“I never took sides,” Marina said. “I never knew any of you were even alive.” She brushed lint from her dyed suit and glanced across at Peggy Ann’s fragile and costly black summer frock. “Do I finish this story, or not?”
“Tell it, tell it,” said Georgie. “You don’t have to make it a speech. Callahan and Vronsky came and told Mama for six hundred there’d be no charge. So Mama paid it, so that’s the end.”
“They looked at Mama’s bankbook,” Marina said. “Vronsky had a girl my age at home, he said, just eighteen, so that meant he had to pat my behind. Mama had just the six, so they said that would do.”
“Six,” Georgie said. The injustice of the sum appeared to overwhelm him anew. “For a first offense. They would have settled for one-fifty each in those days.”
“You weren’t around to advise us,” Marina said. “The nice thing was that we had it to give. As I said before, that was the year I didn’t go any place.”
“For Christ’s sake stop harping on that,” Victor said. “Sure, Mama did it for me. Why wouldn’t she want to keep me out of trouble? Any mother would’ve done it.”
“Any,” said Peggy Ann, looking around the table. “Any mother.”
“You keep your snotty face out of this,” Carol said. He stood up, shouting. “Do you know what she had to do to get six hundred, how many bottles of milk and pounds of butter and cans of soup she had to sell?” He leaned over the table, tipping a glass of brandy. It dripped on Peggy Ann’s dress, and she began once more to cry.
Marina sat down, exhausted. “It was Victor’s insurance policy,” she said. “We looked at it that way. They wrote their names on the back of the calendar. They told Mama if he ever got in trouble again she should call them.”
“It was the only thing I ever did,” Victor told his wife, who pushed away his consoling hand. “The only thing in my whole life.”
“Then we paid the money for nothing,” said Marina. “It was your immunity. You should have kept on doing things, just for the hell of it. That’s why Mama kept the calendar: insurance for Heaven on the front and on the back for this earth. She told Father Patenaude about it afterward, but he never saw the joke.”
“Never mind all that,” said Carol, impatient. “Let’s get this the hell over with. You got the store, Vic; now we want to know what you’re going to do about this,” and he pointed again to the calendar.
“What can I do?” Victor said. “What do you want me to do, turn myself in?” Gaining confidence, he pushed back his chair. “It’s crazy to even talk about it. We came back here to talk about the store. I thought that was settled.”
“Well, it isn’t,” said Georgie. “Mama left it to you, but there’s a couple of guys who owe you six. You ought to collect it.”
“Collect it?” Victor said. He looked at Marina. “Are you in this, too? You want me to go out and beat up a couple of middle-aged cops, old men? Make a lot of trouble? And for what? You know we’d never get that money back.”
“For Mama,” Carol said, sitting down.
“I never heard anything so crazy,” Peggy Ann said. “Why should Victor get mixed up in all these old things?”
“If Mama had wanted it, she’d have said so in her lifetime,” Victor said.
“She left you the shop,” Georgie said, “and the calendar along with it.”
“How about it?” Victor asked Marina once more. “Did you plan this together, to show me up in front of my wife? Or are you so jealous because Mama left it to me? Do you think I ought to make a lot of trouble for Mama’s sake?”
“For mine,” Marina said, twisting her fingers. She did not look up.
“She’s crazy,” Georgie said. “Listen,” he told her, “you’d better get married or something. Or something.”
“Honestly, Victor,” said Peggy Ann. “It’s too awful.”
“I know.” He stood up. “Look,” he said, “this damn place is no good to me. I only wanted it to keep it in the family for Mama’s sake. But I give up. Wherever she is, she sees me now, and she knows I’m acting for the best.”
“You better not talk about where she is,” Carol said, glancing at the ceiling. “Unless you do something before you die,” and he glanced at Peggy Ann.
“The hell with this,” Victor said. He drew the key to the shop from his pocket and placed it quietly on the table. “We can’t work anything out. You’re all so jealous and –”
“And awful,” said Peggy Ann. “Just awful.”
