Small Ceremonies

by Carol Shields

  “The three of us then,” Furlong says. “Mother can get a taxi later. I’ll just have a word with her on the way out.”

  In a moment they are gone, and no one has even noticed their leaving. The wall of noise encloses me again; the volume after midnight doubles, trebles. In the living room I hear singing: “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.” Someone is rolling up the rug; someone else has found Meredith’s rock records.

  Unexpectedly I come across Richard who is carrying towers of coffee cups into the kitchen. As he passes I reach out automatically to pat the top of his head. The springy spaniel hair is familiar enough, but there is something different. My hand angles oddly; can it be that he’s grown this much?

  He shouts something into my ear. What is it? “Great party, Mother,” he seems to be saying. Or something like that.

  Finally they go home, the last guest disappears into the rain-creased darkness; the last car swerves around the corner of Beaver Place where all the other houses are dark. It’s after three.

  Martin carries a pot of tea into the wreckage of the living room, three cups on tray, milk and sugar, a fan of spoons. “Sit down, Judith,” he commands.

  John Spalding, boulder-like, is still occupying the middle of the sofa. Has he moved all evening, I wonder?

  At this hour we abandon the last remnant of formality. I kick off my silver shoes, note where the straps have bitten into the instep, and put my stockinged feet on the coffee table. Martin pours tea and hands me a cup.

  “John,” he says, “surely you’d like some too.”

  “Please,” he booms from the cushions.

  We sip in silence, letting the quiet wash over us.

  Martin inquires about John’s plane. It leaves at ten-thirty, a mere seven hours away. Martin has an early appointment, so it is decided that I will drive John to the airport.

  “I hope the noise wasn’t too much for you tonight,” I say.

  “Not in the least. I enjoyed it all. My first glimpse of North American informality. Spontaneous and delightful.”

  “I’m sorry your visit has been so short,” I tell him. “We’ve hardly had a chance to get acquainted.” He waves aside my remarks with a plump hand. “I feel I’ve got to know you well just by staying with you.”

  “Perhaps you’ll be back this way before long,” Martin says politely. “Seeing publishers and so forth.”

  “When exactly is your novel coming out?” I ask.

  “In about a month’s time,” he says. “And that reminds me, there was a little something I wanted to mention to you both.” He looks around the room, glances at his watch and says, “That is, if it’s not too late for you?”

  “Oh, no,” I say. “It’s not too late for us. Is it, Martin?”

  “No, of course not,” Martin says wearily.

  “Well, the fact is,” John Spalding says, making an effort to sit up straight, “the fact is that this isn’t the first novel I’ve written.”

  “Really?” I say brightly. Too brightly?

  “The truth is I’ve written several. But none of them was ever published. I never seemed to hit on an idea worth developing. Until a year or so ago.”

  “Yes?” Martin and I chorus.

  “Finally I struck on something workable. And I owe the idea for my novel to you. To your family that is.”

  “To us.”

  “You see, I have, in a matter of speaking, borrowed the situation of your family. A Canadian family who spend a year in England.”

  “Your novel is about us?” Martin asks incredulously.

  “Oh, no no no no. Not really about you, not exactly about you. Just the situation. A professor on sabbatical leave comes to an English university in an English city.”

  “Birmingham?”

  “Well, yes. But I’m calling it Flyxton-on-Stoke. They have two children –"

  “A boy and a girl?”

  “Right. You’ve got the picture.”

  “But,” Martin says, setting down his cup, “I suppose the resemblance ends there."

  “Almost,” John Spalding says, smiling a little nervously. “You may find a few other trifling similarities. That was why I wanted to mention this to you. So that when you read it, if you read it, you won’t think I’ve – well – plagiarized from real life. If such a thing is possible.”

  “But how did you know anything about us?” I ask.

  He laces his fingers across his broad stomach and, settling back, says, “Firstly, one can tell something about people simply by the fact that they have occupied the same quarters.”

  I nod, thinking of the bag of lightbulbs in the Birmingham bathroom, the sex manual under the mattress. Not to mention the shelf of manuscripts.

