The Ladies' Lending Library

by Janice Kulyk Keefer

  “I have no acting technique,” she has insisted. “The only thing I know how to do is be.” Unfortunately, talent and schooling alone don’t guarantee a fine actress. Miss Taylor learned acting through acting, and was lucky enough, also, to be born with inherent talent.

  For once, Laura isn’t angry or upset at having her thunder stolen from her. She makes no move to grab the Souvenir Booklet back from Nastia, but merely hugs her knees, repeating, “The only thing I know how to do is be,” her eyes gazing out at where the lake would be, if you could see through the screen of poplar trees.

  “What do you think she means when she says that?”

  Occasionally, Nastia surprises her with a question that triggers the deepest pleasure Laura has yet experienced: that of thinking something through for yourself, thinking past what you’ve been told or taken for the truth.

  “Well, she has servants, of course—to do her laundry, and look after her children, and cook the meals.”

  “Like Mrs. Senchenko,” Nastia suggests shyly, and Laura doesn’t dismiss the comparison. Of all the grown women she knows, Nadia Senchenko is the only one you could speak of in the same breath as Elizabeth Taylor. They both have a regal, distant quality, and nothing they do, no amount of mixing with ordinary people, could ever tarnish them.

  “I suppose it means,” Laura continues, “that she doesn’t ever need to think, that everything falls into place for her.”

  “That everything makes sense,” Nastia adds, “and nothing happens that isn’t supposed to. Or else that you can’t help being the way you are—it’s nobody’s fault what you look like, or who your father is, or why you can never do what you’re told.”

  Mrs. Shkurka is snoring—a fact to which Laura makes no allusion whatsoever, knowing that Nastia would be deeply ashamed, and that as long as neither of them says a word about it, they can pretend the short, snuffling breaths, the almost animal sound, isn’t coming from Nastia’s mother’s mouth. Instead, they listen to the sound of the waves, Laura dreamily, remembering Cleopatra’s barge and the oarsmen beating time to a great bronze drum; Nastia shivering.

  “I hate the sound of the lake,” she confides. “I hate hearing the waves pounding and pounding at the sand.”

  They sit for a long while in silence together, until Nastia gestures for Laura to follow her to the bathroom. By now Laura is bored, and hungry: she feels like going to Venus Variety for a Freezie, or having a swim and then baking in the sand, none of which Nastia would ever be allowed to do. So there’s a frown on her face as she follows Nastia to the room where hangs the cottage’s only mirror, a large rectangle of silvered glass screwed into the wall: a pond for the fish on the wallpaper to swim round or towards, but never inside. The girls are out of earshot of Nettie but still Nastia doesn’t speak. Nor does she stare at her perfect, poreless skin in the mirror, or point out the flaws in Laura’s own.

  What the mirror shows is how the frown on Laura’s face turns from resentment into astonishment and then to something almost like envy, as Nastia takes a nail file from a drawer and holds its point against the wallpaper beside the mirror, a place where tropical fish hide behind long, wavy reeds. With great neatness and control, she incises four words: I hate Nettie S. And then she puts her finger to her lips, miming the word secret and smiling, as Laura nods once, twice, three times, the way you do when you’re swearing a sacred oath.

  The game, whatever it is—hide and go seek, fox and geese—is getting out of hand, Sonia decides. She leaves the picture window, from which she’s been watching her brother and his sons running helter-skelter over the grass, with Katia, Bonnie, Tania racing just as wildly after them. By the time she gets to the flagpole, where they’ve ended up, Yuri and Katia are sitting on Peter’s chest, Tania and Andriy have imprisoned his arms, and Bonnie is tickling her uncle’s nose with a long blade of grass. Sonia sits down on her haunches, looking at her brother’s face while he blows at the grass blade Bonnie’s waving. He’s still so handsome, she thinks. Having grown up with Peter, she’s always taken his good looks for granted, or registered them through the scrim of her mother’s warnings: how he was trading on his face instead of his brains; how he’d fall on that handsome face of his one day, and then where would he be?

  “That’s enough, now,” she tells the children. “Leave him be—come on, up you get! There’s lemonade and cookies on the kitchen table.”

  Peter makes a show of wiping his brow, and bowing down to her for having rescued him “from a fate far worse than lemonade.” Does Sonia have a bottle of beer anywhere in the house? Cold beer, warm beer?

