“And did Watson ever write back?”
“No. Months and months went by and I kept thinking any day it’ll come. I figured Watson couldn’t be so cruel as not to write to his own son—after all, he does drop Greta a line now and then. Finally I said to Seth how strange it was his father hadn’t answered his letter. And do you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He just laughed and said, ‘I never mailed that letter.’ ”
“Why not?”
“I asked him why. I asked him two or three times why he hadn’t mailed it. But he would never tell me.”
Three-fifteen. The luminous dial of Judith’s travel clock announces the hour. She is asleep, lying on her side facing the wall with one arm slung awkwardly, almost grotesquely, over her shoulder. I’m jealous of her ability to sleep, but I am also irrationally pained that she has been able to fall asleep just minutes after I have recounted the miserable story of Watson’s breakdown.
My breakdown too; that’s the part I didn’t confess, the part I conceal even from myself except when I am absolutely alone in the middle of the night as I am now. The day Watson left, everything more or less fell apart for me too. The world, which I was just beginning to perceive, was spoiled. Everything ruined, everything scattered.
Scattered like me, the way I’m scattered through this house: in the spare room where my aggrieved mother sleeps her thin, complaining sleep. And here where Judith lies drugged on my wretchedness. And in the silent back bedroom where Eugene dreams of us riding into Toronto on the Vistadome. In Weedham, Ontario, where Watson Forrest lies amidst the welter of his strange compulsions. And in Vancouver where my son Seth—think of it—I have a fifteen year old son who is sleeping safely in a strange glass and cedar bedroom in the corner of the Savages’ house.
But it is not three-fifteen in Vancouver. A rib of joy nudges me. No, it is not three-fifteen. In Vancouver it is late evening. There is probably a soft, grey rain falling. It is not even midnight yet. The TV stations are going strong; the late show hasn’t even begun. Doug and Greta almost certainly are still awake; they never go to bed until one or two in the morning. Greta likes to read in bed—she is addicted to crime thrillers—and Doug likes to smoke his pipe and listen to Bartok on the record player. True, Seth may be asleep; he is usually in bed fairly early, but it isn’t as though this were the middle of the night.
I’ll telephone. I can dial direct; I know the number by heart. It’s long distance, but I can keep track of the time and leave money to cover the call. My mother will object—the thought of the charge on her monthly bill will be grievous to her—but it will be too late then. I should have thought of phoning earlier, but there’s no harm in calling now, not if I go about it quietly. In fact, this is a good time to phone because the Savages are sure to be at home.
The telephone is in the hallway, a black model sitting on my mother’s gossip bench, a spindly piece of furniture from the twenties, half way to being a real antique. I need only the light of the tiny table lamp, and I dial as quietly as I can, marvelling at the technology which permits me, by dialing only eleven numbers, to sift through the millions of darkened households across the country and reach, through tiny electronic connections, the only person in the world who is really and truly connected with me.
But in Vancouver no one answers. I hang up, wait five minutes and try again. The phone rings and rings. I can picture it, a bright red wall model in the Savages’ birch and copper kitchen. It rings twelve times, twenty times. No one is home. Can they possibly sleep through all this wild ringing? Impossible. No one is home.
Why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I be calm like Judith, why can’t I learn to be brave? Why is my heart thudding like this, why can’t I sleep?
Chapter 4
In the morning my mother’s bedroom is filled with sunlight. Someone has opened the curtains, and high above the asphalt-shingled roof of the house next door floats an amiable, blue, suburban sky terraced with flat-bottomed clouds, lovely. Shutting my eyes again I tense, waiting for fear to reassume its grip on me, but it doesn’t come.
The sun has brought with it a calm perspective, and suddenly I can think of dozens of reasons why Doug and Greta might not have been at home last night. They might, for instance, have had concert tickets; Doug is a music lover and never, if he can help it, misses the symphony. They might have gone to an exhibition at the university and taken Seth along; hadn’t I seen a notice about the opening of a pottery show or something like that in the Fine Arts Building? Or they might have gone out for a late dinner. (Greta frequently has days when, maddened by the world’s unhappiness, she cannot summon the strength to cook a meal.) Or taken in a movie. Or gone for a stroll on the beach. There were countless possibilities, none of which had occurred to me the night before.
