’d been stopped. Because he had something under way here that had to be carried on with.”
“Us,” he said.
“And himself,” she said. “He was a settled man. He needed to stay settled.”
“I heard once,” he said, “just after you came to us, that you had someone who went overseas. Someone who didn’t get back.”
Came to us, she thought. Like a revelation? Is that how he thinks about it now? “Heard that, did you?” she said. “I didn’t think busy boys had time for gossip.”
He most certainly would have described her joining them differently when he was a boy. But at the time, although she’d been casually affectionate with him, and careful and smart and patient, she had not really concerned herself with how Patrick judged her decision because at eighteen he’d been just too young to comprehend much about how a life got built. And she would have to say that she didn’t really care now, either.
“Was it true?” he asked.
He wasn’t going to stop. He was going to keep at her and that was fine. “It’s still true,” she said.
“And…?” he said. “And…?”
“I’m an old woman, Patrick,” she said.
“You are old,” he said. “An old tall woman.”
She thought she heard something and looked toward the stairs, stretched back to look around the archway into the hall to make sure it was empty. She coughed, once and hard.
“He was,” she started, just loud enough to be heard across the coffee table, “tall. Not noticeable, not handsome or extraordinarily smart. But he would have been able to make a good living somehow. He would have been as steady as a rock, not unlike your father. And he was a beautiful lover.”
“Whoa,” Patrick said. “Do I really want to hear this?”
“His body almost matched mine,” she said. “We used to take our bodies out to the inland lakes, over to the east side where there weren’t any cottages.” This is quite nice, she thought, this memory of an innocent young woman, before the war. And she did remember a purity, the pure grace of good sex just discovered, and she felt so lucky to have had that when she was starting out, when she surely could not have survived without it. I loved him,” she said, finishing her Scotch, “and he most certainly loved me.”
Patrick topped up their drinks. “And then there was a war,” he said. “And because he was young and fit he got sent overseas. And then he was killed.”
“And then he got blown to bits in a field in France. And he wasn’t alone. There were sixteen from just here, so multiply that. And lots of the ones who did get back were lost in some other way. Some of your father’s bits got left behind, remember. Bits he could have used.”
“Were you engaged?” Patrick asked.
“Not officially,” she said. “They came to tell his mother. I didn’t find out how and where and when for hours.” She drained her cup again. “His mother would not have liked me much, although I didn’t ever hear that for sure.”
“Because you were rough,” he said.
“But I wasn’t,” she said. “I’ve never been rough. Only my family, my background.”
She sat up straight to begin to gather things on the tray. “I kept myself busy,” she said, “remembering him, all the things about him. It can pass a lot of time. I wouldn’t have noticed another man’s interest if it had parked itself outside my door.” Oh, such easy words, she thought. And said with such a convincing firmness, as if she had been always ready, always on guard, for questions like this.
Patrick picked up the bottle to fill his own cup again and reached across to hers but she stretched out a hand to block the flow.
“Sometimes I used to take Sandra Elliot out to the east side of the inland lakes,” he said. “For years I never travelled without a blanket.”
“You and Paul both,” she said. “I was the one who pulled your blankets from the trunk every fall and washed them. Did you never notice that they didn’t smell as bad as they might have?”
“Maybe we found the same dunes,” he said. “Do you remember where you went exactly?” He lifted his eyebrows, mimicked an exaggerated, prurient interest. “Perhaps we spread our blankets on the same warm, moonlit sand.”
Margaret laughed, abruptly, loudly, covered her mouth to stifle the sound.
“You’re blushing,” Patrick said. “This I’ve heard about but never seen.” He reached for her arm. “Take your hand away.”
She brushed him off, stood up and turned her back on him, bent to gather the cups, her laughter muted from sound to the familiar shaking movement of her broad shoulders.
She lifted the tray and started toward the kitchen, through the hall. She stopped in mid-stride. Bill was sitting on the stairs, on the steps that fanned to make the turn, curled up in his pyjamas, his arms wrapped around himself for warmth, his eyes shut tight against God knows what.
“You’re there,” Margaret said.
Bill stood up, pushed himself up, staggering a bit against the wall. “Sylvia,” he said. “Come to bed. Both of you.”