  She shakes her head. “Max will be getting some this weekend. If you don’t want lemonade, I can make you some tea, or iced coffee.”

  “Ah, Sonia, the answer to a brother’s prayers!”

  Peter sighs, standing up, brushing himself off, combing his hair with his fingers, hair blacker than a raven’s wing, she’d heard it described—by whom? Probably Sasha, with her literary bent. Black hair and brows and eyes; the kind of dark skin that laps up the sun and never burns. Just like a gypsy, their mother had always said—a gypsy’s child. He’d been treated so harshly, poor Petro. Boys have to be tough, their mother had said again and again. It does them no good to be fussed over. And when they’d come to Canada, their father had been just as severe in his own way, lecturing his son on the need to be serious, to have dignity, to pay attention to things that matter, things that won’t always go his way.

  Peter helps her up; he offers her his arm as if they were strolling on some boulevard in their Sunday best, though she’s in shorts and a halter top, and his shirt is covered with grass stains. “Zirka won’t be happy—” Sonia begins, fingering a long green smear down Peter’s back.

  “No, if there’s one thing Zirka’s bound not to be, it’s happy,” Peter agrees. But he throws the ball right back to his sister. “No more than you, Sestrychko.”

  “Never mind me,” Sonia says, trying to find some way to turn the conversation in the direction Sasha has requested. She hasn’t got her brother’s gift with words—what their mother had reproved as “Tom flowery.” What if Sasha’s right, what if Peter is on some wild-goose chase to do with Nadia Senchenko, laying himself wide open to being talked about, shown up as an aging fool, no longer a lovably young one? What if she were to ask him point-blank what he’s up to? As always, Peter disarms her, stopping to pick a stem of devil’s paintbrush, with which he traces two circles on her cheeks, and the curve of a smile over her mouth.

  “That’s better,” he says. “Now, my dear, you look like a woman on holiday, enjoying a run of splendid weather at the beach.” He even looks like Cary Grant as he speaks the words, in a voice so like Cary Grant’s that if Sonia had been blindfolded, she could have believed herself to be arm in arm with the movie star.

  “Please, Peter,” she says, pulling away, looking him straight in the eyes. He’s her own brother, she grew up with him, crossed an ocean with him, learned a new language, a new way of understanding the world, in his company, and yet she knows nothing about him now: what he wants, what he needs, what he’s up to, if he’s up to anything at all.

  “Yes, oh lovely one, Pearl of the Carpathians, Flower of the Sea of Azov, Goddess Incarnate of Kalyna Beach. Your wish is my command, although if you did have that bottle of beer, or better still, a shot of Max’s single malt, wherever he keeps it stashed away, I would kiss your little snow-white feet.”

  Sonia sighs. She walks over to the washing line, where a few beach towels wait to be unpinned. Would he ever grow up? But then, why bother? Nothing he did could ever be good enough, he’d learned this lesson long ago, in the Old Place. A too-tall, too-skinny boy who was always getting into trouble: at school, around the house, with the neighbours. Who should have been a help to his mother, alone as she was, burdened with the running of a farm, the raising of two children, the absence of the man she’d married for love, not land, the disapproval of both sets of family, neither of whom would lift a finger
to help, even when Sonia had come down with scarlet fever and the doctor had been called in from town, wiping out a whole year’s savings. And for every smack or scolding Peter received, she, Sonia, had been caressed, made much of, protected.

  Even when he’d signed up to go to war, had come home to say goodbye, all kitted out in his uniform, all their mother had found to say was, “You—a soldier?” And true to form, Peter had belted out, “I hate to get up, I hate to get up, I hate to get up in the morning,” doubling up his fists in front of his mouth, blowing a slapstick trumpet. He’d made Sonia laugh, when she’d been biting her lip to keep her eyes from flooding. She should have shouted it out to her parents, right then and there: “He’s going off to fight, don’t you understand—he’s risking his life for us. Why can’t you be proud of him, just this once?” But her throat had seized up, her fear had choked her, fear of weakening their love, their support, fear of seeming to criticize the two people who’d given up everything they had to offer her this new, strange world she was supposed to call home.

