The Box Garden

by Carol Shields

  Without thinking, without reflecting, I wink back, and then we move down the street, Louis and I, slowly, almost elegantly.

  Louis’s car is a Fiat 600, a 1968 model, recently repainted, the interior worn but exceedingly clean. This is the car that takes my mother back and forth to the cancer clinic, this is the car that carries her out for Sunday drives, this is the car which in two days will become their car, used for their minor errands, for their weekly trips to the Dominion Store, for their little jaunts into the country.

  Louis, as I had predicted, is a cautious driver. He sits tightly in the driver’s seat, moving the steering wheel and gearshift with intense little jerks, with careful, choppy, concentrated deliberation. The car moves down the suburban streets, delicately shuddering, and Louis, leaning forward, appears rather gnomelike with his wreaths of wrinkles, his puckered, colourless mouth, his contained and benign ugliness. Taking the 401 he heads west across the city.

  On the way to Weedham Louis talks about the wedding. And I think how strange that it is so easy for people to talk in cars. It must have something to do with the enforced temporary proximity or with the proportion of space or perhaps the sealed, cushioned interior silence which must resemble, in some way, the insulated room where Greta Savage meets each week with her encounter group. It is as though the automobile were a specially designed glass talking-machine engineered for human intimacy. Furthermore, in a car the need to watch the road diverts and relieves the passengers, giving to their conversation an unexpected flowing disinterestedness.

  Louis clears his throat and explains that both he and my mother were anxious to avoid fuss and expense; that was why they decided to be married in my mother’s living room in the middle of the afternoon. Afterwards there would be tea in the dining room. And a small cake which Louis has ordered from a bakery; a United Church minister, a local man, has been asked to perform the ceremony.

  This last piece of information surprises me. The McNinns have always been vaguely Protestant; at least Protestant is the word Judith and I supplied when we were asked our religious denomination. But we had never been a church-going family. The reason: I am not entirely sure, but it stemmed, I think, from my mother’s belief that people only go to church in order to show off their hats and fur coats and to sneer at those less elegantly dressed. Certainly it had nothing to do with those larger issues such as the existence of God or the requirement of worship.

  “Is anyone else going to be at the wedding?” I ask Louis. No, he answers, only the family. He himself has no family, none at all anymore.

  The neighbours. I wonder if the neighbours have any inkling that my mother is to be remarried on Friday. Has she told anyone or has she kept her secret? The leitmotif of her anxiety, for as long as I can remember, has been her fear of being judged by the neighbours; what would the neighbours think? When twenty years ago I ran away with Watson to Vancouver, she had been struck almost incoherent with shame: what would the neighbours think? All the other girls in the neighbourhood were going on to secretarial school or studying to be hairdressers, but her daughter—the shame of it—had eloped with a student, had left a note on her pillow and ridden off to Vancouver on the back of a motorcycle.

  Later I learned from Judith exactly how shattered she had been, how for months she’d hardly left the house, how for years she’d been unable to look the neighbours in the face. The fact that I had not been pregnant as she had supposed, the fact that Watson and I had been quite legally if rather sloppily married before we set off for the west, and the fact that Watson, three years later, received his Ph.D. (with honours)—none of these things seemed to ease the terrible shame of my extraordinary departure And then the divorce, the embarrassing blow of the divorce which for years I tried to conceal from her. No one else in the neighbourhood had a daughter who was divorced. The neighbours had daughters who were buying property in Don Mills and producing families of children who came visiting on Sundays. Our mother alone had been cursed by strange daughters: Judith with her boisterous disturbing honesty, bookish and careless, and I with my now fatherless child, my unprecedented divorce, my books of poetry. The neighbours’ children hadn’t dismayed and defeated and failed their mothers.