“Melodramatic,” Victor said firmly. “As for Marina, she gets crazier every time I see her, crazier by the year. If she was so damn crazy to study in France, she could have taken a job and saved some money. She blames me because I got out and she never had the guts. You could have gone next year, or the next,” he told her.
“There was the war,” she said, still looking away.
“So I started the war,” Victor said. “I sent Mama money every month. I never gave her trouble, only that once. The hell with it; I’m going. Come on,” he told his wife, who stumbled after him between the curtains, adjusting her hat.
“I’m sorry I met you under such circumstances,” she paused to say to Marina. “I imagine at heart you’re a very fine person.”
“Come on,” Victor said, and in a moment the front door slammed behind them.
Peggy Ann had left her handkerchief on the table. Carol looked at it and grunted. “He deserves her,” he remarked.
Marina looked around the room, now nearly dark. Carol pulled the light cord, and the sickly ring of yellow swayed back and forth on the walls. Marina clutched the edge of her chair, in a sudden impulse to run after Victor and away; but Carol, who had picked up the key, now held it out to her.
“It’s yours now,” he said. “Yours, and in the family.” He was smiling, and Georgie, a little behind him, smiling, too.
“What for?” Marina said. She put her hands behind her. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Keep it,” Carol said. “Run the business. With the beer license it’s a nice little business now. If you want to fix up this place behind it, we’ll kick in.”
“We figured it out,” Georgie said. “Mama would have wanted it. Victor’s a rat. He doesn’t deserve it. Look at what he wouldn’t do for Mama. He’s only a rat. But what about you? You can’t teach forever, and it doesn’t look like you’re going to get married. So we set the thing up for you.”
“For me?” Marina said. “For me?” Carol took her hand and pressed the key into it.
“If you’re still so crazy to go to France,” he said, indulgent at the thought of her feminine whim, “you could make enough in a year to close it up for a month next summer, maybe. Anyway, it’s a hell of a lot more than you’ll make as a teacher.”
He started to say something else, but Marina flung out her arm, almost striking him as she threw the key away. “For me?” she cried again. “I’m to live here?” She looked around as if to find, once more, the path away from St. Eulalie Street, the shifting and treacherous path that described a circle, and if her brothers, after the first movement, had not held her fast, she would have wrecked the room, thrown her chair out the window, pulled the shrine from the wall, the plates from their shelves, wrenched the curtains from the nails that held them, and smashed every one of the ten tiny glasses that were her brothers’ pride.
BERNADETTE
(1957)
ON THE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIXTH DAY, Bernadette could no longer pretend not to be sure. She got the calendar out from her bureau drawer – a kitchen calendar, with the Sundays and saints’ days in fat red figures, under a brilliant view of Alps. Across the Alps was the name of a hardware store and its address on the other side of Montreal. From the beginning of October the calendar was smudged and grubby, so often had Bernadette with moistened forefinger counted off the days: thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six … That had been October, the beginning of fear, with the trees in the garden and on the suburban street a blaze of red and yellow. Bernadette
had scrubbed floors and washed walls in a frenzy of bending and stretching that alarmed her employers, the kindly, liberal Knights.
“She’s used to hard work – you can see that, of course,” Robbie Knight had remarked, one Sunday, almost apologizing for the fact that they employed anyone in the house at all. Bernadette had chosen to wash the stairs and woodwork that day, instead of resting. It disturbed the atmosphere of the house, but neither of the Knights knew how to deal with a servant who wanted to work too much. He sat by the window, enjoying the warm October sunlight, trying to get on with the Sunday papers but feeling guilty because his wife was worried about Bernadette.
“She will keep on working,” Nora said. “I’ve told her to leave that hard work for the char, but she insists. I suppose it’s her way of showing gratitude, because we’ve treated her like a human being instead of a slave. Don’t you agree?”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m so tired,” Nora said. She lay back in her chair with her eyes closed, the picture of total exhaustion. She had broken one of her nails clean across, that morning, helping Bernadette with something Bernadette might easily have done alone. “You’re right about her being used to hard work. She’s probably been working all her life.” Robbie tried not answering this one. “It’s so much the sort of thing I’ve battled,” Nora said.
