The Diviners

by Margaret Laurence

  “The same,” Julie says, grinning. “Hi, Morag. How you been? My God–when is it due?”

  “In the spring. End of May. For heaven’s sake, come on up.”

  Julie settles herself on the brass bed, taking off her spike-heeled pointed-toe shoes and tucking her feet underneath her. They look at one another carefully, amazed, glad, hesitant, each sizing up the marks the years have placed upon the other person and by implication upon themselves.

  “How on earth did you find me, Julie?”

  “God’s sake, Morag, I saw your articles in the paper, of course, and phoned and got your address. How you been, then? It’s been a long time.”

  “Ten years. I’m pretty okay, actually. I’m happy about the baby, but kind of anxious about how I’m going to look after it and make a living. My husband and I are being divorced. It was my fault. I left him.”

  “What d’you mean, your fault, you left him,” Julie snorts. “It’s a two-way street, kid. Don’t give me that malarkey. Anyhow, join the club. Buckle and me are getting unhitched, also.”

  “I didn’t even know you were married, although I always thought you’d marry young.”

  “Well, I didn’t marry all that young. But, yeh. Buckle Fennick, truck driver. Does the long hauls, Alaska Highway and that. He’s a great driver, matter of fact. I think I married him because he was such a snappy dancer. How dumb can you get?”

  “Got any kids?”

  “Yeh. One.” Julie looks away. “He’s a good kid, Steve. He’s two years old now, going on three. I don’t want him to grow up like his old man.”

  “You mean–a truck driver? No. You don’t mean that.”

  “No,” Julie says, “I don’t mean that. I mean, like, crazy. Loco. I grew up on the farm, as you know. You ever seen a loco horse? I guess not. We had one once, like that. A real loner, and crazy. Something in him made him want to knock down everything in sight. He was beautiful–a roan stallion. Great in every way except he was a killer. My dad shot him. I don’t mean Buckle’s a killer outright–he does it in other ways. Well, never mind all that now. You say you’re worried about how to support the kid–won’t your husband have to contribute?”

  “He hasn’t got any obligation. It’s not his child, Julie.”

  Julie looks startled, then laughs.

  “Well, you sure as hell don’t do things by halves, do you? You’ll manage, kid. I know you will. You were always smart, although you always tried not to let on. But I knew. Soon as I’m free, I’m marrying this nice guy who’s in the insurance business, and we’re going to Montreal. Dennis isn’t anybody’s idea of a glamour boy, but he is really kind and he cares about me and he’s good with Steve.”

  Julie, landing on her feet. Julie, who always had a string of boyfriends. And yet, the undertone of sadness. He’s kind. Not I love him so much I think I’d die without him. The first hopes shown up as illusions, yet parted with painfully.

  “You’re lucky,” Morag says, despite herself.

  Julie gives her a shrewd look.

  “I know I am,” she says in a low voice. Then, becoming brisk, an individual Manawaka Banner reporting, “You know Stacey Cameron’s married and living here?”

  “Really? My God, how many people from town must be here?”

  “Thousands, probably,” Julie says in her old slapdash way. “We all head west, kiddo. We think it’ll be heaven on earth–no forty below in winter, no blastfurnace in summer, and mountains to look at, not just grain elevators. So we troop out to the Coast, and every time we meet someone from back home we fall on their necks and weep. Stupid, eh?”

  Neither of them think it is stupid. You Can’t Go Home Again, said Thomas Wolfe. Morag wonders now if it may be the reverse which is true. You have to go home again, in some way or other. This concept cannot yet be looked at.

  They discuss people they’ve known, and whatever happened to them. Then Julie looks at Morag enquiringly.

  “You plan on staying in this dump, Morag?”

  “It hasn’t been so bad. But I can’t stay once the baby’s here. Can you see me dragging a carriage up these stairs? And can you see Maggie Tefler letting me leave it in the downstairs hall? No. I’ve been looking for a place, but so far no dice.”