  Peter should hate her, by rights. Spoiled, adored, indulged as she’d been while he’d gone begging. The fact that he doesn’t resent her, that however much he jokes with her, he’s always been protective towards her—doesn’t that prove his goodness, deep down? How could he be capable of what Sasha thinks? Surely everyone must see that Peter hasn’t the pride, or the strength, or the blindness to make an approach to another man’s wife, especially if that man is rich and successful, so rich and successful that he can afford to bail out his brother-in-law time and again. And no one in their right mind could believe that Nadia Senchenko would give Peter Metelsky the encouragement of a mosquito! So what is the point of Sonia’s speaking to Peter about his intentions? It would only cause pain and confusion; it would only make everything a hundred times worse.

  “Here,” Sonia says. She piles the beach towels into his arms, stuffing the clothes pegs into her pockets. “I’ll take a look in the sideboard for that single malt—”

  But before she can finish, Peter has dropped the towels piled into his arms; has reached out to her, placing a hand on each of her shoulders.

  “Sonia, tell me,” he begins, but what he goes on to say is so unexpected that his sister can give him no answer.

  “What would you do if, suddenly, out of the blue, you were granted your heart’s desire?”

  Part Three

  Water Wings

  The ladies have put down their racy books and turned to a meatier source of gossip. And all because Jack Senchenko has bought himself a new motorboat, a zillion-horsepower Speed King, snapped up on sale at the end of the summer. For all his wealth, Jack is not averse to finding a bargain: he’s almost as fond of revealing the fortunes he saves as he is of boasting of those he spends on what the ladies and their husbands would all regard as shameful extravagance, outrageous luxuries.

  Who, for heaven’s sake, was Nadia Moroz, to have made a catch like that of Jack Senchenko? Nadia Moroz, a scholar’s daughter, an only child. Sometimes you wonder how she ever got born at all, her father so unworldly, a small man with a dreamer’s face and a voice so soft that when he talked to you each word felt like a little pillow. He was a saint: he would, and often did, give you the shirt off his back; his wife spent all her time getting back enough of what he’d given away that there’d be bread on the table and shoes on their feet. She was a broomstick of a woman, a good six inches taller and five years older than her husband, with eyes like whips—this is what the kids at Sunday School said. Pani Professor Moroz was the only one who terrified them, so that never did any whispering or giggling occur when she marched them up from the cathedral basement to join the congregation above. More nun than woman, was Sofia Moroz; you couldn’t imagine her scraping off even one layer of the clothes she wore, summer and winter, geometric prints on murky backgrounds, and all that elasticated armour underneath. She should have been born a man: she could have been a general or at least a bishop.

  The Morozes had come to Canada after the war, but not like all the other DPs in Toronto. For one thing, they arrived speaking fluent English: they all sounded foreign, but though her parents’ Ukrainian came through rich and heavy in their speech, Nadia’s accent was just like what you heard on the radio when they played a broadcast from the BBC. She was born in a part of Ukraine that was then the east of Poland; she had moved to England with her parents when she was ten years old. Her father had been a student and then a lecturer in philosophy at the University of London. When the war broke out, Sofia Moroz thanked God for their escape from Poland; when peace finally limped in, she left God out of it, and made preparations for the family’s removal to Canada. Nadia and her father had had no say in the matter: their happiness, their ties to England and their settled life in London counted for nothing in Sofia’s calculations. She was sick of war and a peace that made no difference to the meagre amount of butter or eggs, meat or wool, you could buy each week; she was sick of the ruins and rubble all around them (they had returned one morning from the shelter in which they’d spent a miserable night to find that their flat had been destroyed, along with all of Professor Moroz’s books and papers). They were British subjects, and Sofia had a cousin in Oshawa, so the immigration people hadn’t raised a hair, in spite of the Morozes’ strong accents (they had let Nadia do most of the talking).

  Why Nadia had accompanied her parents to Canada is a question debated endlessly, not only by the ladies, but by Peter Metelsky, as well—Peter who had once made a point of finding out every scrap of in formation he could about the daughter of Professor Nestor Moroz. Why Nadia had ever come to Canada was a far greater mystery than why, for example, she had married Jack Senchenko. She had been twenty-three when the Morozes had embraced Sofia’s cousin and her family in the great hall of Union Station; she had been old enough to have stayed behind, to have been engaged if not to an Englishman, then in a course of study. Rumours had circulated that Nadia had, in fact, been a student, and of a subject as useless as philosophy: fine art. She had given it all up, Peter had mused: art school (about which he knew less than nothing), London (which he did know a little, from his army days), the country where she’d spent most of her life up till then.