He gave up. He let his paper slide to the floor. Compelled to think about his wife’s battles, he found it impossible to concentrate on anything else. Nora’s weapons were kept sharp for two dragons: crooked politics and the Roman Catholic Church. She had battled for birth control, clean milk, vaccination, homes for mothers, homes for old people, homes for cats and dogs. She fought against censorship, and for votes for cloistered nuns, and for the provincial income tax.
“Good old Nora,” said Robbie absently. Nora accepted this tribute without opening her eyes. Robbie looked at her, at the thin, nervous hand with the broken nail.
“She’s not exciting, exactly,” he had once told one of his mistresses. “But she’s an awfully good sort, if you know what I mean. I mean, she’s really a good sort. I honestly couldn’t imagine not living with Nora.” The girl to whom this was addressed had instantly burst into tears, but Robbie was used to that. Unreasonable emotional behavior on the part of other women only reinforced his respect for his wife.
The Knights had been married nearly sixteen years. They considered themselves solidly united. Like many people no longer in love, they cemented their relationship with opinions, pet prejudices, secret meanings, a private vocabulary that enabled them to exchange amused glances over a dinner table and made them feel a shade superior to the world outside the house. Their home held them, and their two daughters, now in boarding school. Private schools were out of line with the Knights’ social beliefs, but in the case of their own children they had judged a private school essential.
“Selfish, they were,” Robbie liked to explain. “Selfish, like their father.” Here he would laugh a little, and so would his listeners. He was fond of assuming a boyish air of self-deprecation – a manner which, like his boyish nickname, had clung to him since school. “Nora slapped them both in St. Margaret’s, and it cleared up in a year.”
On three occasions, Nora had discovered Robbie in an affair. Each time, she had faced him bravely and made him discuss it, a process she called “working things out.” Their talks would be formal, at first – a frigid question-and-answer period, with Robbie frightened and almost sick and Nora depressingly unreproachful. For a few nights, she would sleep in another room. She said that this enabled her to think. Thinking all night, she was fresh and ready for talk the next day. She would analyze their marriage, their lives, their childhoods, and their uncommon characters. She would tell Robbie what a Don Juan complex was, and tell him what he was trying to prove. Finally, reconciled, they were able to talk all night, usually in the kitchen, the most neutral room of the house, slowly and congenially sharing a bottle of Scotch. Robbie would begin avoiding his mistress’s telephone calls and at last would write her a letter saying that his marriage had been rocked from top to bottom and that but for the great tolerance shown by his wife they would all of them have been involved in something disagreeable. He and his wife had now arrived at a newer, fuller, truer, richer, deeper understanding. The long affection they held for each other would enable them to start life again on a different basis, the letter would conclude.
The basic notion of the letter was true. After such upheavals his marriage went swimmingly. He would feel flattened, but not unpleasantly, and it was Nora’s practice to treat him with tolerance and good humor, like an ailing child.
He looked at the paper lying at his feet and tried to read the review of a film. It was hopeless. Nora’s silence demanded his attention. He got up, kissed her lightly, and started out.
“Off to work?” said Nora, without opening her eyes.
“Well, yes,” he said.
“I’ll keep the house quiet. Would you like your lunch on a tray?”
“No, I’ll come down.”
“Just as you like, darling. It’s no trouble.”
He escaped.