  “Then there were the letters,” he continues.

  “But we never wrote you any,” Martin says. “The university arranged the letting of the flat.”

  “No no no no no. I mean Anita’s letters. The letters which your son Richard, a fine boy by the way, wrote to our daughter.”

  “You read the letters?”

  “Good Lord yes. We all quite looked forward to them. Anita used to read them aloud to us after tea. Ah, those were happier days. He writes a fine letter; your lad.”

  Martin and I exchange looks of amazement. “And your novel is based on Richard’s letters?”

  “Oh, no no no no.” Again he fills the air with a spray of little no’s like the exhaust from a car. “I didn’t exactly base the novel on it. Just got a general idea of the sort of people you were, how you responded to things. That sort of thing.”

  “And you just took off from there?”

  He beamed. “Exactly, exactly. But I did want you to know. I mean, in case you had any objections.”

  “It seems it’s too late for objections even if we did have some,” Martin says dryly.

  “Well, yes, that is more or less the case. But you see, a writer must –"

  “Get his material where he can find it,” I finish for him.

  “Quite. Quite. Exactly. And, of course, I have changed all the names entirely.”

  “What are we called?” I ask eagerly.

  “You, I have called Gillian. Martin is simply inverted to Gilbert Martin.”

  “Very clever,” Martin says, tight-lipped.

  “We’ll look forward to reading it,” I say. “Will you send us a copy?”

  “You may be sure of that. And I’m more than pleased that you seem to understand the situation.”

  “What I can’t understand,” Martin says, “is how you could find material for a novel out of our rather ordinary domestic situation. I mean, what in Christ did Richard write you about?”

  “Yes what?” I ask.

  John Spalding opens his mouth to speak, but, we are interrupted by someone banging on the back door.

  Martin rises muttering, “Who on earth?”

  “Oh,” I suddenly remember. “It’s Meredith. I completely forgot about her.”

  “Meredith! I thought she was in bed hours ago. What’s she doing out at three in the morning?”

  She’s standing before us, a raincoat over her long patchwork dress, her hair clinging siren-like to her slender neck. Her face is shiny with rain, but more than that, it is iridescent with happiness, and she says over and over again as though she can’t quite believe it, “It’s a boy. It’s a boy, seven pounds, ten ounces, a beautiful, beautiful baby boy.”

  MAY

  It is the morning after our party, the first morning in May.

  “I know what you think,” Meredith charges, “and it isn’t true.”

  “What isn’t true?” I ask. I am cleaning up after the party, putting away glasses, trays, and casseroles that won’t be needed again. Until the next time.

  “About Ruthie’s baby.”

  “What about Ruthie’s baby?”

  “I’m just saying that I know it looks suspicious. With Ruthie living at the Eberhardts’ and all that. But it really isn’t the way it looks.”

 
; “Meredith!” I face her. “You’ve got to make yourself clear. What is the awful thing that you suspect me of suspecting?”

  “I know you’ve had doubts. I can tell by the way you talked about Furlong.”

  “And how exactly did I talk about Furlong?”

  “You said you didn’t trust him. Remember? You didn’t trust him anymore.”

  “Well, that may be true.”

  “But if you’d only listen to me for a minute, I’m trying to tell you that it wasn’t Furlong at all.”

  “What wasn’t Furlong?”

  Meredith sighs and with enormous deliberation pronounces, “Furlong is not the father of Ruthie’s baby.”

  “But, Meredith, I never thought he was.”

  “You didn’t?” she says, her voice draining away.

  “No, not for a minute.”

  “But –"

  “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  She flounders. “I just thought – well here was Ruthie, big as a barn – and living with Furlong – what else could you possibly think?”

  “Well, I never once thought of Furlong. You can be sure of that.”

  “But why not?”

  Can it be that she doesn’t realize about Furlong? Must I tell her? “Meredith,” I say, “don’t you know that Furlong – well – surely you must have noticed – I mean, I just wouldn’t ever suspect Furlong of anything like that. It’s just not the sort of thing he would do. At all.”