  “I’m staying in the top floor of a friend’s house in North Van,” Julie says. “She’ll want to rent it when Stevie and I have gone. It all depends on the divorce, just when that’ll be. God, I wish it was all over. I hate all this. Buckle’s agreed to sue me –adultery. But he could change his mind at the drop of a handkerchief, and then I’d have to go for the cruelty charge. And I don’t want to, Morag. Sometimes I hate him, but I don’t want it all brought out in court. It’s not the beating-up kind of cruelty–he’s never blacked an eye for me, or like that. Better if he had. They could understand that. It’s what he says–that I’m out to get his power, things like that. He can’t make love any more–he never did, very much, but the last coupla years he couldn’t at all. He just jerked himself off in front of me and said these things. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. But how do I know what’s made him that way? I know some, but I’ll never understand it all. And even if I did understand, what could I do? And how much of it have I made worse? That bothers me.”

  “I know,” Morag says.

  Julie looks up.

  “Yeh,” she says. “I guess you do. Well, goddamn it, eh? But I am getting out, with my kid. Buckle can live or he can die. Sometimes I don’t even care which, anymore. But I’m not dying, not yet, not if I can help it. Well, let’s change the subject. I started out to say maybe you’d like my place, if you can hold out until my divorce comes through. Also, if you could get on with Fan–”

  “I could get on with the Dragon Lady at this point,” Morag says. “Anybody would be better than Maggie Tefler as a landlady.”

  “Yeh. Well. You haven’t met Fan. She’s–well, she’s fine, but she sort of takes getting used to. So we’ll see.”

  “Don’t worry,” Morag says. “If that doesn’t work out, something else will. I’m not begging.”

  They look at each other, and laugh.

  Memorybank Movie: Through Dooms of Love

  Morag is in the hospital. A different zone of human existence, acres of glass and chrome, miles of corridors in which the floor polish seems to have mated with antiseptic, a protected swathed world. Morag has never been in hospital before in her life, so finds it a weirdly isolating experience. At first the contractions are not so severe that she cannot observe what’s going on around her, not to her sight, anyway. Everything that is going on is inside herself.

  Someone, ghostwhite, formidable, pushes an apparatus into her hand–walkie-talkie? No.

  “Breathe in here, Mrs. Gunn, if the pain gets a little too much.”

  “I’m not Mrs.,” Morag says.

  “Well, I wouldn’t advertise the fact if I was you,” the nurse says coldly. “It’s nothing to be proud of. You’re just lucky they’re letting you have the baby here.”

  “Where do you think I should have it?” Morag says clearly, from somewhere outside her body. “In a ten-acre field?”

  Crazy. Crazy. The contractions are coming closer and more severely. Why argue with the nurse now? She needs that nurse.

  “I’m sorry,” Morag says abjectly, untruthfully. “Please–please don’t leave me.”

  “You’re perfectly all right,” the nurse says. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  In a minute, however, Morag has reached the second stage of labour and is trundled hastily into the delivery room.

  “Hold back,” the doctor’s ghostvoice commands from beyond the outer reaches of space. “Don’t bear down so hard. It’s coming too quickly.”

  You try holding back. You just try. I can’t. I can’t.

  The child rips its way into its life, tearing its mother’s flesh in its hurry, unwilling to wait.

  It is over. Relief. Morag, numbed, sleepy and yet totally alert, can feel no pain at all. The nurse plac
es the child on Morag’s now-gaunt belly. It is writhing a little, covered with streaks of blood and yellow slime. The cord is not yet cut. Morag cannot see the baby’s face. All she can see is its rounded backside. She has imagined her first question will be–what is it, boy or girl? Not so.

  “Is it all right?”

  “Certainly,” the doctor says in a talcum-powder voice. “She’s fine. We just want to get her breathing a bit more deeply, that’s all.”

  She.

  The cord is cut, and the placenta comes away without Morag’s being aware of it. All she can think of is whether the child is breathing properly or not. Then the girlchild opens her mouth and yells, an amazingly loud sound from so minuscule a creature. The doctor is holding the child, and Morag has still not seen her daughter’s face. What if they get her mixed up with all the hundreds of other kids in this baby emporium?

  “Let me see her.”

  “We’ll clean her up, and then nurse will bring her to you,” the doctor says.

  Morag props herself up on an elbow, somewhat hampered by the fact that she is still confined by legstraps.