  And now my mother is getting married and she doesn‘t, it seems, worry at all about what the neighbours will think. She doesn’t care a fig; she doesn’t care a straw. For after all these years she has, in a sense, triumphed over the neighbours. Or, more accurately, the neighbours no longer exist. Both Mr. and Mrs. Maddison with their wailing cats and shredded curtains have died. The MacArthurs—lazy Mrs. MacArthur, always hanging out the clothes in her dressing gown, and Mr. MacArthur with his gravel truck sitting by the side of the house—have moved to a duplex in Riverdale to be near their married daughter. The Whiteheads—he drank, she used filthy language—have gone to California. Mrs. Lilly and her crippled sister, so sinfully proud of their dahlias, have disappeared without a trace, and the Jacksons, whom my mother believed to be very common, have become rich and live in south Rosedale. All the houses in our neighbourhood are filled with Jamaicans now, with Pakistanis, with multi- generation, unidentifiable southern Europeans who grow cabbages and kohlrabi in their backyards and rent out their basements. My mother is not in the least afraid of their judgment on her. She has, after all, lived for forty years in her little house, she has lived on the block longer than anyone else, she is widowed old Mrs. McNinn, the woman who keeps a clean house, the woman who minds her own business; she is respectable old Mrs. McNinn.

  “We’re almost there,” Louis says, steering carefully. “Another mile or so.”

  “What a pretty little town,” I exclaim. For Weedham, Ontario, in the blond, spring sunlight has a tidy green rural face. A sign announces its population: 2,500. Another sign welcomes visiting Rotarians. Still another, a billboard of restrained proportions, urges visitors to stop at the Wayfarers’ Inn.

  “That’s where we’re going,” Louis says.

  The Wayfarers’ Inn at the edge of town is relatively new, built in the last thirty years or so, but in the style of more ancient inns it has a stone courtyard, a raftered ceiling, here and there curls of wrought iron, and rows of polished wooden tables ranged round the walls. Light filters glowingly through stained glass windows which, Louis explains, are the real thing; they were taken from an old house in the area which was being demolished.

  “It’s charming,” I say politely.

  Shyly he tells me, “I brought your mother here for lunch. When I asked her to marry me.”

  I am taken by surprise. In fact, I am dumbfounded, for I cannot imagine my mother submitting to the luxury of lunch at the Wayfarers’ Inn. And it is even more difficult to imagine her absorbing—in this room at one of these little tables peopled with local businessmen and white-gloved club women—a declaration of love.

  “Was it ... sudden?” I dare to ask.

  His face crinkles over his r hroom soup, engulfed in pleasant nostalgia. “Yes,” he nods, choking a little. “Only three months after we’d met at the clinic.”

  His openness touches me, but at the same time I am unbelievably embarrassed. Much as I would like to pursue it, to ask him, “and do you really love each other?” I cannot; Judith might have, in fact she probably did. I am certain he told her too, just as I am certain he would tell me if I asked; why else has he brought me out for lunch if not to make me feel easy about him. But I draw back, I can’t ask, not now at least. To pursue the subject beyond Louis’s first eager revelation might diminish it, might bury it. Why shouldn’t he love my mother? If there is such a thing as justice, then surely even the unloving deserve love. She’s like everyone else, I suddenly see; inside her head are the same turning, gathering spindles of necessity; why shouldn’t he love her?

  Louis smiles at me with almost boyish gaiety, his teeth, dark ivory with flashes of gold at the sides, his wrinkles breaking like waves around the hub of his happiness—a happiness so accidental, so improbable and so finely suspended—hadn’t
Brother Adam written that happiness arrives when least expected and that it tends to dissolve under scrutiny. Better to change the subject.

  I glance around the room, taking in the polished wood and coloured glass; a square of ruby-red light falls on Louis’s soft old hair. “How did you find this place?” I ask him. “Had you been here before ... before the day ... you brought her out here?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” he is pleased with my question. “When I was teaching school—I used to be the woodwork teacher, your mother must have told you. Always was good with my hands.” He spreads them for my inspection.

  “Simple carpentry, nothing complicated, knife racks and wall shelves mostly. At the end of the school year, round about the middle of June, I’d say, we used to come out here, all the teachers, and have lunch.” He coughs, a sudden attacking hack of a cough. “Sort of, you know, a celebration.”

  “Which school was it?” I ask politely.

  “St. Vincent.” He chokes again. “Not so far from where you went to school.”

