by Keath Fraser
“Speaking of Mr. Bonynge’s good work,” said my father. “You’re probably watching your own figure, Denise.” An odd thing to say to me, unless he was colluding in the sham of my full-term pregnancy. India, after all, wasn’t where I’d gone to put on weight. My mother preferred to ignore my figure and the supposed adoption of her grandchild by francophone strangers. His remark resembled what fathers might have presumed to advise daughters about catching a man after girdles had relaxed their grip on fashion. I’d never needed one, although for a while had tugged one on against Barry, which hadn’t worked. My mother still wore one.
“I would suggest the aubergine to start,” she said.
The wine arrived. Something called calamari my father nibbled at. When he got grumpy over his Veal Scallopini with Brown Butter and Capers my mother said what did he expect when he smoked so much, he had exfoliated his taste buds. She was annoyed he’d ignored her suggestion that a diabetic should order the Pasta Primavera with Roasted Vegetables. When his meal had come, he embarrassed her by calling back our waiter with a request. Winking at me, he then shook his wrist uncontrollably, like a spastic person, something he couldn’t do over my mother’s meals without consequence. Seasoning her dishes not only insulted the chef but constituted grounds for extended banishment to our garage under the coach house.
After dessert, a panna cotta whose sweetness he relished deeply in front of her, he put down his napkin and reached casually into his tuxedo to remove a narrow velvet box. Black. He said nothing of course about celebrating my return from abroad. Instead, he said he understood there was to be a ballroom scene in the musical we were going to see, and that I’d probably need to wear something special to feel in tune with the music. He had clearly upstaged my mother, who looked astonished at his presumption.
“You’ll probably want to return whatever it is,” she said, pivoting to me.
When I opened the box, he reached over to help me lift from it a long strand of pearls, which he stood to clasp carefully around my neck. My mother, her eyebrows still raised, was fingering her own strand. She must have bought that one for herself. He then sat down and lit a cigarette, pleasing himself by blowing a perfect smoke ring on his first blow—pleased too, perhaps, for having forgiven me my moral lapse, without ever mentioning my moral lapse, which my mother had remained on the fence about without appearing to have lost her poise. She stirred her coffee. Studying me. She resented my evolving independence, the kind of worldliness I now wore, and not just around my neck, since returning from exile.
“When you have a family,” my father loudly suggested, “you can pass the pearls on to your favourite.” He actually said this, knowing what I knew and he now very much regretted. The bay window turned, the couple at it intent this time to appraise the princess rather than her pearls. I could only suppose he was thanking me—partly for lying about his lapse years ago, on my bedspread—mainly these days for betraying nothing to my mother of his arrangement of and payment for my abortion. He had gently told Jack, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, that all would be well if he didn’t interfere by offering, for example, to marry me. He called him Jack. Barry went on to become for a while the concertmaster in Calgary. Ironically, my mother would have approved.
I suppose, looking back, my father enjoyed this doubling down on her. It was the moral equivalent for him of balancing his jolly numbers on invoice sheets. He was colluding to deceive her about more than the abortion. It was strange, his compounding of duplicity in this way, making me a myth of sorts in the eyes of a daughter I would never have.
I did wonder, if Mother were to pass her own pearls on to me, whether I’d be keeping both strands lustrous by some acquired faith in family heirlooms and a mild Swedish soap. I was their only child, after my younger brother died in our cottage at the age of eight. Much later, when I discovered my strand of pearls missing after Greta hoisted it to buy herself another celebration of light—or whatever she experienced shooting up—I wondered. Did she think I wouldn’t miss mine, if she left behind my mother’s strand to deceive me in its own velvet box?
When in time I didn’t seem to be having any more children, my mother put this down to my hooking up with Patrick rather late in life. Also, she believed I liked my own company a smidge too much. My father knew the truth, knowing my trip abroad had not extinguished the real reason for my going—to forget what had gone wrong back here. I was still grieving the loss of what I’d expected my life to become. It was like the opera that evening. I felt Violetta’s heartache keenly. But at least I wasn’t dying as she was of consumption. I remember her gay aria at the masked ball—and at my mother’s reception following, at our house, the cast’s glittering recitative continuing to sound quite hopeful for her recovery.