  “Like hell,” she says fiercely. “I want to see her right now.”

  “These conscious births,” the doctor sighs, sounding tired.

  Morag holds the child, still slippery, very warm. The slightly slanted eyes are tightly closed, and the miniature fists are clenched. The baby’s hair, damp, is sparse and straight and black. Her skin is pinkish tan.

  “She’s–she’s great, eh?”

  Piquette Tonnerre Gunn has entered her own and unknown life.

  Morag is back at Bleak House within a week. Julie comes over to help, and seeing the baby for the first time says My gosh. Morag bristles.

  “It’s okay,” Julie says quickly. “I was only a little surprised, is all.”

  “You remember Skinner Tonnerre, Julie?”

  “Sure. Well, my goodness. Small world.”

  They do not discuss it again.

  Morag finds she cannot actually call the child by the name of Piquette. She calls her, instead, Pique. When the baby is two months old, Julie takes a whole roll of colour film. Morag sends one to Jules, a picture of the baby alone. She writes a brief letter, and sends it to the place where he was living in Toronto, wondering if he will receive it or if he will have moved by now. She no longer trusts Mrs. Tefler for her own mail, so puts her return address as Fan Brady’s house, where Julie lives. After another month she gets a reply.

  Dear Morag–

  You sure are a crazy woman, but it is up to you, and the baby looks fine. I’m glad you called her what you did. I hope I’ll see her one of these days. I moved, awhile back. Still in the same game. Not much news here. Say hello to the kid for me. Good luck.

  Jules

  The letter is postmarked Trois-Rivières. There is no address.

  Morag has to write longhand now, at nights, so as not to waken the child. She can only type when Pique is awake. The room grows smaller every day.

  Milward Crispin writes to say that he’s sold another two of her stories, but the Piper stories appear to have no appeal to editors, and it could be that editors these days have no damn brains or it could be the stories need reworking, possibly both. The American reviews of Spear are pretty good. The English reviews are politely indifferent, some of them damning with faint praise. “A pleasant enough novel from the Canadian backwoods, which attempts with limited success to inject a little sophistication in the form of bizarre if somewhat unlikely shenanigans.” Morag, enraged, rips this review into pieces. Then, feeling it unworthy of her to keep only the good reviews, she Scotch tapes it together again.

  At nights she communicates glumly with her cheque-book, in the vain but persistent hope that she has miscalculated the total and may in fact have more money in the bank than she thought.

  Pique is good-tempered and easy throughout the days, but wakens regularly at two A.M., apparently in the last and vocal throes of angry starvation. Morag weeps with chagrin and tiredness.

  Maggie Tefler passes remarks of an unflattering nature about Pique’s ancestry.

  “Did you get yourself mixed up with a Chinee or a Jap, dear? No? Well, I wasn’t going to say halfbreed–I didn’t think it possible. What’s that? Maytee? I never heard that word. They’re all halfbreeds to me, and I could tell you a thing or two, you betcha.”

  Morag writes to Christie about the child. He replies that he would like to see her, and he hopes she looks a lot like Morag.

  After innumerable letters exchanged with members of the legal profession, Morag’s divorce comes through in what her lawyer assures her is record time. She is spared the ignominy of having to appear in court, which is just as well, as she could not afford to go to Toronto. She is now no longer Mrs. Brooke Skelton. She looks at the paper with its unfamiliar terminology. At this moment, she can remember only the good things that happened between herself and Brooke. Appalled, she wonders what has taken place and why she finds herself here, in circumstances which at this moment seem unreal. She half expects to waken and find herself back with Brooke, ten years ago.

  Then Pique lifts her voice, and Morag goes to her.

  Julie phones to say her own divorce has come through, and she and Dennis are being married and leaving for Montreal.

  Memorybank Movie: Begonia Road

  “I would have thought,” Maggie Tefler says, wounded, “that you would of had the decency to give me a month’s notice.”

  “I pay you by the week,” Morag says, “and I’m giving you a week’s rent in lieu of notice. That’s perfectly fair.”

  “That it is not,” Maggie moans sullenly. “That it is not. You owe me a month’s rent if yer just gonna take off like that.”

  “A month’s rent? You’re out of your mind.”

