by Rule, Jane;
“Yep,” Tom said, “a contribution from Stew.”
“Is he coming?”
“No,” Mavis said, “but we had dinner with him last night.”
“Has he ever changed his image!” Gladys said as she put a large bowl of salad on the table.
“And I like it,” Mavis said.
“Who liked it was Joanie. I’ve never seen her turn on like that before,” Gladys said. “I began to have pangs for poor old blue convertible.”
“Don’t start that until after dinner, Tom,” Mavis said as he began to open the boxes he’d brought from the hall. “Let’s make one mess at a time, or Ruth will veto the whole project.”
“I’m going to veto it anyway,” Ruth said amiably. “Tonight’s fine. Tonight’s a party, but I’ve been running this house too long, and I’m just not the cooperative sort.”
“How do you know until you try?” Gladys protested.
Willard came in at that moment and raised his head in unaccustomed nervousness like an animal picking up a strange scent.
“It’s all right, Willard,” Gladys said, laughing. “It’s only that I’m cooking dinner tonight.”
“Are you sick?” Willard asked Ruth, a fear in his face Ruth had never seen before.
“No, of course I’m not sick. I’m never sick. You know that. It’s a party, that’s all.”
“A party,” Willard repeated thoughtfully.
“A Christmas party while we’re all still here,” Tom explained. “Joanie’s going home tomorrow, and you’re going to Kamloops, aren’t you?”
“We aren’t all still here now,” Willard said, climbing over the boxes of ornaments to reach his chair.
Was it Clara he missed? Ruth couldn’t be sure. For her the room was crowded with ghosts, not before her mingling with the present company, no, she didn’t allow that, but at her back, the refused memories who lived on only in her dreams.
Joanie either didn’t feel she had time to change into curlers or hadn’t got the message that Hal had really gone, for she joined them the moment she got in and was some real last-minute help in the kitchen, remembering the coffee which Gladys had forgotten.
It had been so long since Clara had joined them for dinner that she did not seem as absent as she had during the day. She was only in another room, listening not for words but for the message of mood at the table which tonight was resolutely cheerful. The presence that had not quite left them was Hal. Gladys used not one four-letter word the meal long, and Joanie played with her hair like a girl on a date. Willard sniffed his wine several times before he decided to drink it, but then it went down in gulps like a glass of cold beer.
“Do you like it?” Ruth asked.
“It goes down,” he admitted.
“You’re not going to go out tonight, are you, Willard?” Gladys asked. “Why don’t you stay and decorate the tree with us?”
He shook his head. The laundry had to be done. Since he had to deal with a four-day holiday and a long bus trip, he had to guard his routine the more carefully while he had it.
Ruth was not allowed to take part in the cleaning up.
“You’re just too organized. You make everyone but Tom nervous,” Gladys explained.
Ruth was abandoned in the living room with nothing but a last cup of coffee to keep her company. It was the time of night she might go in to read to Clara. Would she be listening to her radio instead? Or, left in peace, perhaps she would learn to sleep.
In the kitchen, Joanie began a carol, her voice high, the words uncertain high-school Latin. Gladys joined in resolutely in English. Mavis picked up the harmony, and Tom hummed an octave underneath.
“The only thing I ever learned in Latin was ‘Jingle Bells,’ a class project to irritate the Latin teacher,” Gladys admitted and began, “Tineat, tineat …”
“Oh, come on,” Mavis moaned.
“All right, I’ll stop if everyone promises not to sing ‘White Christmas.’”
“I like ‘White Christmas,’” Joanie protested.
Tom began a bad imitation of Bing Crosby which came to an end with a grunt, undoubtedly caused by Gladys’ authoritative fist. Mavis started a carol the others didn’t know, her voice sure enough to carry it by herself. When she had finished, they sang together again, this time with unself-conscious pleasure, of peace, of joy, of salvation over the clatter of pots and pans, and they went on singing once they had come back into the living room until the decorating of the tree began, offering opportunities for argument.
“Why is it that men always assume they have to put up the lights?” Gladys demanded.
“Be my guest,” Tom said, offering her the string he had been testing and was about to begin winding through the branches.
