Did she ask about me?
Laurie perseveres, “It seemed only an instant since we were friends in high school. When I asked her what I could do, she didn’t answer right away, as if she was thinking it over and wasn’t sure. But I kept asking: Could I help?”
“And do you think you did?” I say coldly.
“I was able to give her what she most wanted. No one knew. We didn’t hurt anyone.”
My sister was the sovereign of standards, embracing marriage and work, disclaiming the lure of secrecy. But she took off her clothes for him—Laurie, the boy next door, the safe boy.
“I didn’t know you had it in you,” I tell him.
He flinches.
“Was it good?” I say.
“Eve!”
“Was it worth it?”
“She was going to die. She had been good all her life, she said, and she wanted to know what it felt like to be bad.”
A light mist begins to film the windshield. Laurie turns on his brights. There is not another car on the road as we retrace the route by which we came, Laurie driving cautiously.
Now his hands on the wheel look peculiar, white undefined slabs.
“Eve,” he tries again. “I want to keep seeing you. This may not be the best start—”
I can feel the laughter in my throat as demented hysteria.
“Take me home,” I direct him.
“I made her happy,” he says. “Can you begrudge her that?”
“I don’t begrudge her anything.” I am curt. “You don’t know the story of Tam and me.”
“She did feel guilty about you.”
“This is making me sick.” The complicity of their talking in bed about me. “My relationship with Tam is none of your business.”
Everything is coming undone. I am not going to marry Laurie. I am not going to return to Toronto. My parents will have to fend for themselves. I am in the middle of the same life I had before, but I do not have a sister.
The tears that have made no appearance this week are blurring my sight. I don’t feel immortal anymore. My knotted hair, the sweat congealed in the fissures of my body are the rank tracks of a story forsaken.
For a minute, I mourn the beauty of the idea that has borne me aloft, the lyricism of love, cleansed of dross or dailiness. Then, like a righteous suffragette of Nana’s vintage, I see myself clad in a sensible navy blue dress, upholding the banner of merciless truth forever.
Simon will approve of my new position, if not the melodrama; he always favors the shredding of illusion.
I have not thought of him. Now I panic when my mind cannot recall his phone number.
I’m in Buffalo, I think, some limbo place between Toronto and New York, the future hazy and the past dismantled.
“I can’t drop you off without telling you. You said you wanted to know,” Laurie offers.
“But I do know.”
I can see their story before me, frame by frame. “You went first to a hotel room, because she had never done it during the day in a hotel. You took the room yourself for the night, because she was much too famous. You left her the key and then walked out. She came half an hour later and went up alone. By the time you got in, she was under the covers. She didn’t want you to see her without, with only one breast. But you told her she was”—I retrieve the language—“beautiful beyond words.”
Laurie is looking at me, stunned.
“Keep driving. Her clothes are on the chair—no, in the closet. She was always neat. She’s nervous, but you take it very slowly, asking her if she’s all right. ‘We can stop any time you like,’ you tell her. But she says she doesn’t want to stop. You are very careful. You’re going to show her that it makes no difference, that—”
“No more,” Laurie says. He has braked abruptly and is bent over the wheel, hands on his ears.
“I can go on,” I say.
“No,” he begs me.
“The next time was in your house. You had taken away any reminders of your wife. I see a scented candle. Again it is midmorning, after she finished her show. I wonder what you told your office.”
“Lunch date. Back at two thirty,” he says robotically.
“You wouldn’t do it in your marital bed,” I decide. “Is there a guest room? Yes, but the bed folds out. The floor. The living room rug. How am I doing?” I ask him.
“Did she tell you? But she said—” He pivots. “You’re a witch.”
I am inflated by a momentary grandiosity. The clairvoyance lent by shock has resuscitated my confidence. I know my sister.
“She told me,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“How would I know otherwise?”
“But she said she didn’t tell anyone. Not even you,” he says, a perverse tribute.
“She didn’t tell me in words,” I concede.
“There’s something else.”
“What?” I am surly.
“It was a way of”—he gathers his courage—“of getting you back.”
“I thought that was possible,” I say. “But it turns out I was wrong.”
“How can you be sure? You were always so sure.”
“I sound sure. But inside I’m terrified. If I weren’t, we wouldn’t be here, trying to find something that was lost a long time ago.”
“I never thought it was lost,” Laurie says with vigor. “You decided suddenly, and then you left.”
“Tam thought it was a mistake,” I say. “My going to New York. She couldn’t understand what I thought I’d find.”
“And have you?” Laurie asks. “Found it?”
“What do you think?”
“You seem the same,” he says. “Out of reach.”
That must be the way he saw me then, the way I wanted to be seen. When I was a child, I tried to dodge my shadow on the midday sidewalk, to jump so quickly that I’d catch myself ahead of the foreshortened silhouette. I was always slipping out of my skin, a familiar eluding her magician.
