Small Ceremonies

by Carol Shields

  He came running with it into the kitchen where we stood examining the ancient stove. At that time he was only nine, not yet given to secrecy, and he handed the letter proudly to Martin.

  “Look what I’ve found.”

  Martin read the letter aloud, very solemnly pronouncing each syllable, while the rest of us stood listening in a foolish smiling semicircle. It was a curious note, written in a puckered, precocious style with Lewis Carroll overtones, but sincere and simple.

  To Whoever is the Keeper of This Room,

  Greetings and welcome. I am distressed thinking about you, for my parents have told me that you are Canadians which I suppose is rather like being Americans. I am worried that you may find the arrangements here rather queer since I have seen packs and packs of American films and know what kind of houses they live in. This bed, for instance, is rotten through and through. It is odd to think that someone else will actually be sleeping in my bed. But then I shall be sleeping in someone else’s bed in Nicosia. They are a Scottish family and they will spend the year in Glasgow, probably in someone else’s flat. And the Glasgow family, they’ll have to go off and live somewhere, won’t they? Isn’t it astonishing that we should all be sleeping in one another’s beds. A sort of roundabout almost. Whoever you are, if you should happen to be a child (I am nine and a girl) perhaps you would like to write me a letter. I would be delighted to reply. I am exceedingly fond of writing letters but have no connections at the moment. So please write. Isn’t the kitchen a fright! Not like the ones in the films at all.

  Your obedient servant,

  ANITA DREW SPALDING 9

  It took Richard more than a month to write back, although I reminded him once or twice. He hates writing letters, and was busy with other things; I did not press him.

  But one dark chilly Sunday afternoon he asked me for some paper, and for an hour he sat at the kitchen table scratching away, asking me once whether there was an “e” in homesick; his or hers, we never knew, for he didn’t offer to show us what he’d written. He sealed it shyly, and the next day took it to the post office and sent it, on its way to Cyprus.

  Anita’s reply was almost instantaneous. “It’s from her,” he explained, showing us the envelope. “From that Cyprus girl.” That evening he asked for more paper.

  Once a week, sometimes twice, a thick letter with the little grey Cyprus stamp shot through our mail slot. At least as often Richard wrote back, walking to the post office next to MacFisheries at the end of our road in time for the evening pickup.

  We never did meet the Spaldings. We left England a month before they returned. We thought Richard would be heartbroken that he would not see Anita, but he seemed not to care much, and I had the idea that the correspondence might drop off when he got home to Canada. But their letters came and went as frequently as ever and seemed to grow even thicker. Postage mounted up, draining off Richard’s pocket money, so they switched occasionally to airletters. Always when Richard opens them, he smiles secretly to himself.

  “What on earth do you write about?” I asked him.

  “Just the same stuff everyone writes in letters,” he dodged.

  “You mean just news? Like what you’ve been doing in school?”

  “Sort of, yeah. Sometimes she sends cartoons from Punch. And I send her the best ones out of your old New Yorkers."

  I find it curious. I don’t write to my own sister in Vancouver more than four times a year. To my mother in Scarborough I write a dutiful weekly letter, but sometimes I have to sit for half an hour thinking up items to fill one page. Martin’s parents write weekly from Montreal, his mother using one side of the page, his father the other, but even they haven’t the stamina of these two mysterious children. Richard’s constancy in this correspondence seems oddly serious and out of proportion to childhood, causing me to wonder sometimes whether this little witch in England hasn’t got hold of a corner of his soul and somehow transformed it. He is bewitched. I can see it by the way he is sitting here in the kitchen folding her letter. He has read it twice and now he is folding it. Creasing its edges. With tenderness.

  “Well, how is Anita these days?” My light voice again.

  “Fine.” Noncommittal.

  “Has she ever sent a picture of herself?”

  “No,” he says, and my heart leaps. She is ugly.

  “Why not?” I ask foxily. “I thought pen-pals always exchanged pictures.”

  “We decided not to,” he says morosely, wincing, or so I believe, at the word pen-pal. Then he adds, “It was an agreement we made. Not to send pictures.”