  “That is the thanks a person gets,” Maggie complains to heaven, “for taking in a girl who’s in trouble and letting her stay even though it turns out she’s got herself mixed up with the Lord only knows who. That is all the thanks a person gets. She spits on you. I should of known better. But that’s me. I feel sorry for people.”

  “Please, Mrs. Tefler, can’t we just stop this?”

  “You,” Maggie says, “are nothing but a slut, and the sooner you are outa here, the better.”

  And so, as the sun sinks slowly into the saltchuck, we bid farewell to Maggie Tefler, friend of fallen womanhood.

  Fan Brady’s house in North Vancouver is at the top of a steeply sloped street, Begonia Road. Looking out the front window of Morag’s apartment, you can see the harbour, and beyond that, the tall city, looking cleaner and more stately from this distance than it really is. Looking out from the back balcony, you can see the pine and tamarack marching up the mountainsides. The entire top floor of the two-storey house belongs to Morag. She sleeps in the livingroom where the couch makes up into a bed, and gives the bedroom to Pique. At first, Morag is nervous thinking of the child alone in there–what if the cot blankets slip and she smothers? This is, of course, ridiculous. Pique at four months is active and strong as an eel, a born little scrapper. There is no way that kid would ever lie there passively and let some feeble blanket suffocate her. Her voice, also, has if anything grown in power. Hence another anxiety. Pique may not smother, but will she yell and disturb Fan, who will then order Morag out? Fan, however, works nights, sleeps days and is only in evidence in the late afternoon. Pique, luckily, does most of her lung exercise in the evenings.

  Fan Brady does, as Julie said, take some getting used to. It is impossible to tell her age, but she is probably close to thirty. She is tiny, bird-boned, but well-endowed withal, and she cares tenderly for her body, constantly smearing perfumed and pastel-tinted creams and ointments on various parts of herself, whoever happens to be present. False modesty is one thing Fan hasn’t got. She wears her flaming auburn hair in an odd assortment of ringlets, frizz and spitcurls like a calendar girl from the Mary Pickford era, and yet on Fan this coiffure doesn’t look old-fashioned. Her
face isn’t beautiful–it isn’t even pretty. In fact, facially, she rather resembles a monkey. She is well aware of this, and doesn’t give a damn. When she has applied her false eyelashes, green eyeshadow, orange lipstick, and multitudinous other bits of makeup, she looks weird. But from a distance, possibly, and under coloured lights, there would be a certain circus sequinned splendour about her.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” she says, that first day. “You get settled in okay? Want a beer?”

  “Thanks.”

  Fan twirls across to the fridge, her apricot nylon housecoat frothing around her. She is devoid of makeup at the moment, and her face is drawn tight and hollowed by whatever it is she has lived through, but she moves with speed and lightness.

  “Now, let’s get this straight, sweetheart,” she says. “I don’t give a fuck what you do here, just so long as you don’t do too much tramping around when I’m asleep. I gotta get my sleep or I’m dead. Not that I’m that easily wakened, once I get to sleep, the amount of Seconal I take. I wish I could sleep without them, but I can’t. You’d think in all this time I’d of gotten used to sleeping days, but no.”

  Fan Brady is, in her own terminology, a danseuse, and she works at a nightclub called, with more publicity than accuracy, The Figleaf.

  “Don’t get me wrong, sweetheart. I am not yer common-or-garden stripper. Not by a long shot. I am a dansoose. How about that, eh? Makes it sound good. The Figleaf is just another clipjoint, actually, but in a slightly classy way, legal and not too crude. Spicy but genteel, is the management’s slogan, ha ha. Well, never mind, I can laugh, but I tell you, sweetheart, my work is an Art. It is definitely an Art. I am a pro, I will tell you that. Not like some of these kids, all bump and grind–they think if you’ve got a decent pair of tits, you don’t need to learn nothing. I am definitely not like that. I work at it. I exercise daily. I practise. I go on the Swedish milk diet coupla days each month–can’t afford a spare tire around my belly. It’s my work and I take it serious. Not that all them slobby salesmen appreciate it. I don’t do it for them, the cheap bastards. It’s my pride. That’s what it is.”