  For some reason she has started to cry a little, and, sniffing, she says, “I thought for sure you thought it was Furlong.”

  “No, Meredith, no,” I tell her. “Never for a moment. Truly.”

  She reaches blindly for a Kleenex, blows her nose and looks at me wetly, smiling somewhat foolishly, and I am struck, not for the first time, by her unique blend of innocence and knowledge; a curious imbalance which may never be perfectly corrected; out of stubborn perversity she wills it not to be, conjuring a guilelessness which is deliberate and which perhaps propitiates life’s darker offerings. Always at such moments she reminds me of someone, someone half-recalled but never quite brought into focus. I can never think who it is. But today I see for the first time who it is she reminds me of: it’s me.

  Now that the warmer weather is here to stay, Richard and his friends are outside most of the time. Baseball has taken possession of him, but not only baseball. His disappearances are often long and unexplained, and his comings and goings marked only by the banging of the back door.

  Lately the phone rings for him often, school friends, kids in the neighborhood, and one day there is someone who sounds almost girl-like.

  It is a girl. His startled blush confirms it. She begins to phone fairly often – her name is Maureen – and sometimes he talks to her for an hour or more. About what? I don’t know because he speaks in his brand-new low-register voice and cups his hand carefully over the receiver. And says nothing to us.

  But he is suddenly happy again. I knew, of course, that it would come, knew that he was too young and resilient to be slain by the death of a single love. Martin told me he would get over it. And I knew all along that he would.

  But I never dreamed it would be this; something so simple, something so natural.

  And so soon.

  “Living meanly is the greatest sin,” Nancy Krantz tells me. “Needless economy. It thins the blood. Cuts out the heart.”

  It is so warm this morning that we have carried our coffee cups out on the back porch. “What about thrift?” I ask her.

  “A vice,” she says, “but an okay vice. Thrift, after all, implies its own raison d’être. But cheapness for its own sake is destructive.”

  We swap frugality stories.

  She tells me about a man, a lawyer, well-to-do, with a beautiful house in Montreal, a summer place in the Rideau, annual excursions to London, the whole picture. And whenever he wanted to buy any new clothes, where do you think he went? You’ll never guess. Down to the Salvation Army outlet. He’d pick through piles of old clothes until he’d find a forty-four medium. And that’s what he wore. Pinstripe suits with shiny elbows. Navy blue blazers faded across the shoulders. Pants that bagged at the knees. Fuzzy along the pockets. He just didn’t care. He’d take them home with him in a shopping bag and then he’d put them on and look at himself in the mirror. And he’d say, “Well, I’m no fashion plate but it only cost me three and a half bucks.”

  “Terrible, terrible,” I breathe.

  And I tell her about a widow, not wealthy, not even well-to-do, but not poverty-stricken either. She owns her own house, has an adequate pension and so on. But she had to have a breast removed, a terrible operation, she suffered terribly, cancer, and after she was discharged from the hospital she took the subway home. The subway! With a great white bandage where her left breast had been. On the subway.

  “That’s awful,” Nancy says in a shocked whisper.

  “But,” I tell her, “that’s not the worst part.”

  “What could be worse than that?” she asks.

  I hesitate. For Nancy who is my good, my best friend, has never been an intimate. But I tell her anyway. The really awful thing was that the woman with the sheared-off breast riding home on the subway was my own mother.

  “Oh, Judith, oh, Judith,” she says. “Why didn’t I tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  She gives a short harsh laugh. “That the man with the second-hand suits – was my father.”

  After that we sit quietly, finishing our coffee not talking much.

  What have we said? Nothing much. But we have, for a minute, transcended abstractions. Have made a sort of pledge, a grim refusal to be stunned by the accidents of genes or the stopped-up world of others. We can outdistance any sorrow; what is it anyway but another abstraction, a stirring of air.

