Then, with a burst of opening doors, the family had returned from the funeral. While they were taking off their coats, I slammed the Bible shut and sneaked it back into the bookcase without anyone’s having noticed.
Grandfather Connor walked over to me and placed his hands on my shoulders, and I could do nothing except endure his touch.
“Vanessa –” he said gruffly, and I had at the time no idea how much it cost him to speak at all, “she was an angel. You remember that.”
Then he went down to the basement by himself. No one attempted to follow him, or to ask him to come and join the rest of us. Even I, in the confusion of my lack of years, realised that this would have been an impossibility. He was, in some way, untouchable. Whatever his grief was, he did not want us to look at it and we did not want to look at it, either.
Uncle Terence went straight into the kitchen, brought out his pocket flask, and poured a hefty slug of whiskey for himself. He did the same for my mother and father and Aunt Edna.
“Oh Glory,” Aunt Edna said with a sigh, “do I ever need this. All the same, I feel we shouldn’t, right immediately afterwards. You know – considering how she always felt about it. Supposing Father comes up –”
“It’s about time you quit thinking that way, Edna,” Uncle Terence said.
Aunt Edna felt in her purse for a cigarette. Uncle Terence reached over and lit it for her. Her hands were unsteady.
“You’re telling me,” she said.
Uncle Terence gave me a quizzical and yet resigned look, and I knew then that my presence was placing a constraint upon them. When my father said he had to go back to the hospital, I used his departure to slip upstairs to my old post, the deserted stove-pipe hole. I could no longer eavesdrop with a clear conscience, but I justified it now by the fact that I had voluntarily removed myself from the kitchen, knowing they would not have told me to run along, not today.
“An angel,” Aunt Edna said bitterly. “Did you hear what he said to Vanessa? It’s a pity he never said as much to Mother once or twice, isn’t it?”
“She knew how much he thought of her,” my mother said.
“Did she?” Aunt Edna said. “I don’t believe she ever knew he cared about her at all. I don’t think I knew it myself, until I saw how her death hit him.”
“That’s an awful thing to say!” my mother cried. “Of course she knew, Edna.”
“How would she know,” Aunt Edna persisted, “if he never let on?”
“How do you know he didn’t?” my mother countered. “When they were by themselves.”
“I don’t know, of course,” Aunt Edna said. “But I have my damn shrewd suspicions.”
“Did you ever know, Beth,” Uncle Terence enquired, pouring himself another drink, “that she almost left him once? That was before you were born, Edna.”
“No,” my mother said incredulously. “Surely not.”
“Yeh. Aunt Mattie told me. Apparently Father carried on for a while with some girl in Winnipeg, and Mother found out about it. She never told him she’d considered leaving him. She only told God and Aunt Mattie. The three of them thrashed it out together, I suppose. Too bad she never told him. It would’ve been a relief to him, no doubt, to see she wasn’t all calm forgiveness.”
“How could he?” my mother said in a low voice. “Oh Terence. How could he have done that? To Mother, of all people.”
“You know something, Beth?” Uncle Terence said. “I think he honestly believed that about her being some kind of angel. She’d never have thought of herself like that, so I don’t suppose it ever would have occurred to her that he did. But I have a notion that he felt all along she was far and away too good for him. Can you feature going to bed with an angel, honey? It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“Terence, you’re drunk,” my mother said sharply. “As usual.”
“Maybe so,” he admitted. Then he burst out, “I only felt, Beth, that somebody might have said to Vanessa just now, Look, baby, she was terrific and we thought the world of her, but let’s not say angel, eh? All this angel business gets us into really deep water, you know that?”
“I don’t see how you can talk like that, Terence,” my mother said, trying not to cry. “Now all of a sudden everything was her fault. I just don’t see how you can.”
“I’m not saying it was her fault,” Uncle Terence said wearily. “That’s not what I meant. Give me credit for one or two brains, Beth. I’m only saying it might have been rough for him, as well, that’s all. How do any of us know what he’s had to carry on his shoulders? Another person’s virtues could be an awful weight to tote around. We all loved her. Whoever loved him? Who in hell could? Don’t you think he knew that? Maybe he even thought sometimes it was no more than was coming to him.”
“Oh –” my mother said bleakly. “That can’t be so. That would be – oh, Terence, do you really think he might have thought that way?”
“I don’t know any more than you do, Beth. I think he knew quite well that she had something he didn’t, but I’d be willing to bet he always imagined it must be righteousness. It wasn’t. It was – well, I guess it was tenderness, really. Unfair as you always are about him, Edna, I think you hit the nail on the head about one thing. I don’t believe Mother ever realised he might have wanted her tenderness. Why should she? He could never show any of his own. All he could ever come out with was anger. Well, everybody to his own shield in this family. I guess I carry mine in my hip pocket. I don’t know what yours is, Beth, but Edna’s is more like his than you might think.”
“Oh yeh?” Aunt Edna said, her voice suddenly rough. “What is it, then, if I may be so bold as to enquire?”
“Wisecracks, honey,” Uncle Terence replied, very gently. “Just wisecracks.”