“It’s not that I really want to do it,” Gladys admitted. “But at home, Dad always put up lights, and then he didn’t do one other thing. My sisters and I always did the rest, while he sat around drinking beer.”
“Speaking of that,” Mavis said, “I’ve got a bottle of brandy.”
“My dad didn’t even do that,” Joanie said. “He thought Christmas was a pile of crap, but then he thought we were all a pile of crap too. He finally took off. That’s why I have to go home. Mum’s alone now. Neither of my brothers want to be bothered.”
Tom didn’t say anything. He had gone back to putting up the lights, whistling softly through his teeth. He was so resolute about Christmas because, among them, he was the only one who could not choose to go home.
“I’d go home if I could afford it,” Gladys said. “I’ve got seven nieces and nephews, but Toronto’s just out of the question.”
Mavis came in with the brandy.
“Where’s your family, Mavis?” Joanie asked.
“In Vancouver.”
“And you’re not going home?”
“I don’t go home,” Mavis said.
“This is home,” Tom said, stepping back from his work to admire it, putting a hand on Mavis’ shoulder. “Now, give me my brandy so that I can sit around and watch the rest of you work.”
“Not fucking likely!” Gladys shouted, snatching at the glass Tom was reaching for. “Not until you’ve earned it.”
Hal’s ghost bellowed as loudly but only in Ruth’s hearing. She saluted him privately and took a sip of her brandy, which helped unclench the grief in her throat. The bright globes began to go up on the tree, turning slowly, giving off miniature reflections of the room.
“Where did this pretty glass angel come from?” Joanie asked. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
“I don’t remember,” Ruth said.
“Put it high up, Tom,” Joanie said, handing the ornament to him, “in the light.”
“Angels we have heard on high …” Mavis began, and the others joined in, except for Ruth, whose voice could no longer lift to any line of melody.
There was no more way to stop the invention of angels than there was to stop the building of high rises or trips to the moon. Creatures floundered out of one element into another, always trying to leave behind the mortal climate of their birth.
“I can’t understand wanting life ever after,” Ruth said, nearly to herself, “except perhaps for other people.”
“People don’t like dying,” Mavis said, “particularly for nothing.”
“Oh, don’t be morbid,” Joanie protested. “Look at this pretty fish. I’ve never seen a Christmas fish before.”
“Must be a lungfish,” Mavis observed.
“My father always hung silver dollars on the tree,” Tom said.
“How American!”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Well, we had chocolate money,” Joanie said. “I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think different customs are interesting.”
Mavis poured another round of brandy. Willard came in with his clean laundry and refused to join them for a drink. Joanie went off to pack for her departure in the morning. Tom went out into the kitchen and came back with the cart loaded with breakfa
st dishes.
“Tom!” Ruth called sharply, beginning to get up from her chair.
“The thing is,” Gladys said quickly, “we thought we might find a place together, Tom and Mavis and I, maybe Joanie, too, but we need some practice at it if we’re going to do it, to see beforehand if we could.”
“You’ve got all the work of packing this place up,” Mavis added, “and you’ll want to spend some time with Clara; so it could be a help to you, too, don’t you think?”
“It’s a conspiracy,” Ruth muttered.
“A peaceful revolution,” Gladys said.
“A family solution to a family problem,” Tom said, “and there haven’t been enough of those around here. You’ve been carrying everybody and everything on your back, Ruth.”
“You can tell us exactly what to do if you will,” Gladys said.
I think I’ve had as many burdens taken from me as I can bear, she wanted to cry at them, watching her with such hopeful love, but she couldn’t. They were right. She would need help because it was now time. Without Clara there was no point in waiting until the end, and these young needed to be set free.
“All right,” Ruth said.
There by the lights of the Christmas tree, they laid out the plans they had already made, surprising Ruth with their knowledge of the work she did.
“It would be more practical for you to go on doing the ordering,” Mavis said, “but we wish you’d teach us. Tom’s used to restaurant quantities, and Gladdy’d get us into co-op buying of crates of wormy apples, and I’ve managed for twenty-four years never to set foot in a kitchen, except to get ice for a drink.”
When the chores that usually occupied Ruth’s restless night had been done, Tom and Gladys drifted off to bed. They had been so much together for the last week, Ruth was surprised that she had not realized until this afternoon that they had become lovers.