  Although Ruthie no longer believes in the Catholic Church, or in marriage for that matter, she and Roger have asked a priest to officiate at their wedding. Not a priestly priest, Roger tells us. Father Claude is young and liberal-leaning, attached in some nebulous way to the university; his theology is aligned with scholarship rather than myth; he is a good guy.

  Both Roger and Ruthie want to have the ceremony out-of-doors, but this proves difficult to arrange. A hitherto unknown bylaw prohibits weddings in city parks. And going outside the city involves a procession of cars, which is aesthetically unacceptable to them. And, besides, what if it rains?

  They ask us if they can have the wedding in our back yard. At first I protest, that our yard is too ordinary for a wedding, having nothing to offer but a stretch of brownish grass, a strip of tulips by the garage, a few bushes, and a fence.

  “Please,” they say, “it will be fine.”

  And it is fine. The sunshine is a little thin, but there’s no wind to speak of; for the middle of May it’s a chilly but reasonable afternoon. The boys next door agree to carry on their ball game at the far end of the street, so it’s fairly quiet except for an occasional thrust of birdsong. Best of all, the shrubs are in their first, pale-green budding.

  Ruthie wears a long, wide-yoked dress printed with a million yellow flowers, and Roger arrives in that comic costume of formality, a borrowed navy blue suit.

  There are no more than fifteen guests, a few friends of Ruthie’s from the library, Furlong and his mother (in purple crimplene and mink stole), a friend of Roger’s who makes guitars, a gentle couple (he batiks, she crochets) who live in the flat beneath them. Ruthie has not invited her parents; they would not feel comfortable at this type of wedding, she thinks.

  She and Roger and Father Claude stand near the forsythia, and the rest of us wait, shivering slightly, in a circle around them. Ruthie, who has been taking a night course in jewelry making, has made the rings herself out of twisted strands of silver. Roger has written the wedding service which, surprisingly, is composed in blank verse. “For you, Martin,” he says. “I want you to be able to speak your part to a familiar rhythm.”

  We all have p
arts which we read from the Xeroxed scripts Roger has prepared; even Richard and Meredith have a few lines. I read:

  Let peace descend upon this happy day

  That Man and Woman may with conscience clear

  Respect each other yet remain themselves

  Their first commitment to the inner voice.

  (A dog barks somewhere, a delivery van whines around the bend in the road; a few neighborhood children peer hypnotized through the fence.) After the exchange of rings, Meredith fetches the baby from the pram (our wedding gift) which has been parked in a spray of sun near the garage. Bundled in a blanket, he is brought forward and christened Roger St. Pierre Martin Ramsay, a name lushly weighted with establishment echoes. Roger loves it: “Listen to that roll of r’s,” he says. “Pure poetry.”

  A friend of Ruthie’s sits cross-legged on the grass and plays something mournful on an alto recorder, and then we go into the house to drink Roger’s homemade wine and eat the plates of exotic fruit which Ruthie has brought. And a surprise: Meredith has made a beautiful multi-layered cake topped with flowers, beads and sea shells. Why sea shells? “For fertility,” she deadpans.

  The afternoon drains away, leaving us steeped in a pale, translucent peace, relaxed, very much at our ease, talking quietly, content, but it occurs to me finally that there is a distinct lack of festivity. Something is missing from this gathering. It’s joyous enough, but it’s contained and diminished in some way. At first – out there in the garden – I had felt something more, something trying to come into being. Perhaps it was those heavy iambic lines we uttered or the somberness of the recorder music, but there is no fine edge of nerve in this marriage rite, no undercurrent, no sense of beginning or expectation. Why?

  I look at the bridal pair. Ruthie rocks little Roger St. Pierre while big Roger leans over them, bottle in hand, anxiously testing it against his wrist. Ruthie looks up at him, and what passes between them is a look of resignation, a little tired already, an arc of strain so subtle I think afterwards that I may have imagined it.

  At five the baby begins to cry, and Roger and Ruthie go home. Everything has been fine, just as they said it would be. Just fine. I want to rush after them and tell them: everything will be just fine.