*
Over dinner I do plan on talking to Patrick. Not about the Nazis and such, but rather his day. Watching his patients come and go, talking of . . . Viareggio. A patient with liver disease and a rare attitude is planning to call in at this Italian port by cruise ship. “Giving her life over to rest,” he tells me, “before the last port.” He has suggested sailing with her sister.
“Terminal is it?”
He brightens. “At least Margaret has a future. She’s got Medicine to come back to.”
This remains his scenario: Margaret Fitzgerald, M.D.
Mine on the other hand goes:
“Do you still have your agent patient?”
“Who?”
“The real estate agent?”
“I don’t think she’s been in for a while. We don’t do botox. I sent her to the dentist.”
“Patrick, I’m thinking of selling the house. We’re getting a bit creaky to give banquets anymore. I am, anyway. The place needs a steward if not a vassal.”
And he’ll be shocked, of course, when I also tell him where Greta now is.
Judy visited me a month less a day after Patrick and I took her by ferry to the rehab clinic. I brewed her a cup of matcha in the kitchen. Said Judy, “You aren’t the wicked stepmother after all, Denise.” With Judy you never quite knew what she intended by such a remark, but she seemed to sense my disappointment at not being able to talk to Margie the way she could. I think she was trying to alleviate my shame at having compelled Greta to share my unkind remarks about Rudy, with Rudy, in Africa. These apparently then leading to his self-exile. Judy herself remained as alleviated as ever from shame—at least in regard to abandoning her infant daughter—and had recently visited Margie at Margie’s request.
She was instructed not to tell Patrick. She was to talk only to me, whom Margie feared she’d offended by not sharing her plight when I was eager to listen sympathetically. My offer to help had met with her frosty indifference. And so here I was, this time prepared to listen to the mother who wasn’t really her mother, talking to the stepmother who actually was her mother, conveying a message from the daughter who no longer answered to either of us, but hoped for my forgiveness.
Judy was “permitted” to tell me Margie had checked herself out early from The Orchard, where we’d committed her. “She knows Patrick won’t approve.” She intended on her own to finish getting “better”—felt, in fact, she already was—in Whistler.
“Whistler,” I said.
“Yes. And slowly putting on weight. She needs help to pay for a trailer she’s sharing in Squamish with a girl from Melbourne. They were both hired at Araxia. Until her high-end tips start coming in, she needs a loan to stay afloat between meals. Serving them.”
She described the trailer. “A leaky scow. I offered to buy her an outfit.”
What impressed Judy was unexpected.
She had applied for her job as Margaret Catalpa. This at first puzzled Judy—the name change, but also why she bothered to mention it to Judy—unless, Judy decided— after her hoping some vague recognition of the name would impress a three-star employer—Greta also hoped to impress me. My name was Catalpa.
“Unless, that is—I imagine it’s possible—you once impressed her? Did you?”
Never nothing but direct, Judy could also be funny.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“I suppose we were all young and gullible once, even Margie. Here,” she said, handing me an envelope as if glad to be rid of it. “She asked me to give you this. I watched her scribble something down and lick it.”
I tried to remember how I might have impressed Greta, enough to tempt her into abandoning Patrick’s name in obeisance to the power or even terror invested in me as a stepmother. Judy was probably right, she needed money to survive until her tips accumulated and impressing me was worth disappointing her father. But it was strange. Greta knew I would have given her money, unconditionally. Just as I’d always kept her from going hungry.
“And then some,” responded Judy. “It must have been for some other reason.”
It stumped her. “I kept Patrick’s name, I really don’t know why she’d reject Patrick. I could understand not wanting to remind herself of me. But her father? Dr. Fitzgerald?”
I felt sorry for Judy. Even if she had never pined to become “Senora” Gonzalez, not even with the athletic señor’s prize money pouring in, she could never be wholly persuaded that a motive for someone else’s connivance in re-identifying herself would not involve the possibility of a windfall.