  Of course. Their correspondence, I perceive, is a formalized structure, no snapshots, no gifts at Christmas, no postcards ever. Rules in acid, immovable, a pact bound on two sides, a covenant. I can’t resist one more question.

  “Does she still sign her letters ‘your obedient servant?’”

  “No,” Richard says, and he sighs. The heaviness of that sound tells me that he sighs with love. My heart twists for him. I know the signs, or at least I used to. Absurd it may be, but I believe it; Richard is as deeply in love at twelve as many people are in a lifetime.

  The house we live in – Martin, the children and I – is not really my house. That is, it is not the kind of house I once imagined I might be the mistress of. We live in the suburbs of a small city; our particular division is called Greenhills, and it is neither a town nor a community, not a neighborhood, not even a postal zone. It is really nothing but the extension of a developer’s pencil, the place on the map where he planned to plunk down his clutch of houses and make his million. I suppose he had to call it something, and perhaps he thought Greenhills was catchy and good for sales; or perhaps, who knows, it evoked happy rural images inside his head.

  We are reached in the usual way by a main arterial route which we leave and enter by numbered exits and entrances. Greenhills is the seventh exit from the city center which means we are within a mile or two of open countryside, although it might just as well be ten.

  Where we live there are no streets, only crescents, drives, circles and one self-conscious boulevard. It is leafy green and safe for children; our lawns stretch luscious as flesh to the streets; our shrubs and borders are watered.

  As soon as the sewers were installed nine years ago, we moved in. The house itself has all the bone-cracking clichés of Sixties domestic architecture: there is a family room, a dining ell, a utility room, a master bedroom with bath en suite. A Spanish step-saving kitchen with pass-through, colonial door, attached garage, sliding patio window, split-level grace, spacious garden. The only item we lack is a set of Westminster chimes; the week we moved in, Martin disconnected the mechanism with a screw-driver and installed a doorknocker instead, proving what I have always known, that despite his socialism, he is 90 per cent an aristocrat.

  It is a beige and uninteresting house. Curtains join rugs, rugs join furniture; nubby sofa sits between matching lamps on twin tables, direct from Eaton’s show room. Utilitarian at the comfort level, there is nothing unexpected. This is a shell to live in without thought.

  And in a way it is deliberate, this minimal approach to decorating. My sister Charleen and I, now that we are safely grown up, agree on one thing, and that is that as children we were cruelly overburdened with interior decoration. The house in which we grew up in Scarborough – the old Scarborough that is, before television, before shopping centers, the Scarborough of neat and faintly rural streets – that tiny house was in a constant state of revitalization. All our young lives, or so it seemed, we dodged stepladders, stepped carefully around the wet paint, shared the lunch table with wallpaper samples. Our little living room broke out with staggered garlands one year, with French stripes the next, and our girlish bedroom at the back of the house was gutted almost annually. Shaking his head, our father used to say that the rooms would grow gradually smaller under their layers and layers of paint and paper. We would be pushed out on to the street one day, he predicted. It was his little joke, almost his onl
y joke, but straining to recall his voice, do I now hear or imagine the desperate edge? Better Homes and Gardens was centered on our coffee table, cheerful with new storage ideas or instructions for gluing bold fabric to attic ceilings. The dining table was in the basement being refinished, or the chesterfield was being fitted for slipcovers. The pictures were changed with the seasons. “My house is my hobby,” Mother used to say to the few visitors we ever had; and even as she spoke, her eyes turned inward, tuned to the next color scheme, to the ultimate arrangement, just out of reach, beamed in from House and Garden, a world the rest of us never entered. Nor wished to.

  Still we have put our mark on this place, Martin and I. The floor tiles rise periodically, reminding us they are now nine years old. The utility room is so filled with ski equipment that we call it the ski room. The dining ell has been partitioned off with a plywood planter which looks tacky and hellish, though we thought it a good idea at the time. Hosiery drips from the shower rail in the en suite bathroom. In the cool dry basement our first married furniture glooms around the furnace, its Lurex threads as luminous and accusing as the day we bought it; Richard’s electric train tunnels between the brass-tipped legs. The spacious garden is the same flat rectangle it always was except for a row of tomato plants and a band of marigolds by the fence.