“Shall we have a nightcap?” Mavis asked.
“Why not? It might even put me to sleep.”
“We’re awfully sorry about Clara, Ruth,” Mavis said quietly, as she handed Ruth her glass and sat down unaccustomedly near Ruth on the floor, a gesture far more like Gladys, for whom physical affection was natural. “We thought if we’d put our minds to helping once Arthur left, she might not have wanted … needed to go.”
“You’ve always helped,” Ruth said, “particularly with Clara.”
“We could have done a lot more.”
“It was time. I should have known it and done something about it myself.”
“You couldn’t have very well, could you?”
“It was probably better for Hal to do it.”
Ruth was glad to be sitting with Mavis instead of Tom or Gladys, both of whom at this late hour, after the strains and bewilderments of the last few days, might need to ask questions. Even if Mavis needed to, she wouldn’t.
“I think the three of us could live together, but I’m not so sure about Joanie,” Mavis said. “I haven’t got Gladdy’s movement faith that we’re all sisters, and I’m not so sure about sisters anyway.”
“I’ve sometimes thought it was hard for you to live in the same house with Tom and Gladdy.”
Mavis smiled. “It has been, and it probably would go on being. I’ve been applying for teaching jobs all over the country; so I might not be around all that long anyway. I guess I don’t much like the idea of moving into a room somewhere; it’s too easy for me. Now that they’ve finally … got it together, it won’t be as hard.”
Mavis was not self-sufficient so much as self-protective. If Gladys had been sitting there, Ruth would easily have put out her hand, touched the young head, but Mavis was just out of natural reach. She would be more comfortable with options closed, and for Tom they probably would be, but for Gladys? Gladys could be genuinely grief-stricken over a mistake like Stew and Arthur; she might even learn to be more careful, but wherever Gladys was, no option could be entirely closed.
“I guess nearly anything works for a while,” Mavis said, “if people want it to.”
“If it isn’t important,” Ruth said, “and nothing should be very important.”
“You could be cynical, Ruth.”
“I’ve never had that kind of hope.”
“Will Clara see any of us?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see.”
Was Mavis wondering as well whose hands were canny or gentle enough to settle Clara for the night, to get her up in the morning?
“I guess you must be tired,” Mavis said, quickly looking at Ruth. “I’ll get the lights and do the glasses. You go on to bed.”
With the faint odor of Hal in her bed, a comfort she could not even explain to herself, Ruth did drift into sleep, and, though the glass angel hovered precariously, it did not fall. Then Tom was floating around the room on the strings of a puppet, and Gladys held up her arms to him, or perhaps it was Stew up there, or Arthur, and Ruth was reaching her own arms up, the face above her her husband’s, descending on her, and he was heavy and naked again, held in her arms, as often restored to her in dreams as her children, all her children, were taken away. She was afraid. She had to warn him, “Hal, if you don’t finally get out of the way of progress, it’s going to fall on your head.” And above them the tree began to fall, but very slowly, as if it might take days or weeks to reach them; yet Ruth knew, however long it took, there was nothing she could do, for it had all really happened years ago. Her father was singing, “Happy birthday to you,” the song he always sang to her first thing on Christmas morning. She had sometimes thought it was her birthday with all those presents. She wanted to wake Hal up. She wanted to tell him it was Christmas. She wanted to wake their child, singing. “We mustn’t forget,” she was pleading with him. “We mustn’t forget her.”
The room when she woke might have been a hospital room, so white and bright it was with snow.
CHAPTER SIX
Ruth sat in the chair she and Hal had insisted on moving into Clara’s new room, brutally bright on this shining winter day.
“It’s hard to praise glaring beauty,” Clara said.
“Shall I draw the blinds?”
Clara smiled, as if such a subversive act might restore them to familiar conspiracy, but she did not give assent. Ruth didn’t know whether it was perverse courage or immobilizing fear that kept her from doing what she herself had suggested. Clara lay exposed in a frozen flash of light, and Ruth did not want to see how mortally frail she was, death as close as a change of expression on her face. Oh, Ruth had seen it before, not only in the old but in the mirror and in the faces of children. Familiarity did not lessen shock.
