Brooke is lighting two more cigarettes and smiling at her.
“That’s settled, then, I guess the spring would be a good time to be married, would you have thought, Morag?”
Yes. Yes. Anytime. How about tomorrow?
“Yes. It would be a really good time to be married, Brooke.”
Then she thinks of something else.
“Shall I go on in university there, Brooke?”
He considers.
“Quite honestly, love, I don’t know what to think about it. If you want to go on, of course you’ve a perfect right to do so. On the other hand, you might feel a bit awkward about attending classes, with your husband teaching there.”
“I–don’t know.”
“Well, you won’t need the degree. My salary won’t exactly be princely, but I can afford to keep a wife. Why don’t you audit some classes? Or simply read. Education isn’t getting a degree, you know. It’s learning, and learning to think.”
True. Hm. And if she isn’t attending classes, she will have time to read and also work at her own writing. And care for the house, naturally.
“Another thing, love,” Brooke says. “What about seeing a doctor? I mean, a diaphragm would be better.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes. Definitely. More reliable. We don’t want accidents.”
Accidents. He means kids.
“All right, then, I will, Brooke. But I want a child of yours, Brooke. You know?”
He laughs, but very gently.
“My true love, lots of time for that. Let’s not think of it now, shall we? Get yourself fixed up, won’t you?”
“Yes. Of course.”
The doctor’s office is small and very dark. Probably in external fact it is normal-sized and normally lighted. When finally summoned Morag finds an unknown resource within herself and does not whisper, stutter or slump.
She explains that she is about to be married. The doc, oldish, with a thin tired face, fixes her with a beady raven’s eye.
“Well, suppose you come back to me when you are married, eh?”
What if she’d turned up with a Woolworth’s brass ring on her left hand? He would not have turned a hair, likely.
“What if I get pregnant before–”
“Would that be the end of the world?”
No. No. It would be fine. For her. But but but. It has to be two people’s decision. It would be difficult, moving to another city and that. Not to mention the money. None of which would bother Morag, but then she is not the one who has to worry about the money and all.
She leaves. She does not see whether the expression on the doctor’s face is one of boredom, or resignation, or sympathy, or what.
In the waitingroom, going out, she finds herself powerful with fury. She goes to the reception desk and makes another appointment. For the day after her wedding.
Dear Christie:
I have something to tell you. I am going to get married. His name is Brooke Skelton, and he teaches English here in the university. He is an Englishman (I mean, from England) and is a really fine and wonderful man, and I am very happy. As I am not yet 21, I guess I would have to have your permission, although am I legally adopted by you? But I guess you would be classed as my guardian. I feel sure you will say okay, though.
We are not having a real wedding, just very quiet, so we’re not actually having any guests, as it seems a waste of money. I hope you don’t mind. I will come to see you beforehand, as we will be moving to Toronto soon afterwards. Brooke would just love to come along, also, but cannot, unfortunately, as he will have examination papers to mark and can’t get away, but I will show you a picture of him, and no doubt he will write to you.
I hope this is okay with you, and I hope Prin is reasonably all right.
All the best,
Morag
Dear Morag–
Well you are getting married that is some news all right and I wish well to you and him. You know damn well I would not say no and it is your life and I hope all goes well too bad he is English and not Scots ha ha. Come home when convenient. Prin not good in herself these days.
Yours,
Christie
Memorybank Movie: Hill Street Revisited
The house is just the same, only worse. Perhaps Morag notices it more now. The sour smell is sourer. The exposed light bulb in the kitchen looks bleaker, dimmer, than before, the old sideboard more cluttered with newspapers and unironed clothes, Christie’s shaggily upholstered chair more shabbily torn and worn.
“Hello, Christie.”
He is fifty-six, only. He looks about seventy, his hair sparser than she recalled, his badly shaven jaw more tweedlike with sprouting hairs, his eyes less blue, more clouded. As expected, he also stinks. But has put on a relatively clean shirt for her visit. The effect is somewhat diminished by the fact that the shirt was made to wear with a detachable collar which has got itself detached permanently and is no doubt among the dustballs under a bed or sofa.
“Hello, girl. By all the saints, then, and by the lord Harry, and by the–”
“Yes. Well. How’s Prin?”
“She’s–she’s took to her bed now, Morag. Doesn’t rise, these days. Can’t hardly manage to rise. She ain’t old, you know.”
“No. I know.”
The hulk in bed is barely discernible under the thick welter of blankets and eiderdown. Christie pulls away the sheet from the face. Prin’s skin is the colour of uncooked pastry, yellowish-white. Christie shouts, as though to penetrate the veil of the years which comes between Prin’s mind and now.
“Here’s Morag to see you, Prin.”
The eyes flutter open, and a smile, small and faint as the ghost of a child, crosses the puffy lips.
“Morag–Morag?”
“Leave me be, with her, for a bit, Christie, will you, then?”
“Sure, girl. Whatever you say.”
Morag sits down beside Prin’s bed. Prin smiles again, trustingly, like a young girl about to be married.