They stopped talking, and all I could hear was my aunt’s uneven breathing, with no one saying a word. Then I could hear her blowing her nose.
“Mercy, I must look like the wreck of the Hesperus,” she said briskly. “I’ll bet I haven’t got a speck of powder left on. Never mind. I’ll repair the ravages later. What about putting the kettle on, Beth? Maybe I should go down and see if he’ll have a cup of tea now.”
“Yes,” my mother said. “That’s a good idea. You do that, Edna.”
I heard my aunt’s footsteps on the basement stairs as she went down into Grandfather Connor’s solitary place.
Many years later, when Manawaka was far away from me, in miles and in time, I saw one day in a museum the Bear Mask of the Haida Indians. It was a weird mask. The features were ugly and yet powerful. The mouth was turned down in an expression of sullen rage. The eyes were empty caverns, revealing nothing. Yet as I looked, they seemed to draw my own eyes towards them, until I imagined I could see somewhere within that darkness a look which I knew, a lurking bewilderment. I remembered then that in the days before it became a museum piece, the mask had concealed a man.
A BIRD IN THE HOUSE
The parade would be almost over by now, and I had not gone. My mother had said in a resigned voice, “All right, Vanessa, if that’s the way you feel,” making me suffer twice as many jabs of guilt as I would have done if she had lost her temper. She and Grandmother MacLeod had gone off, my mother pulling the low box-sleigh with Roddie all dolled up in his new red snowsuit, just the sort of little kid anyone would want people to see. I sat on the lowest branch of the birch tree in our yard, not minding the snowy wind, even welcoming its punishment. I went over my reasons for not going, trying to believe they were good and sufficient, but in my heart I felt I was betraying my father. This was the first time I had stayed away from the Remembrance Day parade. I wondered if he would notice that I was not there, standing on the sidewalk at the corner of River and Main while the parade passed, and then following to the Court House grounds where the service was held.
I could see the whole thing in my mind. It was the same every year. The Manawaka Civic Band always led the way. They had never been able to afford full uniforms, but they had peaked
navy-blue caps and sky-blue chest ribbons. They were joined on Remembrance Day by the Salvation Army band, whose uniforms seemed too ordinary for a parade, for they were the same ones the bandsmen wore every Saturday night when they played “Nearer My God to Thee” at the foot of River Street. The two bands never managed to practise quite enough together, so they did not keep in time too well. The Salvation Army band invariably played faster, and afterwards my father would say irritably, “They play those marches just like they do hymns, blast them, as though they wouldn’t get to heaven if they didn’t hustle up.” And my mother, who had great respect for the Salvation Army because of the good work they did, would respond chidingly, “Now, now, Ewen –” I vowed I would never say “Now, now” to my husband or children, not that I ever intended having the latter, for I had been put off by my brother Roderick, who was now two years old with wavy hair, and everyone said what a beautiful child. I was twelve, and no one in their right mind would have said what a beautiful child, for I was big-boned like my Grandfather Connor and had straight lanky black hair like a Blackfoot or Cree.
After the bands would come the veterans. Even thinking of them at this distance, in the white and withdrawn quiet of the birch tree, gave me a sense of painful embarrassment. I might not have minded so much if my father had not been among them. How could he go? How could he not see how they all looked? It must have been a long time since they were soldiers, for they had forgotten how to march in step. They were old – that was the thing. My father was bad enough, being almost forty, but he wasn’t a patch on Howard Tully from the drugstore, who was completely grey-haired and also fat, or Stewart MacMurchie, who was bald at the back of his head. They looked to me like imposters, plump or spindly caricatures of past warriors. I almost hated them for walking in that limping column down Main. At the Court House, everyone would sing Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget. Will Masterson would pick up his old Army bugle and blow the Last Post. Then it would be over and everyone could start gabbling once more and go home.
I jumped down from the birch bough and ran to the house, yelling, making as much noise as I could.
I’m a poor lonesome cowboy
An’ a long way from home –
I stepped inside the front hall and kicked off my snow boots. I slammed the door behind me, making the dark ruby and emerald glass shake in the small leaded panes. I slid purposely on the hall rug, causing it to bunch and crinkle on the slippery polished oak of the floor. I seized the newel post, round as a head, and spun myself to and fro on the bottom stair.
I ain’t got no father
To buy the clothes I wear,
I’m a poor lonesome –
At this moment my shoulders were firmly seized and shaken by a pair of hands, white and delicate and old, but strong as talons.
“Just what do you think you’re doing, young lady?” Grandmother MacLeod enquired, in a voice like frost on a windowpane, infinitely cold and clearly etched.
I went limp and in a moment she took her hands away. If you struggled, she would always hold on longer.
“Gee, I never knew you were home yet.”
“I would have thought that on a day like this you might have shown a little respect and consideration,” Grandmother MacLeod said, “even if you couldn’t make the effort to get cleaned up enough to go to the parade.”
I realised with surprise that she imagined this to be my reason for not going. I did not try to correct her impression. My real reason would have been even less acceptable.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly.
In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.
“This isn’t an easy day for any of us,” she said.