“Gladdy’s taken to Tom’s bed now,” Ruth said, her liveliest offering.
“Poor Mavis.”
“They’re thinking of finding a place to share, the three of them, perhaps even Joanie.”
Clara had nothing to say to that. It would probably be too much of an effort for her to go on imagining into the lives of all these young now that they no longer populated her days. Ruth should learn to let them go as well, but she hadn’t the painful weariness to make it easy.
“I wonder what the world will be like without accidents … mistakes like Hal,” Clara said suddenly.
Without accidental birth, there would still be accidental death, children growing up without fathers, parents bereaved in middle age. But Clara was not really interested in generalities. She was speaking out of specific guilt, one that Gladys and Joanie would not have to experience, given the pill and easy abortion.
“He’s not a bad man, Clara.”
“No,” she agreed, “not for someone who has no business here.”
Do any of us really have, Clara? Could you tell me what my business is or ever has been? At least Hal thinks he knows, however rigid and silly it is, this being a man. The pity for him is only how little we let him get on with it I sometimes think I was born an obstruction and not a very successful one at that. My mother married again. Hal went his own bullying way. The child died. And
now you’ve left me, too. It’s not much of a business, a lifetime of trying to keep things from happening when they happen anyway.
“I don’t even remember him,” Clara mused. “And there shouldn’t have been any reason to. Will Gladys remember Arthur? Or Stew? Or Tom, for that matter?”
I’ve tried to forget, and so I dream orgies of the forgotten. I can remember if I have to. Am I to sit here now in this terrible light, wide awake, and let everything happen again before my open eyes? Everything that is lost to me still there? Why should I? Why should you? Nothing between glare and dark then, nothing.
“It can make such a difference,” her father was saying, pleased with their own newly acquired electricity, about to teach his child one of a thousand lessons in generosity. “Won’t cost us more than a few cents a day just to take this wire down to the Weedmans, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Is it legal?” Ruth’s mother asked.
“Never heard of a law against neighborliness,” he said.
“They might get one of those electric heaters,” she protested.
“Might get them one myself. Be easier on me than worrying about her firewood all the time now that he’s no help to her.”
Ruth was allowed to help her father, and stringing the wire along the posts he’d set was more exciting than mending a fence or building a new one because it carried that mystery of energy which not only turned on new lights in their house but made the inside of the new icebox cold as winter and turned the water in the little trays into ice. Her father had bought her a pair of electric scissors, and, though (as her mother pointed out) they didn’t really cut as well as her old ordinary ones, they were still amazing, vibrating in her hand like something alive.
“This is going to be a big surprise to old Weedman. I bet he never thought he’d live to see the day …” her father was telling her, the delight in his scheme a deep pleasure in his voice.
Only when they got to the Weedmans’ shack, built too close to the river, flooded out twice even in Ruth’s short memory, did Ruth feel any of her mother’s apprehension about the project. Ruth was afraid of old Mr. Weedman, maybe not so much now that he lay in bed, one side paralyzed by a stroke, unable to talk. He didn’t seem to her crazier now than he had just weeks ago when he was a strong, upright man because he didn’t talk even when he could, and now he was helpless. He hadn’t ever been mean to her really. In fact, when she tried to think about it, she worried that she might have been mean to him. Old Weedman often helped her mother when her father was away. Last spring he had even put in their garden, but, when she tried to help as she always did with her father, he behaved as if she were a nuisance instead, something to be watched and shooed away like a chicken from new seed. Or if her mother sent her down there to the shack with a gratitude, a pie or a half worn-out sweater of her father’s, Mr. Weedman glared at it and at her as if she might have been the person who put that knife scar right across his nose and cheek, but the worst time was this fall when she had been impatient for the water melons to ripen. If her father had been home, he would have walked along the row with her, thumping the biggest ones, now and then making a small plug with his knife, until he’d found one for her. Old Weedman just shook his head to mean, no, they weren’t ready, and turned his back on her. Though she was frightened of him, she felt he was denying not just her but her father. She thumped a melon or two loudly, hoping to confirm the deep, hollow tone of ripeness for herself, but she wasn’t sure.