Morag becomes different, in this house. Older, older. With Brooke she feels young, too young sometimes, ignorant. Here she feels too old, too knowing. She should stay here and look after Prin, look after both of them. But cannot. Will not.
“Prin, I’m going to be married.”
The faraway eyes try desperately to focus on Morag’s face, to understand.
“Marry? Morag–little girl.”
A soft giggle from the mound, as though somewhere inside that skull there is the image of an unchanging little girl. Morag who will never grow up, never go away, never be different, always four or six years old.
No use. No use trying to explain. Morag reaches out and holds one of Prin’s swollen hands, the left one on which the wedding ring has long been overwhelmed and lost in the fat flesh.
Then an odd thing happens. What causes this swift and then swiftly vanishing streak of almost pure lucidity? Do the very very old have flashes of pure and painful sight, sweeping senility away for a second’s unbearable perception of everything, everything? Prin, the doctor says, is prematurely senile. Her voice, this instant, is as clear and sweet as it might have been when she was a young girl. But what she says is neither sweet nor, at first, clear.
“That Colin,” Prin says. “He never done that for my Christie. Saved him, like. Or maybe he done it. I dunno. He was a boy, just a boy, and that scared. Poor lamb. The poor lamb. He would cry, and Christie would hold him. Sh-sh. There, there. It’s all right now. He’s all right now, that Colin. Ain’t he?”
Then the shutters come down over the eyes again, and although Prin’s eyes remain open, they are seeing something Morag doesn’t see, the fields or faces from a long way back.
“Yes, he’s all right now, Prin.”
Colin Gunn. Christie’s tale of Gunner Gunn and the Great War. How Colin saved Christie, staved off his dying, that time away out there, on that corner of some foreign field that is forever nowhere. It hadn’t happened that way, then, or proba
bly not. It had happened the way Prin said. Christie holding Colin in his arms. Colin probably eighteen. Eighteen. Amid the shellfire and the barbwire and the mud, crying.
After a while, Morag goes back to the kitchen. On the table is a pot of tea and two cups. She recalls the half-bottle of whiskey.
“Here–I brought this for you, Christie.”
“Well, thanks a million, Morag. That was real kind.”
Kind. Half a bottle of whiskey. Not even a whole bottle. They sit and drink in silence. Then Christie, slowly, begins and she is terrified lest he launch into one of the old rants. He does not, however, do so.
“Married, eh? When will it be, then?”
“In about two weeks, Christie. It’s not a–I mean, it’s just going to be very quiet–no one there, really–”
She has all the subtlety of a two-ton truck. He’s not stupid.
“It’s okay,” Christie says, his voice suddenly cracking like fire. “I wouldn’t turn up, Morag. Never fear. I’d have to borrow a suit from Simon Pearl, eh? Think he’d lend it to me?”
“Oh Christie–I’m sorry. I never meant–”
“Sure you meant,” Christie says, pouring himself another huge slug of whiskey. “No need to fib to me, Morag. I have known you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Listen here, now, don’t worry. I can tell you plain, and without fear nor favour, and this is the Almighty God’s almighty truth, and I’d swear the same on a stack of Bibles and on the blood and bones of the whole clan of Logans from the time of Adam–look here, it’s a bloody good thing you’ve got away from this dump. So just shut your goddamn trap and thank your lucky stars.”
“Do you really think that, Christie?”
“I do,” Christie says, knocking back the whiskey. “And also I don’t. That’s the way it goes. It’ll all go along with you, too. That goes without saying.”
But it has been said. The way it goes–it’ll all go–that goes. Does Christie bring in these echoes knowingly, or does it happen naturally with him? She has never known.
“You mean–everything will go along with me?”
“No less than that, ever,” Christie says.
“It won’t, though,” Morag says, and hears the stubbornness in her own voice.
Christie laughs.
“Who says so, Morag?”
“I say so.”
In some ways she would welcome one of their old arguments. But it is better to change the subject.
“Christie–how do you manage here?”
“I’m still working, for Christ’s sake,” he growls.
“I know. I meant–with Prin, and all.”
“Oh–that. Eva comes in on Saturday and washes Prin and changes her bed and that. I can make do for the rest. Prin has to use the bedpan now. But hell’s bells and buckets of blood, girl, if I can still heave around them trash barrels, I can heave around my own woman when need be.”
Coals of fire on the head. He doesn’t mean it that way. Or does he? With Christie you never ever really know.
“Eva–Winkler?”
“The same.”
“Where–what’s she–”
“Married one of the McKendrick boys–he farms out by Freehold. The family was that put out, you would have bust a gut laughing.”
“You mean, his family?”
“Of course. You wouldn’t think old Gus Winkler would object, would you? He was glad to get rid of her.”
“Did Gus ever find out? I mean–”
“No,” Christie says, frowning. “It ain’t ever talked about here, neither.”
“You needn’t worry. I wouldn’t. Has she got a–is she–well, it’s only a year.”
“No kid yet,” Christie says, “nor won’t be.”
“Who told you?”
“Eva did. They’re going to adopt. She works her fool head off, that girl. Thinks she should be grateful to young McKendrick for marrying her. He knows, you see. She told him. She would. The Winklers was never well-known for their brains.”