And this morning, waking up, I yawn, stretch, smile to myself. Nine o‘clock. There is no reason to hurry. This evening I can phone Vancouver again; if I phone about ten o’clock I will be sure to catch them at home.
I dress lazily, savouring the rumpled feel of the unmade bed, the open suitcases on the floor, the faintly stale bedroomy air. Through the shut door a burr of lowered voices reaches me, my mother‘s, Martin’s, and whose is that other voice? Of course, Eugene’s.
A determined indifference is the perfect cure for anxiety. That’s what Brother Adam wrote me. I take my time. I unpack and hang up my clothes in my mother’s closet, arranging them next to her half dozen dresses—such dresses: limp, round-shouldered, jersey-knit prints, all of them, in off-colours like maroon and avocado, grey and taupe. They give off a sweetish-sourish smell, very faint, a little musty. Beside them my new orange dress appears sharply synthetic and aggressively youthful. I am sorry now I bought it. For today, I decide, I will put on my old beige skirt instead. And a blouse, a dotted brown cotton which is only slightly creased across the yoke.
In the living room I find Martin, hunched on the slipcovered chesterfield with several sections of the Globe and Mail scattered around him. After all these years I scarcely know him. He is an English professor, Renaissance, and as is the case with a good many academics, his essential kindness is somewhat damaged by wit. And a finished reserve. As though he had spent years and years simmering to his present rich sanity, his pot-au feu pungency. He is a little uneasy with me—I am so brash, so non-Judith—but his uneasiness has never worried me; our present non-relationship has a temporary, transitional quality; at any moment, it seems to me, we will find our way to being friends. For Martin is a man with a talent for friendship, and in this respect I once believed that Watson resembled him, Watson who knew hundreds and hundreds of people, whole colonies of them secreted away in the cities and towns between Toronto and Vancouver. The difference, I later observed, was that for Watson friendship was not a pleasing dispensation of existence but a means, the only means he knew, by which he could be certain of his existence.
“Well,” Martin greets me, “I hear you and Judith made a night of it last night.”
“We had a lot of catching up to do,” I say. “I hope I didn’t wear out her ear drums.” I add this apologetically, feeling that Martin might begrudge me a night of Judith’s companionship while he himself has been relegated to the back bedroom.
But he smiles quite warmly and says, “Why don’t you come and spend a week with us after the wedding and really get caught up?”
“I wish I could,” I tell him, “but Seth’s staying with friends. And there’s my job.”
“Surely you could take a few days?” he urges.
Does Martin think I have no responsibilities, nothing to nail me down? No life of my own? And what about Eugene? But I sense that his invitation is no more than a rhetorical exercise; cordial, yes, but mechanically issued. Martin grew up in a hospitable, generous Montreal household where the giving and receiving of invitations was routine, as simple as eating, as simple as breathing.
“Where’s Judith now?” I ask, looking around.
“She went ou
t for a few groceries.”
I nod, remembering the few slices of bread and the half quart of milk in the refrigerator. “Has everyone had breakfast?”
“Everyone but you. Judith thought you’d prefer to get some sleep. Afraid we didn’t leave you anything though. She’s gone for some more coffee and bread,” he looks at his watch, “but she should be back in a few minutes.”
In the kitchen my mother stands washing dishes in the sink; Eugene in a well-pressed spring suit stands next to her, drying teacups and valiantly trying to make conversation. Seeing me in the doorway he almost gasps with relief. “Charleen!”
“Well, you had yourself a good sleep,” my mother says, not turning around. (Couldn’t she even turn around? Does Eugene notice this greeting, this lack of greeting?)
“Yes,” I say, determined to remain unruffled. “I thought I’d be lazy today.”