“Winifred Holtby, come to my aid,” I cry. But Winifred, golden, mythical even during her life, has been dead for over half a century. Her striking physical presence, her public voice, her passion for justice, her aristocratic renunciation of personal love, her unparalleled friendship: dust in a Yorkshire grave. She went home, all right, home for good at thirty-seven, her mother, her singular friend, Vera, and her political and literary admirers in attendance. Winifred was my age when, blind and failing, she could still tell her grieving mother that she and the permanently inconstant lover to whom she had been loyal since her teens had agreed to marry. And her heartbroken mother acquiesced in the delusion and congratulated her.
“You worshiped Tam,” says Laurie.
“I certainly did not.”
“You did. But I knew her in a different way.”
“I’ll say.”
He hesitates. “I don’t think it was that simple.”
I prepare myself for a banality.
Laurie says, “I think she was jealous of you. Always,” he says firmly.
My response is immediate. “That’s not possible.”
“Even sisters who love each other can miss the boat. Especially if they love each other.”
Now—a little late, says Tam—I remember how Laurie’s clichés went from endearing to infuriating.
I want to cry out: I left you because you couldn’t speak English! But, of course, I sit voiceless.
We are nearing Toronto. It is still dark on this Sunday morning, but already I can hear church bells.
“She admired you for taking some chances, for not having a pat life.”
This is not Laurie’s language.
I tell Tam: Stop using Laurie as your ventriloquist.
“You don’t know how much she berated me,” I say, perplexed. “Even while the two of you were—”
“Sometimes it’s that way.”
“How do you know?” I am suspicious. “Did she use the word ‘jealous’?”
“Maybe not, but I know s
he was. We both were.”
I cannot accommodate Laurie’s new loquacity or the content of his confessions. “No more talk,” I say, slumping in my seat.
Laurie halts midword. I am remembering Tam’s description of morphine. “I thought it was the euphoria of having a baby”—she giggled—“but it might have been the drugs. For an entire day, I didn’t worry about a thing.”
Once, I told Simon I was worn out from fighting for a little peace of mind. “I want to lie on a chaise on a South Sea Island,” I said, “reading magazines and eating bonbons.”
“That’s what heroin feels like.”
“And you know that how?”
“I was interested,” he said. “Academically.”
A half hour from my mother’s house, I would give anything for the respite of an artificial oblivion. But I have to know the finale.
“Take me to Tam’s house,” I say, as we enter the last stretch of the highway.
“What will you do when you get there?”
What I want to do is to barge in, as the household is stirring, to declare, “Your wife was having an affair with my first boyfriend,” compelling Ben to grieve not only for Tam but for his marriage.
I am appalled to realize how much I’d love to blow up everything, a frenzied anarchist. Inside my skull, a cacophony of malicious voices shrieks: It’s your story. She didn’t think of you; why should you think of her?
“Which way?” Laurie says. “Home or Tam’s?”
“I suppose you know how to get to her house. Did she invite you in?”
He says quietly, “You know she didn’t.”
“I thought I knew a lot.”
“This was not about her family. Or her husband.”
“Then why?”
“It was about death,” says Laurie. “Which way?”
“Tam’s.”
“Your force of life,” he says, like a vitamin ad. “What Tam wanted to feel.”
“A great marriage, a wonderful daughter and a new baby, fame and fortune weren’t enough?”
“I guess not.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I can’t help smiling—and neither can he.
“Sometimes it is good to be needed,” he says.
“Why didn’t she turn to me?”
“In this one case,” Laurie says, “you couldn’t do what I could. Here we are.” He stops. “Do you want me to stay?”
I run up Tam’s driveway as if she were waiting for me.
SIXTH
DAY
TWELVE
“WAIT UP!”
Tam was a half block ahead of me, fracturing the dingy snow crust with her boot heel, unimpeded by her subsequent sinking into powder. She did not look back.
“Tam,” I said. “Wait up. Can’t we take a bus?”
Her face, turned to me, was adamant. “Step on it. Or we’ll miss it.”
We were walking, because we needed the exercise, Tam informed me, to the annual Winter Wonderland show at Casa Loma, the castle that was supposedly brought over stone by stone from Scotland to appease a homesick bride. Casa Loma was bedecked with fairy-tale Christmas lights. A boy soprano chorus of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” wafted above the parking lot as we approached.
I was panting.
Inside, a mob of tow-haired children in red or green velvet clothes was swelling within a cordoned-off area near Santa.
“The concert’s upstairs,” Tam said.
“Where’s the cafeteria?” I needed hot chocolate, heaps of whipped cream freckled with cocoa. “My hands are ice.”
“The show is at three,” said my sister. “Cafeteria later. You’re supposed to reward yourself at the end, not before you start.”
I read in the Globe that if you offer young children half a cookie now or a whole cookie later, the ones who choose the whole cookie will be far more successful in life.
I knew which category I was in. And, alas, the one she was in.
“Is that the line?” I asked. “It’s too long.”
Children were snaking between braided silk cords as far as I could see.
“That’s for Santa.” Tam summoned a tone from her infinite reserve of disdain.
“I’m skipping the show,” I said, lining up.
“No, you’re not. Dad lets us come as long as we remember it’s not our holiday. Sitting on Santa at age ten does not qualify.”