“I see. Oh Christie–”
“Yeh, it’s a bugger all right. So you go, Morag, and don’t look back, you hear?”
Eva, coming into town on Saturdays, coming here and bathing Prin, hoisting that whalewoman, unwholewoman, unwholesome flesh, wholly alone inside her lost mind.
“I hear, Christie. I’m–I’m sorry.”
Christie’s eyes take on almost the same blue sharpness they once had.
“Don’t ever say that word again,” he says. “Not to me nor to anyone, for it’s a useless christly awful word.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Nobody can’t help nothing, Morag, so best shut up about it, eh?”
The next day she goes away again.
Brooke meets her at the bus depot.
“Was it all right, love?”
“Yes. But I missed you. I’ll never go away from you again, Brooke. Never. Not even for a day.”
They go to Brooke’s apartment, and this time she wants him more than ever, and there is no apprehension in her, only the simple need to be with him and to feel him inside herself. His entry into her is gentle and fierce, and they are close close close.
“Brooke–Brooke–”
“Yes. Yes. My love–”
And then no words no words at all, and after all there are no words, none.
She wants, then, to tell him, to praise him. To let him know. But there isn’t any need, because he knows. They lie very still and close together, still joined, not speaking. Both shaken by the mystery they have known.
Memorybank Movie: Leavetaking
Morag and Ella are skimming along the street on the way to Ella’s house, and it is real spring at last and the time of the singing birds has come. The sidewalks no longer flow with torrents of muddy water, the ex-snow. Small leaves are beginning to appear on the elms and maples, and the winter-anaemic grass shows signs of recuperating after all. The little stucco or frame houses look barer, greyer, without the whiteness of the snow on and around them. In a few yards, people are painting their front doors or porches.
“Hey, Ella, what means The voice of the turtle is heard through the land?”
“Well, you see, turtles have got this very soft croaking–well, more sort of creaking voices, heard only in spring. You have to listen very carefully. It helps to be a member of the Turtle Watchers’ Association.”
They are running running through the warm cool air, their laughter unabashedly loud, brash, brazen.
“Have you ever heard a turtle dove?” Ella enquires.
“Hell, no,” Morag says. “I didn’t know that turtles did dove.”
Suddenly Morag feels bereft, about to journey to a strange land, knowing no one there.
“Ella, I’ll sure miss you. I feel–well, you know–at home at your place. We’ll write–letters, I mean. We won’t ever lose touch, will we?”
“Of course not,” Ella says. “Of course not.”
Then they look at each other, frightened that this will not prove to be so, that friendship may not be weatherproof. Or frightened that neither of them can know what will happen, or how many years are ahead, or what manner of years they may turn out to be.
“It’s terribly good of your mother to have the reception, Ella.”
“Her pleasure. As you know.”
“Does she cry at weddings, your mother?”
“Like the Assiniboine in flood.”
“Do you think it’s kind of silly, for me to be married in white?”
“What’s so silly? A nice virgin like you, white you deserve.”
Laughter. Spring. Like kids. Running. Wisecracking. They are almost twenty, both of them. Will Morag be able to act like this, when she feels like it, after this day?
“Ella, I’m kind of scared.”
“Don’t be dumb. All right–change your mind, then.”
“No. I didn’t mean that.”
“It happens to everybody, so I’m told. Quit worrying. Brooke’s probably nervous too.�
�
“Brooke’s never nervous.”
Is he?
SIX
The air always cooled off at night here, with the breeze from the river, thank heavens. Morag turned on a small lamp on the sideboard and poured herself a careful scotch. Pure malt whiskey. Royalty cheque on small continuing sale of previous books received yesterday and this was the celebration. Or Thanksgiving libation, as the case might be. The case. Did anybody actually buy scotch by the case? Imagine sauntering into the liquor store and saying casually I’ll take a case of Glenfiddich.
Morag sat down in the big old armchair beside the kitchen window. The chair she had purchased in McConnell’s Landing for two bucks fifty, and Maudie Smith had cleverly and beautifully recovered it in grey felt embroidered with leaves and flowers in brash shades of pink and green. Damn Maudie for being able to turn her hand to anything. Or rather, bless her for being so generous with her time and her work.
On the scotch bottle was the motto of the Grant clan. Stand fast. Morag sighed. Didn’t any of them ever have mottoes such as, let’s say, Take It Easy or Rest Your Soul? Nope. Stiffen the spine. Prepare to suffer, but good. The Logan crest with the pierced heart, ye gods.
She wished all at once that she could talk to Christie. As he had now been dead for some seven years, that was not exactly possible. How great if one could believe in a re-encounter beyond this ridge of tears. When They Call the Roll Up Yonder, I’ll Be There. How Christie would laugh at that. Would there be a special corner of heaven, then, for scavengers and diviners? Which was Morag, if either, or were they the same thing?
But the need to talk remained. She had long ago given up feeling guilty about long-distance phone calls. She settled herself on the high stool beside the side-board, and dialled.
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