She turns around then, carefully assessing me from top to toe, hair, blouse (creased), skirt, stockings, shoes, and says tartly, “Mr. Berceau—Louis I should say—is dropping by this morning to meet you.”
“Good,” I answer, rather too lightly, “I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
“In that case it’s too bad you picked this morning to sleep in. Because you haven’t had your breakfast and he’s coming at ten o‘clock. He’s always right on time, right on the dot. We all had breakfast at eight o’clock. Toast and coffee. I told Dr. Redding,” she nods sharply at Eugene, “that I hoped he wasn’t expecting a big breakfast. We never were a bacon and egg house here. I can’t eat all that fried food for breakfast anyway. We just have toast and coffee and always have, guests or no guests. But there’s no toast for you. We just completely ran out of bread. That’s something I never do normally, run out of things. I plan carefully. You remember, Charleen, how I always planned carefully. There’s no excuse for waste, I always say. Of course, I didn’t know Dr. Redding would be here, you didn’t write about him staying here, or I would have bought an extra loaf. Martin always eats at least three pieces of toast. Not that he needs it. I told Judith this morning he should watch his starches. I never have more than one. I’ve never been a heavy eater, and a good thing with the price of food. Well, we’re right out of bread. Martin even ate the heel, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Waste not. Then Judith said, never mind, she’d go down to the Red and White. You’d never know the Red and White now. The floor, it’s filthy, just filthy, they used to keep it so clean in there; you remember, Charleen, it used to be spotless when the old man was alive. Spotless. And they let people bring their dogs in, and I don’t know what. I thought Judith would be back by the time you woke up but she isn’t. I don’t know what in the world’s keeping her. She always was a dawdler, it’s only a block away and it shouldn’t be crowded at this time of the morning. And here you are up already. Judith thought you’d sleep in until she got back and here you are and there’s nothing for breakfast. You should have got up with the rest of us. And here’s Dr. Redding wiping dishes, he insisted, and he’s in a rush to get downtown. But Judith said the two of you were up half the night talking away. I thought I heard someone up banging around in the kitchen. You and Judith need your sleep, you don’t need me to remind you about that, and here you are up to all hours. How do you expect to get your rest when you sit up all night? You’ve got all day to talk away. The rest of us need our sleep too.”
Eugene, rose-stamped teacup in hand, listens stunned. I have to remember that he has come unprepared, that he has never met anyone like my mother, that she has always been like this. Nevertheless I feel an uncontrollable tremour of pity seeing her this morning in her exhausted, chenille dressing gown, white-faced, despairing and horribly aged, her wrists angry red under the lacy suds.
I watch Eugene standing by the sink, slightly stooped, tea towel in hand, looking at once humble and affluent with his well-trimmed, wooly hair and faintly anxious and uncomfortable expression. It isn’t difficult for me to imagine the questions taking shape in Eugene’s head, questions he would never voice or perhaps even acknowledge as his own. Questions like: Why is Mrs. McNinn angry with Charleen? What has Charleen done? Why don’t these two women, mother and daughter, embrace? Why don’t they smile at each other? Why doesn’t Charleen ask her mother how she’s feeling? Why doesn’t Mrs. McNinn ask if Charleen slept well?
As I imagine the questions, the answers too spring into being, the answers which Eugene would almost certainly formulate: Mrs. McNinn is angry because she is not in good health; she is possessed of a rather nervous disposition; it is probable that she slept poorly last night. She is, in addition, confused about who I, Eugene Redding, am, and she is somewhat bothered by the fact that she hadn’t been expecting an extra guest. She is unused to house guests and is now embarrassed because she has run short of food. But it is nothing serious; it will pass.
I am able to frame these answers because I know Eugene and trust him to find, as he always does, the most charitable explanation, the most kindly interpretation. Kindness, after all, comes to him naturally; he was hatched in its lucky genre and embraces its attributes effortlessly. Gentleness, generosity and compromise are not for him learned skills; they have always been with him, wound up with the invisible genes which determine the wooliness of his hair and the slightly vacant look in his grey eyes. It may, for all I know, have existed in his family for generations. He is not at the frontier as I am.