Robbie was a partner in a firm of consulting engineers. He had, at one time, wanted to be a playwright. It was this interest that had, with other things, attracted Nora when they had been at university together. Robbie had been taking a course in writing for the stage – a sideline to his main degree. His family had insisted on engineering; he spoke of defying them, and going to London or New York. Nora had known, even then, that she was a born struggler and fighter. She often wished she had been a man. She believed that to balance this overassertive side of her nature she should marry someone essentially feminine, an artist of some description. At the same time, a burning fear of poverty pushed her in the direction of someone with stability, background, and a profession outside the arts. Both she and Robbie were campus liberals; they met at a gathering that had something to do with the Spanish war – the sort of party where, as Nora later described it, you all sat on the floor and drank beer out of old pickle jars. There had been a homogeneous quality about the group that was quite deceptive; political feeling was a great leveler. For Nora, who came from a poor and an ugly lower-middle-class home, political action was a leg up. It brought her in contact with people she would not otherwise have known. Her snobbishness moved to a different level; she spoke of herself as working-class, which was not strictly true. Robbie, in revolt against his family, who were well-to-do, conservative, and had no idea of the injurious things he said about them behind their backs, was, for want of a gentler expression, slumming around. He drifted into a beer-drinking Left Wing movement, where he was welcomed for his money, his good looks, and the respectable tone he lent the group. His favorite phrase at that time was “of the people.” He mistook Nora for someone of the people, and married her almost before he had discovered his mistake. Nora then did an extraordinary about-face. She reconciled Robbie with his family. She encouraged him to go into his father’s firm. She dampened, ever so gently, the idea of London and New York.
Still, she continued to encourage his interest in theatre. More, she managed to create such a positive atmosphere of playwriting in the house that many of their casual acquaintances thought he was a playwright, and were astonished to learn he was the Knight of Turnbull, Knight & Beardsley. Robbie had begun and abandoned many plays since college. He had not consciously studied since the creative-writing course, but he read, and criticized, and had reached the point where he condemned everything that had to do with the English-language stage.
Nora agreed with everything he believed. She doggedly shared his passion for the theatre – which had long since ceased to be real, except when she insisted – and she talked to him about his work, sharing his problems and trying to help. She knew that his trouble arose from the fact that he had to spend his daytime hours in the offices of the firm. She agreed that his real life was the theatre, with the firm a practical adjunct. She was sensible: she d
id not ask that he sell his partnership and hurl himself into uncertainty and insecurity – a prospect that would have frightened him very much indeed. She understood that it was the firm that kept them going, that paid for the girls at St. Margaret’s and the trip to Europe every second summer. It was the firm that gave Nora leisure and scope for her tireless battles with the political and ecclesiastical authorities of Quebec. She encouraged Robbie to write in his spare time. Every day, or nearly, during his “good” periods, she mentioned his work. She rarely accepted an invitation without calling Robbie at his office and asking if he wanted to shut himself up and work that particular night. She could talk about his work, without boredom or exhaustion, just as she could discuss his love affairs. The only difference was that when they were mutually explaining Robbie’s infidelity, they drank whiskey. When they talked about his play and his inability to get on with it, Nora would go to the refrigerator and bring out a bottle of milk. She was honest and painstaking; she had at the tip of her tongue the vocabulary needed to turn their relationship and marriage inside out. After listening to Nora for a whole evening, agreeing all the way, Robbie would go to bed subdued with truth and totally empty. He felt that they had drained everything they would ever have to say. After too much talk, he would think, a couple should part; just part, without another word, full of kind thoughts and mutual understanding. He was afraid of words. That was why, that Sunday morning toward the end of October, the simple act of leaving the living room took on the dramatic feeling of escape.
He started up the stairs, free. Bernadette was on her knees, washing the painted baseboard. Her hair, matted with a cheap permanent, had been flattened into curls that looked like snails, each snail held with two crossed bobby pins. She was young, with a touching attractiveness that owed everything to youth.
“Bonjour, Bernadette.”
“’Jour.”
Bending, she plunged her hands into the bucket of soapy water. A moment earlier, she had thought of throwing herself down the stairs and making it seem an accident. Robbie’s sudden appearance had frightened her into stillness. She wiped her forehead, waiting until he had closed the door behind him. Then she flung herself at the baseboard, cloth in hand. Did she feel something – a tugging, a pain? “Merci, mon Dieu,” she whispered. But there was nothing to be thankful for, in spite of the walls and the buckets of water and the bending and the stretching.
Going Ashore Page 7