Her younger son, my Uncle Roderick, had been killed in the Great War. When my father marched, and when the hymn was sung, and when that unbearably lonely tune was sounded by the one bugle and everyone forced themselves to keep absolutely still, it would be that boy of whom she was thinking. I felt the enormity of my own offence.
“Grandmother – I’m sorry.”
“So you said.”
I could not tell her I had not really said it before at all. I went into the den and found my father there. He was sitting in the leather-cushioned armchair beside the fireplace. He was not doing anything, just sitting and smoking. I stood beside him, wanting to touch the light-brown hairs on his forearm, but thinking he might laugh at me or pull his arm away if I did.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
“What for, honey?”
“For not going.”
“Oh – that. What was the matter?”
I did not want him to know, and yet I had to tell him, make him see.
“They look silly,” I blurted. “Marching like that.”
For a minute I thought he was going to be angry. It would have been a relief to me if he had been. Instead, he drew his eyes away from mine and fixed them above the mantelpiece where the sword hung, the handsome and evil-looking crescent in its carved bronze sheath that some ancestor had once brought from the Northern Frontier of India.
“Is that the way it looks to you?” he said.
I felt in his voice some hurt, something that was my fault. I wanted to make everything all right between us, to convince him that I understood, even if I did not. I prayed that Grandmother MacLeod would stay put in her room, and that my mother would take a long time in the kitchen, giving Roddie his lunch. I wanted my father to myself, so I could prove to him that I cared more about him than any of the others did. I wanted to speak in some way that would be more poignant and comprehending than anything of which my mother could possibly be capable. But I did not know how.
“You were right there when Uncle Roderick got killed, weren’t you?” I began uncertainly.
“Yes.”
“How old was he, Dad?”
“Eighteen,” my father said.
Unexpectedly, that day came into intense being for me. He had had to watch his own brother die, not in the anti-septic calm of some hospital, but out in the open, the stretches of mud I had seen in his snapshots. He would not have known what to do. He would just have had to stand there and look at it, whatever that might mean. I looked at my father with a kind of horrified awe, and then I began to cry. I had forgotten about impressing him with my perception. Now I needed him to console me for this unwanted glimpse of the pain he had once known.
“Hey, cut it out, honey,” he said, embarrassed. “It was bad, but it wasn’t all as bad as that part. There were a few other things.”
“Like what?” I said, not believing him.
“Oh – I don’t know,” he replied evasively. “Most of us were pretty young, you know, I and the boys I joined up with. None of us had ever been away from Manawaka before. Those of us who came back mostly came back here, or else went no further away from town than Winnipeg. So when we were overseas – that was the only time most of us were ever a long way from home.”
“Did you want to be?” I asked, shocked.
“Oh well –” my father said uncomfortably. “It was kind of interesting to see a few other places for a change, that’s all.”
Grandmother MacLeod was standing in the doorway.
“Beth’s called you twice for lunch, Ewen. Are you deaf, you and Vanessa?”
“Sorry,” my father and I said simultaneously.
Then we went upstairs to wash our hands.
That winter my mother returned to her old job as nurse in my father’s medical practice. She was able to do this only because of Noreen.
“Grandmother MacLeod says we’re getting a maid,” I said to my father, accusingly, one morning. “We’re not, are we?”
“Believe you me, on what I’m going to be paying her,” my father growled, “she couldn’t be called anything as classy as a maid. Hired girl would be more like it.”
“Now, now, Ewen,” my mother put in, “it’s not as if we were cheating her or anything. You know
she wants to live in town, and I can certainly see why, stuck out there on the farm, and her father hardly ever letting her come in. What kind of life is that for a girl?”
“I don’t like the idea of your going back to work, Beth,” my father said. “I know you’re fine now, but you’re not exactly the robust type.”
“You can’t afford to hire a nurse any longer. It’s all very well to say the Depression won’t last forever – probably it won’t, but what else can we do for now?”
“I’m damned if I know,” my father admitted. “Beth –”
“Yes?”
They both seemed to have forgotten about me. It was at breakfast, which we always ate in the kitchen, and I sat rigidly on my chair, pretending to ignore and thus snub their withdrawal from me. I glared at the window, but it was so thickly plumed and scrolled with frost that I could not see out. I glanced back to my parents. My father had not replied, and my mother was looking at him in that anxious and half-frowning way she had recently developed.
“What is it, Ewen?” Her voice had the same nervous sharpness it bore sometimes when she would say to me, “For mercy’s sake, Vanessa, what is it now?” as though whatever was the matter, it was bound to be the last straw.
My father spun his sterling silver serviette ring, engraved with his initials, slowly around on the table.
“I never thought things would turn out like this, did you?”
“Please –” my mother said in a low strained voice, “please, Ewen, let’s not start all this again. I can’t take it.”
“All right,” my father said. “Only –”
“The MacLeods used to have money and now they don’t,” my mother cried. “Well, they’re not alone. Do you think all that matters to me, Ewen? What I can’t bear is to see you forever reproaching yourself. As if it were your fault.”
A Bird in the House Page 8