For me kindness is an alien quality; and like a difficult French verb I must learn it slowly, painfully, and probably imperfectly. It does not swim freely in my bloodstream—I have to inject it artificially at the risk of all sorts of unknown factors. It does not wake with me in the mornings; every day I have to coax it anew into existence, breathe on it to keep it alive, practice it to keep it in good working order. And most difficult of all, I have to exercise it in such a way that it looks spontaneous and genuine; I have to see that it flows without hesitation as it does from its true practitioners, its lucky heirs who acquire it without laborious seeking, the lucky ones like Eugene.
Louis Berceau arrives precisely at ten o‘clock in a small, dark-green Fiat which he parks at the curb in front of the house. When he knocks at the back door, Judith is making fresh coffee, and Eugene has just left by taxi for the dental convention downtown, an extravagance which both shocked and impressed my mother. (“Doesn’t he know we have a subway? Well, I know it’s pokey, but it’s good enough for most people.”)
Judith has been mistaken about Louis’s height; he is considerably shorter than our mother, perhaps as much as six inches. And he is thin—certainly I had not expected that he would be robust—with enormously wrinkled, whitish-yellow skin; his gnarled peanut face—how humble he looks!—and his thickish, wall-like eyelids make him look like a dwarfed, jaundiced Jesus. This man has had three operations, I chant to myself. Three operations.
Judith puts down the coffee pot, and he takes both her hands in his and presses her warmly, a warmth which takes Judith by surprise; they have met only once before. Then he turns to me and I see him hesitate an instant before speaking. He has a choked and gummy voice—did tumors nest in that plugged up throat?—but friendliness leaks through. “So this is Charleen.”
For a man, he has a tiny hand, harshly-formed, dry and papery as though the flesh were about to fall away from the gathered bones. His clothes, too, seem curiously dry, an old, blue suit, far too hot for today, with faintly dusty seams and buttonholes.
Martin comes into the kitchen to be introduced, and with his hearty “How do you do, Mr. Berceau,” we all breathe more easily. My mother, like a minor character in a play, has frozen during these introductions, literally flattening herself against the refrigerator door, nervously observing Louis’s presentation of himself to the “family.”
“I’ve just made some coffee,” Judith announces.
“Exactly what I need,” Louis replies from the top of his strangled, phleghm-plugged throat. “I’ve been up for hours.” And with a rattling sigh he sinks
down at the kitchen table.
“We could go into the living room,” my mother says with the pinched voice she uses when she wants to be genteel.
“The kitchen is fine, Florence,” Louis says, breathing rapidly. Florence! Well, what had I expected?
We sit down at the table while my mother finds cups and saucers in the cupboard. There is a moment’s silence which I rush to fill; it seems so extraordinarily painful for Louis Berceau to speak that all I can think of is the necessity of sparing him the effort.
“I’m really very happy to meet you,” I rattle away in anely. “At first I thought I wasn’t going to be able to come. But I managed to get a week off work, and some friends offered to keep an eye on Seth—my son—and I thought, why not?”
Louis stirs his coffee and lifts his eyes in a disarming, skin-pleated smile. Gasping between spaced phrases he manages, “We are so grateful—both of us—your mother and I—that you could come all these—thousands of miles—to be with us—on Friday. We are—we are—” he searches for a word, then with a final burst says, “we are honoured.”
Honoured! Honoured? I glance at my mother, take in her tightly shut lips, and look away. Louis is honoured—how touching—but only Louis.
“It was Mr. Berceau’s idea,” my mother explains sharply, “to have a proper wedding. And invite,” she pauses, “the family.”
“Well, you see,” Louis chokes, “I never ... never had a family.”
“Well, now you do,” Judith says with firm cheerfulness. (How easily I can picture her performing at faculty receptions.) “The children, my two kids that is, have exams this week, but they’ll be coming on the train Friday in time for the wedding.”
“I hope,” Louis says, his thick lips cracking puckishly, “that I’ll get to know them well in time.”
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