Patrick recovered quickly. “Yes,” he said, loudly, cleanly. “It’s about that time.” He pulled off his work socks and held them tight in his hands, did not drop them to the floor and leave them for Margaret as he had when he was a young man. “Our room?” he asked, meaning his and Paul’s. He knew it was up there waiting for him, the sheets on his old bed newly washed and ironed so they would feel cool on his skin, the faded quilts stacked three thick the way he liked them, the air in the room freshened with the late afternoon breeze. Earlier, standing sweating in the garden, he had looked up at the sound of their window being thrown open. He had seen his father’s arms spread wide to grip the heavy sash.
* * *
HE UNDERSTOOD THAT he was expected to get up and follow his father. This day, the work he’d done this day, had exhausted him, as he had wanted it to. His body needed and for once had earned the deepest sleep. But he stayed put. Hearing the stumbling footfalls on the stairs, he thought about the man who was still supposed to be his father sitting out there listening, knowing, if he still knew anything, that he would soon be discovered, and then climbing the stairs to his bed to lie there alone and rage about what he’d heard or thought he’d heard. A man who had possessed for most of his life no talent for rage at all, now lost, now helpless, without it.
He lowered his head. He could not, for anything, have lifted his head. He thought about Paul, how good a man he had been, how terrifying it must have been to die so fast, without warning, to be killed instantly, although surely not absolutely instantly, surely not without a brief, black comprehension, and then he thought about sweet Meg, who had not for one moment of her life been sweet and who would never again now be her beloved, difficult, ragged self but always something else, some doped, defeated thing, and he thought about his mother, a mother he could remember not only sick and dying but just as clearly alive at the kitchen table and in the car and in the yard, dying the furthest thing from her mind, her quick, light voice calling out to all of them with praise or correction or surprise, and he thought about Daphne, the steady nerve of her mothering and how wildly, recklessly courageous she was before she fell, pumping the makeshift trapeze as hard as she could above the watching crowd, above the mattresses, smiling her showmanship smile for Murray. At the end of it he thought about a finely wrought first marriage broken by a stupid, sanctimonious man, himself.
He thought if Margaret had not been standing in the hall, he might have … might have what? What? Broken down? Wept? Lost control? Lost himself? No. Except for the one time, the one long moment of losing Paul, the sharp, blunt shock of losing Paul … None of that had ever made itself available to him, not even when he was a boy. His options, if that’s what they were, had always been much more limited.
Margaret hadn’t moved. “Are you sitting there thinking about all of it?” she asked. She didn’t approach him, didn’t put the tray down. “Perhaps you shouldn’t,” she said. “I don’t.”
He looked up at her. “Who knew?” he said.
“Who could have known?” Margaret answered. “None of us.” She steadied the tray against the long moon curve of her stomach. “It’s all right, Patrick,” she said. “You are a kind man. I am a kind woman. There are lots of us around.”
He covered his face with his beautiful tired hands as if to hold something back, as if something behind his face was asking to be held back. “Do you ever pray?” he asked.
“I don’t waste my time asking for anything,” she said. “Although once in a while, perhaps two or three times a year when some small thing happens or maybe doesn’t happen, I catch myself feeling thankful.”
“Thankful,” he said.
“Or maybe lucky,” she said, leaving him there, calling back to him from the kitchen. “Your towels are on the dresser. Have your shower now or in the morning, it doesn’t matter to us one way or the other.”
Patrick got up to put the Scotch away and then he climbed the stairs. Margaret rinsed the cups and saucers in the sink and followed him. There was no further talk. They slept quickly and soundly, all three of them, their separate exhaustions quietly absorbed by the house, by its safety, its comfort, its simple, blessed walls.
* * *
AFTER A BREAKFAST of bacon and French toast with whipped butter and a pitcher of this spring’s maple syrup, the kind of luxury breakfast Margaret allowed only once or twice a year now, Patrick and Bill unhitched the trailer from the Lincoln and drove out to the nursery on the highway for seed. Bill had the list in his hands, held it up close to his face.
“Geraniums,” he said. “I don’t remember that we decided on geraniums.” He reached toward the radio and Patrick, anticipating his wish, turned it down for him. “Tell me if this is right,” he said. “Corn. Geraniums. Peppers. Potatoes. Broccoli. Asparagus. Peas.”
“Sounds about right to me,” Patrick said.
Bill reached out again. “Who is this guy?” he said. “What the hell is he talking about?”