“I’ll remember,” I told her. “But I’m still going to sit on his lap. And ask.”
“For what?” said Tam.
But I was not saying. It was a compensatory indulgence to aggravate her. A Barbie dollhouse even though I’m too old? A portable record player?
“And ho, ho, ho,” I called after her.
On Tam’s porch, waiting for daybreak, I would give all I have for an hour of her derision. So it must have been for Winifred—I see, in a glimmer of empathy—as she pined after Harry Pearson, her great love, despite her self-possession. If the pain of withholding is born early enough, it is so enmeshed with pleasure that the link cannot be severed.
A triangle of light, and Ben finds me, huddled before him, unable to stop shivering.
“I forgot that it’s Sunday,” he says. “No paper. What are you doing?”
“I—”
Ben looks winsome in his nautical pajamas. “You—?” he encourages me.
“I wanted to see you away from the house,” I say lamely.
“How long have you been outside? Come in, come in.”
The housekeeper, carrying Gabriel, is walking down the stairs.
“Please let me hold him,” I say, dropping my coat so that the baby doesn’t freeze. “You smell so good, Gaby,” I murmur into his hair. “Where’s Ella?”
“She’s coming, too. Ella!” Ben calls up.
“By the way”—it occurs to me belatedly—“why aren’t we sitting shiva here?”
“Tam asked me not to,” Ben says. “She was afraid the kids would remember their home as a place of mourning.”
As if her eternal absence would not suffice. But beneath Ben’s sentence is the truer one I hear: Tam did not want Laurie to enter her house.
“Shiva is meant to be a consolation,” I tell Ben.
“That’s not the way she felt about it.”
“And you always listened to her?” I cannot keep the sting from my voice.
“Always. I know there are aspects of Tam she kept to herself,” he says. “But I didn’t care.”
“Why not?” Gabriel is fidgety in my arms. “Do you think he’s hungry?”
Ben takes him from me and slings him expertly across his chest, patting Gabriel’s back.
“How do you know that stuff?”
“You’ll pick it up when you have to.” His voice is tender.
“You were saying about Tam?” Despite my rage to deconsecrate Tam’s memory, I am petrified that her betrayal will seep out of me, never to be retracted.
“We’ll be late for services at your mum’s,” Ben says, “if we don’t leave right now. I’ll give you a lift. How did you get to our house?”
“A friend left me off.”
“Pretty early for an act of friendship,” he says. “Hi, sweetie. Here’s Ella.”
“Delicious.” I open my arms.
In her car seat behind me, Ella prattles on, dominating the few minutes I have with her father. “What did you mean, ‘aspects of Tam she kept to herself’?” I cannot stop, probing and poking about like a diviner.
“In every marriage—” Ben begins, and then remembers Ella. “Are you all right back there?”
I twist my head to smile at her.
“Mummy told me that when you were small, there was no such thing as seat belts, and it wasn’t safe.”
“But luckily,” I say, “nothing happened.”
“My seat belt is so tight it hurts my tummy.”
“It doesn’t have to be that tight,” says Ben, eyes on the road.
“Does too,” she insists.
“Do you f
eel safe and sound?” he asks her.
“How about ditching prayers?” I say to Ben.
“I’ll tell you whatever I can.” He looks puzzled.
Intuiting my zeal, Ella will not leave his side when we enter the house.
Come on, come on, I say silently. “Maybe you’d like to watch TV?”
“Just one show,” Ben cautions. “Let’s find one that suits you.”
Ella succumbs.
In the kitchen, Ben and I face each other. “Now,” he announces. “What is it?”
I am evasive. “There’s only one day left, and you and I have not spoken about her.”
“From the start, I was awestruck,” he says.
“You and everyone.”
“You think I don’t know Tam’s faults?” Ben pours himself orange juice. “Want some?”
“I guess you must, after all these years.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t easy being her sister. And sometimes it wasn’t easy being her husband. Especially at the end.”
My face prickles.
“The end of what?” my uncle says, pushing through the dining room door.
“The end of shiva,” I recover. “Isn’t it?”
“You can expect a lot of people today, so stick around.”
“Where would I go?”
Gil looks at Ben, who is looking at me. “I’m out of here.”
“This is a drawing room farce—but in the kitchen,” I say to Ben.
“There is nothing you could tell me about Tam that I don’t already know,” he answers. “And there’s nothing I want you to tell.”
Abashed, I sit down heavily on the nearest chair.
“You’re very smart, Eve. Yes, you are,” he preempts me. “But the one thing you haven’t tried in your adventurous existence—” He hears the implicit reproof and tempers his manner. “You haven’t tried,” he says more kindly, “the risk of living with someone through everything, including the problems that can’t be fixed. Therein lies the unromantic nobility of love,” he mocks himself with a flourish. “I knew Tam very, very well. You didn’t have a monopoly in loving her.”
“I never claimed to,” I tell him. “You were her husband, for God’s sake.”
“Still, there’s no one like a sister,” he says. “Even a sister you can’t talk to.”
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