  She’d been a devoted daughter, the apple of her father’s eye, but not necessarily a “good girl”—which was to say, Peter reasoned, that she wouldn’t have been fazed by the prospect of living on her own in London. It couldn’t have had much to do with a desire for security: her father had found a position at the University of Toronto, but his salary was modest, as opposed to the expenses of moving three people across an ocean and renting as well as furnishing an apartment (Sofia Moroz had made it clear she wanted everything new, everything their own, untouched by anyone else’s life). You could even argue that the family would have been better off, economically, had Nadia stayed behind; they could have saved her fare, taken a smaller apartment, bought less furniture. But they’d come, all three—though Nadia, far more than her parents, had about her the air of a permanent refugee.

  Peter Metelsky had first noticed Nadia walking along Queen Street one Saturday afternoon in late December, soon after he’d returned from the war. Peter was dating, in a desultory way, Zirka Senchenko, an armful of a girl, a real butterball. Peter could have had his pick of any of the girls, but he was friends with Zirka’s brother, Jack: they were both on the Beaver Bakery volleyball team, and they were going to set up a business together someday. It made sense, everyone agreed, for Peter to settle on Zirka, for Peter’s family was even worse off than Nadia’s. In other words, it made sense for Peter to settle on Jack, who may not have been much to look at—short, stocky, balding already at twenty-nine—but who had an eye for things no one else had his kind of luck at: buying and selling, wheeling and dealing, and most of all, sweet-talking old Lady Luck. He had managed to spend the whole of the war in Saskatchewan; he was financing his business deals on his proceeds from the betting track. He had Ambition, whereas Peter had Style and the kind
of amiable weakness that makes a handsome man friends instead of enemies.

  Yet when Peter had walked down Queen Street that December afternoon, had run into Jack Senchenko with Nadia Moroz on his arm, he’d stopped dead in his tracks and been barely able to answer Jack’s hello. Which came first, who can tell: Peter’s alarm that his plans for Jack to marry Sonia had been shot all to hell, or his shock at seeing, in Jack’s possession, the girl—the only woman in the world whom he, Peter Metelsky, Don Juan of the Dnipro, could ever desire? Right there and then, a double date was arranged: Jack and Nadia along with Peter and Zirka would attend the Malanka at the cathedral hall, see the New Year in together. As for Nadia, all this time she was looking off into the distance, towering over Jack, and, after a first absent hello, failing to so much as glance at Peter. Nadia, awkward and aloof—though perhaps she was only dismally shy. Nadia, who held herself so straight she loomed—that’s exactly the word for it—and who, what with looming, and the silence she brought like a cold wind into a room, made most people uneasy, as if her eyes in their dark-rimmed spectacles could see through to your bones.

  The night of the Malanka, Peter had walked into the hall with Zirka dressed up to the nines, all crinoline and bright, bouffant hair. And there was Nadia Moroz in a cheap, dark print, more like a spent umbrella than a ball gown. Next to her Zirka looked like a plump little bird of paradise, but the first thing Peter did was to release his date into her brother’s care. Before anyone could say a word, he’d seized Nadia by the hand and led her onto the dance floor. It was the usual amateur band, heavy on accordion, all the old favourites like “The Anniversary Waltz” and “The Beer Barrel Polka”—none of the bebop and jive you’d have found at more glamorous dances on a Saturday night in Toronto. But never mind the music—what mattered was that Nadia Moroz, even in that awful dress, was held like something rare and fine and infinitely precious in Peter Metelsky’s arms. Who would have suspected what a good dancer she could be, moving effortlessly across a floor packed with couples all ages from eighteen to eighty-three? Who would have imagined what a perfect pair they’d make—Peter a few inches taller than Nadia, with an athlete’s build, and extravagantly handsome? The perfect foil to the austerity of Nadia’s jutting cheekbones and high, pure forehead; the severe, black frames of her glasses, which made her look like a swan plunged into mourning.