“Of course,” I told Judy. “I can help her out.”
“You can?” She sounded disappointed.
“Her father might resist. If it isn’t for school.”
“You know,” said Judy. “This health thing isn’t over. She told me she’d been suffering from Rickettsia, the aftermath of an old tick bite. I don’t think it was ever drugs.” Judy, rising to deposit her teacup in my dishwasher, studied my response to this bit of casual information. She was determined to trump whatever confidential scribble Greta’s envelope contained. “Still,” she said, “I think she took a risk checking out so soon.”
Blue mountains over the bay. Breeze-scalloped seawater. And straight out at anchor a gleaming red-hulled freighter. An eagle touching down—but it doesn’t—because ahead on the sand a hollowed-out flounder isn’t worth its grabbing.
*
“Can we have a dog?” asked Greta.
It wasn’t hard to persuade Patrick and his daughter to move out of their Kits townhouse after my mother had bequeathed her house to me. Welcoming Margaret I wanted her to know it wasn’t always honeysuckle and croquet. How at her age I’d hated the reek of pulp rising overnight through the trees, after a mill miles up the sound released its toxic waste, counting on the stench to evaporate before city sleepers awoke. It could hang around for days if a heavy fog smelling of formaldehyde marinated its particulate matter of bleach and sulphur. A moaning foghorn, across the—
“Couldn’t you just jump in our swimming pool?” asked Greta, her eyes wide.
“Not in wintertime.”
I remember Japanese gardeners in white masks arriving in the fog with shears to prune the cherry, birch, witch hazel. Down the garden they—
“Couldn’t you move?”
I once thought I had changed my life. I had in a way. Like Greta, when I returned from abroad, I didn’t return to university. Unlike her I found the choices of my generation limited to nurse and teacher. A third was wife. No, librarian, then wife. Not until flying home did I think of stewardess, I liked the pipe smoke. A poem I remembered Barry showing me in the class we shared struck me as a warning, that when I got to be old, unless I could burn like fire and without smoke, there wasn’t a lot of hope in any of these choices. He was hoping I would choose an abortion, a choice that wouldn’t cloud either of our futures.
I attended Pitman Business College on Broadway and took speedwriting. It was easier than shorthand. I ate my lunch at The Aristocratic. These days you can’t lunch without seeing a young person hunched over a communication platform, divining her device, if only to keep in touch with her date across the table. I sometimes think how far Barry and I might have got, keeping digitally in touch across the Pacific. A portable Olivetti might have helped me touch-type an aerogram; there was electricity at night to keep a diary. I suppose secretarial work amounted to the fifth option for young women, but it was really the first. Throw in double-entry bookkeeping, and when the chance came to move up from taking a boss’ dictation, you could escape his Selectric—its spinning golf ball and attendant whiteout, less a calling than a scuffle—and begin balancing his costs and write-offs in a small office of your own, where you’d be treated with the respect of a male colleague for whom one knocked before entering.
With another course or two, I upgraded from stenography.
This got me a job in a dermatologist’s office, followed by other medical offices. Risk, working capital, net profit. Dentists were the worst. Minding their books but also, too often, filling in for temperamental temps. Their casual attire reflected a new, relaxed attitude to showing up for work as professionals; dress whites giving way to jeans and coloured slacks. Tennis pros, Judy recently remarked, grunting through their service, have evolved into red shoes and lingerie. I had nothing better to do, living at home, than to develop a modest talent for interior design, heritage roses, erecting rockeries. Making a living wasn’t the same as making a life. Even after I ended up living with Patrick, and continued to fill in at his clinic, it didn’t end my temping for the temps, though it did land me a family: affectionate, comfortably nuclear, hungry. So I took up cooking. And started bringing Greta for walks at low tide in her little gumboots with dolphin insignias. We climbed down through the forest.