  The house that I once held half-shaped in my head was old, a nook-and-cranny house with turrets and lovely sensuous lips of gingerbread, a night-before-Christmas house, bought for a song and priceless on today’s market. Hung with the work of Quebec weavers, an eclectic composition of Swedish and Canadiana. Tasteful but offhand. A study, beamed, for Martin and a workroom, sunny, for me. Studious corners where children might sit and sip their souls in pools of filtered light. A garden drunk with roses, crisscrossed with paths, moist, shady, secret.

  This place, 62 Beaver Place, is not really me, I used to say apologetically back in the days when I actually said such things. “We’re just roosting here until something ‘us’ turns up.”

  I never say it now. If we wanted to, Martin and I could look in his grey file drawer next to his desk in the family room. Between the folders for Tax and Health, we would find House, and from there we could pluck out our offer-to-purchase, the blueprints, the lot survey, the mortgage schedule and, clipped to it, the record of payments along with the annual tax receipts. It’s all there. We could calculate, if we chose, the exact dimensions of our delusions. But we never do. We live here, after all.

  Up and down the gentle curve of Beaver Place we see cedar-shake siding, colonial pillars, the jutting chins of split-levels, each of them bought in hours of panic, but with each one, some particular fantasy fulfilled. The house they never had as children perhaps. The house that will do for now, before the move to the big one on the river lot. The house where visions of dynasty are glimpsed, a house future generations will visit, spend holidays in and write up in memoirs. Why not?

  Something curious. One day last week, having been especially energetic about Susanna Moodie and turning out six pages in one morning, I found myself out of paper. There must be some in the house, I thought and, although I prefer soft, pulpy yellow stuff, anything is useable in a pinch, I searched Meredith’s room first, being careful not to disturb her things. Everything there is so carefully arranged; she has all sorts of curios, souvenirs, snapshots, a music award stenciled on felt, animal figurines she collected as a very young child, cosmetics in a pearly pale shade standing at attention on her dresser. Everything but paper.

  In Richard’s room I found desk drawers filled with Anita Spalding’s letters, each one taped shut from prying eyes. Mine perhaps? Safety patrol badges, a map of England with an inked star on Birmingham, a copy of Playboy, hockey pictures, but not a single sheet of useable paper.

  Martin will have some, I thought. I went downstairs to the family room to look in his desk. Nothing in the top drawer except his Xeroxed paper on Paradise Regained, recently rejected by the Milton Quarterly. In his second drawer were clipped notes for an article on Samson Agonistes and offprints of an article he had had printed in Renaissance Studies, the one on Milton’s childhood which he had researched in England. The third drawer was full of wool.

  I blinked. Unbelievable. The drawer was stuffed to the top with brand new hanks of wool, still with their little circular bands around them. I reached in and touched them. Blue, red, yellow, green; fat four-ounce bundles in all colors. Eight of them. Lying on their sides in Martin’s drawer. Wool.

  It couldn’t be for me. I hate knitting and detest crocheting. For Meredith perhaps? An early Christmas present? But she hadn’t knitted anything since Brownies, six years ago, and had never expressed any interest in taking it up again.

  Frieda? Frieda who comes to clean out the house on Wednesday? She knits, and it is just possible, I thought, that it was hers. Absurd though. She never goes in Martin’s desk, for one thing. And what reason would she have to stash all this lunatic wool in his drawer anyway? Richard? Out of the question. What would he be doing with wool? It must be Martin’s. For his mother, maybe; she loves knitting. He might have seen it on sale and bought it for her, although it seemed odd he hadn’t mentioned it to me. I’ll ask him tonight, I thought.

  But that night Martin was at a meeting, and I was asleep when he came home. The next day I forgot. And the next. Whenever it pops into my mind, he isn’t around. And when he is, something makes me stumble and hesitate as though I were afraid of the reply. I still haven’t asked him, but this morning I looked in the drawer to see if it was still there. It was all in place, all eight bundles; nothing had been touched. I must ask Martin about it.