When Patrick told him it was the CBC, it was Arthur Black, and that he talked very quickly, that was his style, Bill said, “I don’t like broccoli.” He was studying the radio, trailing his good left fingers over the buttons. When he finally found the right one, he punched it off. “They don’t necessarily pick up on it, what you don’t like.”
“So tell her,” Patrick said, glancing over. “It shouldn’t have to be any big deal.”
Bill shifted in his seat to look directly at this son of his. “Whatever difficulty Margaret and I might have,” he said, “would never under any circumstances become a concern of yours.” He turned away, muttered, “You worry about your own God damned life.” When they pulled into the parking lot, to close it off for good, he said, “I don’t intend to be eating very much broccoli.”
The nursery was having a busy morning. They had recently expanded, there was a bigger, better sign over the doors and a bigger, paved parking lot. Bill claimed to know a dozen cars. “Everybody’s here this morning,” he said, throwing off his seat belt, checking his tie, opening his door wide before the Lincoln had come to a full stop.
They were nearly two hours finding what they’d come for. Bill said he wanted to see where things were now, what was new. He said they had no reason to rush. Patrick let him lead them around the old greenhouse and then outside and into another and then into another. In the courtyard behind the main building, looking over several neat rows of small “accent” trees, most of them stunted, grafted at a modest height for small properties, the grafts gnarled like a big man’s hard fist, Bill laughed out loud and slapped Patrick on the back as if they were compatriots, as if such obvious stupidity must have been staged for their enjoyment. “Whatever these are,” he said, “they sure as Christ aren’t trees. Imagine,” he said, “passing these things off as trees. And people falling for it.”
As they wandered around and around again, he made several of the other gardeners stop and shake hands with Patrick. Some of them remembered Patrick, of course, some of them did not. Bill told everyone that he had decided to replant Margaret’s garden and that he’d asked Patrick to come up and give him a hand. He told them they would have to come over to see his new space-age garden tools, said they were beyond belief. He walked up and down the same soggy aisles a dozen times, reached out to touch the barely blooming plants on either side as if he loved them. He had words for everyone he passed, smiled grandly, bent to kiss all the women who would be kissed.
On the way home with the seeds and the geraniums, Bill checked the time and then told Patrick to turn at Albert Street, to swing by Turnball’s barn down at the creek. He said the Old Babes’ Committee was dedicating the new park today and why didn’t they stop off for a few minutes to watch the proceedings.
“Who are they dedicating it to?” Patrick asked.
“Oh, themselves, I expect,” Bill said.
Turnball’s barn was gone but there were a dozen cars parked where it had once stood and about thirty people standing around down near the creek. The park wasn’t big. It was only a cleaned-up section of Stonebrook Creek with a wide footbridge over the water to an open expanse of cleaned-up land on the other side. Whoever was behind the park had got enough money together for an elaborate wooden swing set and a slide and a complicated climbing gym on the far side of the water and the grass had been roped off and reseeded, although it was still pretty patchy. Several small red maples and a clump-birch had been staked for strength against the hazard of wind and there were three large picnic tables placed in the shade of the willows at the water.
And it was obvious even sitting in the car that they had tampered with the creek bed, that rocks and stones had been either hauled in or substantially, carefully rearranged. Someone with a forklift or a front-end loader had tried to make themselves a little work of art, tried to complicate the course, the appearance and sound, of the current. As if the random placement, the natural state of things, was not worth watching. And all of this effort, this expense, all of it for the benefit of someone who might want to stand for a while on a footbridge.
Bill didn’t get out of the car this time. “Too blazing hot,” he said. “It’s going to be one of those days when walking is more like swimming. Our first this year.” He was leaning forward studying the controls on the dash. “We’ll just sit here with the air on if you don’t mind.”
Patrick adjusted the air-conditioning. “What a fine park,” he said.
“Maybe,” Bill said. “We’ll hope so.” Sitting there, he began to play at the stubs of his missing fingers, a habit he had begun only recently. Soon after the war, the scarred skin had healed and faded back to an almost fleshy pink but now it had been rubbed raw, it was once again a wound. “They came knocking,” he said. “I gave them fifty bucks and Margaret gave them her own fifty. You should give some thought to doing the same.”