When Patrick hired me to go over his clinic’s books, he claimed to remember meeting me at my father’s golf club when he himself was a junior. I must have been celebrating, fifteen years earlier, my twenty-fifth birthday at a Sunday buffet with my parents. Although he’d never played with him, he was in awe of Daddy, who, having shone as a junior back in niblick days, still managed more than once as a senior to shoot his age. It seems improbable Patrick will ever match that feat, even with a generously fluctuating handicap. He called round at our house for his books. He was now overweight and his wife had recently left him. Daddy remembered him a little pitifully as a social member, his evaluation of non-family members embedded in numbers, not gatherings—in golf cards and invoice sheets, income-tax refundable and contracts bid on. Whom he owed or had out-foxed, profited by or donated to.
Or, in Barry’s case, by the fact that he’d proposed to me over blackjack at a sorority fundraiser. Barry’s capacity for numbers was not necessarily negligible.
My mother’s album differed from my father’s ledger. “I want to remember this” she might say of a bridge night out—hoping to savour what she knew my father wouldn’t in a week recall as any more than his duty to keep her happy. A cocktail napkin embossed with a card player’s regret, Bid Me Adieu. “Not me!” she would’ve certainly called out to him across the table. “Two diamonds!” A menu; minutes from an Elizabeth Fry meeting; Jewish war-orphan cards; receipts from a Maynards auction; a TUTS program for Oklahoma! If a souvenir were to be had by my mother, in it went, historical and quotidian both. Memento mori of more material substance deserved a box each of their own. Joan’s hanky, for example, a prop stained with drops of tomato sauce—it had helped her sing the afflicted Violetta role in a tubercular-tinged voice. (My mother had insisted on Rudy handing this immediately over when she learned what he’d been gifted in our kitchen.) Also, a charred set of binoculars, through which you could still see through one barrel, rescued from our cottage after it burned to the ground
Primary sources, if I sell the house, I’ll no longer have room to store.
*
I don’t reach the tide-marker or pick mussels here before the tide turns and with it, I sense, the slackness inside me. Yes, probably I could give my life without having to change it much at all. Could either fa
ll in love with my age or yearn rearward, like Judy, to the age of late ass. I head back across the sand and up-hill at a buttock-embalming lick. Why would any woman drink the Kool-Aid of blind marital faith when the recipe for self-acceptance is simply a virtuous resolution?
By the time I reach home, endorphins in satisfying flow.
Gas burner ticks before bursting into peaky blue flames.
For Norrie and me, Varanasi was a mistake. Its squalor on our itinerary north one more circle of hell. Overbearing filth, stifling air, bringing senses alive only to suffocate them. Out of my backpack, an erotic carving of Shiva, to hold its fragrant sandalwood under my nose.
Norrie slipped on someone’s excrement as we made our way down a cobblestone lane to view the ghats. These the hopeful destination of dying Hindus, already booked into “death hotels,” until the day their ashes would be released into the Ganges. Moksha, said our guide, plucking my sleeve. The practice of escape from an endless cycle of rebirth as cow, cockroach, latrine cleaner. To renounce the material world and accept karma enriched, he said, your chances of moksha. Could I guess how many logs were needed to burn, below us now on the cremation grounds, a human person to ash?
Forests no doubt plundered to meet this requirement of dying well. Bonfires glowing day and night, the smoke an enduring toxic smog. A festive scene, the riverbank strung with a million shrouded lights. Relatives launching candles after dark to carry dead souls downstream, out of suffering into enlightenment. Casts of the afflicted gesturing after them as if through a scrim.
We wondered if widows still threw themselves onto pyres of disintegrating husbands. “They’d have to be insane,” said Norrie. “Drugged,” said the guide. “No more hope for living.” Outlawed, it still happened when a husband’s family shamed her into its expectancy. “Very not cognizant.” At the train station next morning, Norrie observed loudly how glad she was to be born in Canada, where her own parents had shed their Hindu views. Had they remained here, she didn’t know if she’d have been born at all. Or if she had been, survived. I thought she meant as secular Norrie, not orthodox Norindha. I didn’t have time to take her seriously. She was shouting over the infernal din. “. . . And at the end of life, lucky enough to be married off to a hubble-bubble, can you imagine popping yourself onto his pyre!”