  As Meredith grows up I look at her and think, who does she remind me of? A shaded gesture, a position struck, or something curious she might say will touch off a shock of recognition in me, but I can never think who it is she is like.

  I flip through my relatives – like flashcards. My mother. No, no, no. My sister Charleen? No. Charleen, for all her sensitivity, has a core of detachment. Aunt Liddy? Sometimes I am quite sure it is my old aunt. But no. Auntie’s fragility is neurotic, not natural like Meredith’s. Who else?

  She has changed in the last year, is romantic and realistic in violent turns. Now she is reading Furlong Eberhardt’s new book about the prairies. While she reads, her hands grip the cover so hard that the bones of her hands stand up, whey-white. Her eyes float in a concerned sweep over the pages, her forehead puzzled. It’s painful to watch her; she shouldn’t invest so much of herself in anything as ephemeral as a book; it is criminal to care that much.

  Like my family she is dark, but unlike us she has a delicious water-color softness, and if she were braver she would be beautiful. She is as tall as I am but she has been spared the wide, country shoulders; there are some blessings.

  It is an irony, the sort I relish, that I who am a biographer and delight in sorting out personalities, can’t even draw a circle around my own daughter’s. Last night at the table, just as she was cutting into a baked potato, she raised her eyes, exceptionally sober even for her, and answered some trivial question Martin had asked her. The space between the movement of her hand and the upward angle of her eyes opened up, and I almost had it.

  Then it slipped away.

  Last night Martin and I went to a play. It was one of Shaw’s early ones, written before he turned drama into social propaganda. The slimmest of drawingroom debacles, it was a zany sandwich of socialism and pie-in-the-eye, daft but with brisk touches of irreverence. And the heroes were real heroes, the way they should be, and the heroines were even better. The whole evening was a confection, a joy.

  During the intermission we stood in the foyer chatting with Furlong Eberhardt and his mother, our delight in the play surfacing on our lips like crystals of sugar. Mrs. Eberhardt, as broad-breasted as one of the Shavian heroines, encircled us with her peculiar clove-flavored embrace. A big woman, she is mauve to the bone; even her skin is faintly lilac, her face a benign fretwork of lines framed with waves of palest
violet.

  “Judith, you look a picture. How I wish I could wear those pant suits.”

  “You look lovely as you are, Mother,” Furlong said, and she did; if ever a woman deserved a son with a mother fixation, it was Mrs. Eberhardt.

  Martin disappeared to get us drinks, and Furlong, by a bit of clever steering, turned our discussion to his new book, Graven Images.

  “I know I can count on you, Judith, for a candid opinion. The, critics, mind you, have been very helpful, and thus far, very kind.” He paused.

  For a son of the Saskatchewan soil, Furlong is remarkably courtly, and like all the courtly people I know, he inspires in me alleys of unknown coarseness. I want to slap his back, pump his hand, tell him to screw off. But I never do, never, for basically I am too fond of him and even grateful, thankful for his most dazzling talent which is not writing at all, but the ability he has to make the people around him feel alive. There is an exhausted Byzantine quality about him which demands response, and even at that moment, standing in the theatre foyer in my too-tight pantsuit and my hair falling down around my rapidly ageing face, I was swept with vitality, almost drunk with the recognition that all things are possible. Beauty, fame, power; I have not been passed by after all.

  But about Graven Images, I had to confess ignorance. “I’ve been locked up with Susanna for months,” I explained. It sounded weak. It was weak. But I thought to add kindly, “Meredith is reading it right now. She was about halfway through when we left the house tonight.”

  At this he beamed. “Then it is to your charming daughter I shall have to speak.” Visibly wounded that I hadn’t got around to his book, he rallied quickly, drowning his private pain in a flood of diffusion. “Public reaction is really too general to be of any use, as you well know, Judith. It is one’s friends one must rely upon.” He pronounced the word friends with such a silky sound that, for an instant, I wished he were a different make of man.