Patrick did not respond to the admonition. After Mr. McFarlane’s note was paid off, years before, he had found his own private way to move that generosity on down the line. Now, with student loans, no kid was as trapped as he would have been, and he believed this was a good thing, removing the chance for success from the realm of sheer, dumb luck. And it certainly had been sheer, dumb luck, Mr. McFarlane being there to decide that he was worthy of risk. Anyway, if he remembered correctly, such things were not to be bandied about.
Bill was searching around for the control that would make his seat go back. “Your mother would have been pleased as punch to be part of this,” he said, nodding toward the crowd. “It’s just her kind of thing. Improving the filthy creek.” He’d found the right knob to push and he stretched out his legs and crossed his arms. “And she has always supported Margaret. Don’t ever doubt that. All these years not a word against Margaret.” He pointed his left index finger, directing Patrick’s attention to the activity at the creek.
Patrick looked from face to face and finally recognized Charles Taylor, who was dressed as he’d always been dressed in pressed pants and a shirt and tie, maybe the same tie. Except for the snow-white hair, Charles hadn’t changed much. From this distance, at least, he still had the body of the young man who’d spent one of his summers watching a bunch of kids get ready for a circus performance. Patrick tried to calculate just how elderly the rarely seen Mrs. Taylor might be by now and then he recognized the woman standing beside Charles. It was Margaret’s friend Angela Johnston, who was old and small and bent over a stainless-steel walker that reflected the sunlight. Perhaps Angela was the mother now.
A middle-aged man who was probably the mayor spoke briefly and then a woman Patrick was sure he had never known stepped forward to bend down and pull a bright red cloth off a plaque. The plaque was affixed to a rough chunk of black granite that sat low to the ground like a modest grave marker and as soon as the words of dedication were exposed everyone standing down at the creek began to applaud. When some of them lifted their clapping hands high in the air to signify a particular pleasure, Bill joined them with his own hands, shouting, “Hurray for the Old Babes.”
* * *
MARGARET HAD TAKEN a plate of cold baked beans out to the garden bench and she continued to wait with the back door open and her ear half-cocked to the phone. She could catch the phone in four rings, she had counted many times before. She knew their delay could be either very bad or very good, she realized there might be consequences for which she was unprepared, but she was enjoying herself nonetheless.
Looking over the newly enriched, perfected soil, she decided it was a shame to bother with the vegetables. Why shouldn’t the earth just stay as it was? Undisturbed. Dark and rich and tender. The May sun was directly overhead. She could feel its heat on her thinning hair and on her scalp and on the back of her large freckled hands, the skin there like all of her skin now, no longer tight to her body but loose and thin. The slats of the bench, exposed since sunrise, warmed her backside, a backside which Bill, having just read a borrowed, beat-up copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had once affectionately called a great sloping arse, and which was more and more often now, unaccountably, chilled.
She stood up slowly from the bench and stretched her long muscles, arched her long back. She dropped her head alternately to each shoulder, then let it fall heavily back so that her face was flat to the warming sun, to the drifting clouds, eased it slowly forward until her chin touched her chest. She bent at the waist to try to touch her toes, extended her long arms skyward as she straightened, splayed her fingers. She did this three times. Then she swung her arms, made five windmill circles with each arm in turn. She inhaled deeply, pulling new air down into her body, knowing it would do her good.
Although she had never been a particularly fit person, neither had she been slovenly or slow to rise to an occasion, and she credited her relatively good health, her usual feeling of well-being, to her day-to-day living, and to the quiet, lifelong, persistent energy that day-to-day living demanded of a person. If her eighty-one-year-old body already carried within it the seeds of its own demise, a murky possibility she allowed herself to entertain only on the worst of days, Well, she thought, tell me something I don’t know.
Warmed up, she stepped into the plot. With wide-open, calculating eyes she imposed a mental grid, marked off the earth square foot by square foot in her mind. She had to be careful to plant her steps firmly because the earth could easily be soft where it looked hard and hard where it looked soft but she believed there was a very good chance that Patrick had unearthed something more with the deep cuts of the Rototiller. She believed, too, that such a search might require a promise. I will never tell, she thought. Whatever I find, I will never tell. I will hide it on my person, take it back into the earth with me when I go.
She was looking, she supposed, for an artifact unique to another century, something rarely seen any more, some small thing meant to be solid against rot. She assumed the treasure would be shiny, expected the sun to throw the necessary light.