  “St. Vincent,” I say, remembering. “That’s a Catholic school, isn’t it?”

  He nods, watching me closely.

  “Some of the kids in our neighbourhood used to go there,” I tell Louis. “The MacArthurs. Billy MacArthur? Red hair, fat, always in trouble?”

  “I don’t think I remember him,” Louis says regretfully.

  “Judith and I always kind of envied the Catholic kids. It seemed—I don’t know—sort of exotic going to a school like that. Like a pageant. First communion and all those white dresses. And veils even. And catechism. And always calling their teachers Sister this and Father that.”

  Louis nods and smiles.

  “But,” I say thoughtfully, “I always thought that the teachers in those days had to be nuns and priests.”

  Louis nods again.

  “But you ...”

  “Yes,” Louis says.

  Silence. “A priest?” I whisper.

  “Yes,” he says in a level voice, “a priest.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “I wanted you to know.”

  “Does Judith ...”

  “I told her yesterday.”

  “And my mother. Of course she ...”

  “Of course.”

  “But—” I try to gather in my words, I struggle for the right words but there don’t seem to be any for this moment, “but weren’t you ... I thought ... weren’t you married before?”

  “Only to the Church,” he says with a faint, modest rhetorical edge.

  “But now ...”

  “I made the decision to leave,” he says, “three years ago.”

  My mother is marrying a sick, seventy-two-year-old ex-priest, I can hardly breath, I cannot believe this.

  “But Louis,” I stumble on, “why did you ... I mean, it’s none of my business ... but why did you leave?”

  He is ready to tell me; he has, I can see, brought me here to make me understand. “It was when I first started to ... get sick. I know it seems strange. You’d think sickness would make me cling to my vocation. But it wasn’t like that.”

  “What was it like then?”

  “I started to feel afraid.”

  “Of death?”

  “I could never be frightened of death. I’m still a Catholic.”

  “What were you afraid of then?” I ask, but already I know. Oh, Louis, I know what it is to be afraid.

  “I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure now. But I think I was afraid I’d missed half my life.”

  For a sickening half-instant I think he is referring to celibacy, surely he doesn’t mean that.

  “I’d never lived alone,” Louis explains carefully. “I’d never had the strength. But then, when I got sick, it seemed possible. Anything seemed possible. It doesn’t make sense, I know.”

  But to me it does make sense, for why had I married Watson? Because his sudden arrival into my life had said one thing: anything was possible. Possibility rimmed those first days like a purplish light; love was possible; flight was possible; my whole life was going to be possible.

  “So you decided to leave?” I say to Louis.

  He nods. His face has become alarmingly flushed. How difficult this must be for him. I want to reach out and pat his arm, but I’m too awestruck to move.

  “I’ve been quite happy,” he says, “surprisingly so. Of course, being alone has its problems too.”

  I know. I know.

  “Then I met your mother.”

  I smile uncertainly.

  He makes a little laced basket of his hands and says, “I hope you don’t think ... you don’t think we’re just old and foolish.”

  “Of course not,” I gasp truthfully.

  “Because we don’t have ...” he pauses, “surely you realize ... we don’t have all that ... much time.” He says this lightly, he even gives a faint, ghoulish, baffling sort of chuckle which I find both shocking and admirable.

  Now I do reach out and pat his hand, his chamois-coloured, brown-spotted, hairless little hand. We sit in the red and yellow and blue pooled light without saying a word. A young waitress takes our plates away and brings us ice cream in tiny imitation pewter bowls.

  Louis sighs at last and says thickly, “It would have been nice ... nice ... to have a priest at the wedding, that’s all. It doesn’t matter though. Not really.”

  “You mean to perform the ceremony?” I ask him.

  “Oh no. That would be a little ... uncomfortable for your mother, I think. But it would have been nice to have a priest, just to, you know, be there.”

  “Couldn’t you invite one?” I ask him earnestly.

  “It’s awkward,” he says. “I’m a little ... out of touch.”

  I tease the bitter chocolate ice cream with the tip of my spoon. I can’t stop myself: I say, “Look, Louis, I know a priest. As a matter of fact I’m going to see him tomorrow. Why don’t I ask him to come? I don’t have to tell him anything about your being a priest. I could just invite him—you know—to my mother’s wedding.”

  He tips his head to one side and smiles a startled amber-toothed asymmetrical smile; pleasure drains into his grouted eyes and, nodding his head, he surprises me by saying, “Why, that would be very kind of you.”

  Louis’s confession has refreshed him; he looks rather tired but he orders coffee with the happy air of a man who has discharged his purpose.

  For me the revelation is not so speedily digested; it hangs overhead like a bank of fresh steam, and my imagination struggles to picture Louis of the clerical collar; Louis of the ivory Sunday vestments, wafer in mouth, cup upraised; Louis as devout young novice; Louis as frightened lonely child—somewhere under the old, soft, yellowed skin that boy must still exist. It is too much for me—the idea of Louis as priest resists belief, but it must, it will be, assimilated.

  And what, I ask myself, is so strange about my mother meeting a defrocked priest—an ex-priest, I should say, it is somehow kinder to think of him that way—certainly a lot of them are floating around these days. And how did I imagine they would look if not like Louis? Did I expect them to be exhausted and spiritual, hollow-eyed, pitted with recognizable piety, baroque in manner, fatherly and frightened with damaged holiness sewn into their fingertips? They were men, only men, assorted, various and unmarked. Was Eugene with his moist normalcy and gentle hands identifiable as an orthodontist? And Martin: to see him turning over the pages of the Globe and Mail in my mother’s back yard, who would suspect the Miltonic peaks and canyons that furnished his intelligence: the very idea was ridiculous.

  Meeting Watson Forrest when I was eighteen—there he was drinking orange soda in a run-down, soon-to-be-bankrupt drugstore—a short, frowsy boy of twenty-two with wrinkled corduroy pants, acne scars and tufted crown of reddish hair—I had not believed him at first when he told me he had graduated in botany from the University of Toronto, that he had already written his Master’s thesis (what was a Master’s thesis? I had asked) on rare Ontario orc
hids. Later, made restless by the romance of the North, Watson had turned to Arctic lichens; later still, drawn into the back-to-nature movement, he had focussed on the common pigweed and had theorized, often tiresomely, on the pigweed’s ability to draw nutrients to the surface of the earth. Orchids to pigweed: Watson had continually evolved toward the more popular, more democratic, more ubiquitous forms of a plant life. Specialty was for those who were content to stand still. Watson had resisted, more than most, the stamp of profession.

  And as for me, Charleen Forrest, who, seeing me buying oranges in the Safeway or mailing letters on rainy Vancouver corners, who would guess that I am a poet? My bone structure is wrong; all those elongations; all those undisciplined edges, the ridged thighs, the wire-brush hair, the corns on my feet, the impurities in my heart—how could I possibly be a poet, how could I, as some might say, sing in a finer key?

  The truth is, I am a sort of phony poet; poetry was grafted artificially onto my lazy unconnectedness, and it was Watson—yes, Watson—who did the grafting. Watson made me a poet—at least he pushed me in that direction—by his frenzied, almost hysterical efforts to educate me. What a shock it must have been, when he recovered from the first sexual ecstasies, to find himself married to an eighteen-year-old girl of crushing ignorance. Our first apartment in Vancouver was crammed with the books he brought me from the library, books I read doggedly, despairingly, in an attempt to conceal from him the shallowness of my learning. I seemed always to be working against time; the bright lights of possibility he had lighted in my head were already flickering out one by one.

  I took a short typing course in Vancouver and for three years I supported both of us by typing term papers for graduate students in the cluttered, dusty nest of our one-room apartment. And in between, in order to forestall Watson’s ultimate disenchantment, I sweated through books of history, biography, science; in fact, whatever Watson selected for me. How he had loved the role of tutor, one of his many incarnations: he became a kind of magician and I the raw material to be transformed. His devotion to my education was, to be sure, less than altruistic : his first appointment was in sight; another incarnation, another role—that of brilliant young lecturer—awaited him, and he became, not without reason, worried about the handicap of a stupid wife.