Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  “There’s ordinary good and there’s ordinary awful,” Dorothy said. “Ordinary good says Gus wants his dinner on time.”

  And ordinary awful, Edna thought, as she went into her own kitchen, is that I don’t care when I eat or what. She suspected Charlie, methodical and disciplined as he was, was probably better at living alone than she was. She had a sudden and ridiculous image of him cooking a solitary hamburger on a small hibachi on his studio apartment balcony in an apron that said, “Boss.” Their large family barbecue sat rusting in the garage, moved there by one of the boys because she couldn’t stand the sight of it. She’d had his chair in the living room moved to the basement as well.

  Right now Dorothy and Gus were sitting down together to dinner, and Dorothy was saying to Gus, “You’re not going to believe this: Charlie’s come crawling home, and I think she’s going to let that bastard back in, after five years.”

  Why, after all, did he want to come home? He missed being something more than a cheque book to the children, but he could change that without her. He said the house needed painting. She said what it probably needed was to be put up for sale.

  “What are your plans, Edna?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s time I took that trip to Europe.”

  “Maybe we could go together,” he said, “now that the kids are through college.”

  He wasn’t looking at her. He was figuring out that it had been five years since the apple trees had been pruned.

  “Why don’t I come over next Sunday and do a bit of work around here?”

  Edna scrambled herself some eggs, ate a whole tomato and a carrot, finished off with a digestive biscuit, distracting herself with planning Sunday’s menu.

  Maybe he was as tired of being a villain as she was of being a wronged woman. But that’s what they were, and how did they ever get past that? Wouldn’t they just begin saying all over again, “How could you be so vain?” and “Why do you have to be so offended?” She used to think that a marriage with only one basic argument was a pretty remarkable thing, as long as there was loyalty, as long as no matter what…

  “I kicked the bugger out,” she said into her coffee cup, “and alienated his kids and bad mouthed him to our friends.”

  What was so boring, ordinary, and impossible was not the argument but being left with only one side of it endlessly repeating in her head.

  “Charlie,” she said into the phone, “why do you want to come home?”

  “Because I flatter myself with the hope that you want me to,” he said.

  “You can do that for yourself now?”

  “Maybe it’s just a gimmick,” he admitted.

  Edna was tempted to say, maybe it wasn’t, because she’d certainly learned to offend herself in the last five years, no help from anyone. But she had a more important confession to make.

  “I do, Charlie,” Edna said. “I do want you home.”

  INLAND PASSAGE

  “THE OTHER LADY…” the ship’s steward began.

  “We’re not together,” a quiet but determined female voice explained from the corridor, one hand thrust through the doorway insisting that he take her independent tip for the bag he had just deposited on the lower bunk.

  There was not room for Troy McFadden to step into the cabin until the steward had left.

  “It’s awfully small,” Fidelity Munroe, the first occupant of the cabin, confirmed, shrinking down into her oversized duffle coat.

  “It will do if we take turns,” Troy McFadden decided. “I’ll let you settle first, shall I?”

  “I just need a place to put my bag.”

  The upper bunk was bolted against the cabin ceiling to leave headroom for anyone wanting to sit on the narrow upholstered bench below.

  “Under my bunk,” Troy McFadden suggested.

  There was no other place. The single chair in the cabin was shoved in under the small, square table, and the floor of the minute closet was taken up with life jackets. The bathroom whose door Troy McFadden opened to inspect, had a coverless toilet, sink and triangle of a shower. The one hook on the back of the door might make dressing there possible. When she stepped back into the cabin, she bumped into Fidelity Munroe, crouching down to stow her bag.

  “I’m sorry,” Fidelity said, standing up, “But I can get out now.”

  “Let’s both get out.”

  They sidled along the narrow corridor, giving room to other passengers in search of their staterooms.

  Glancing into one open door, Troy McFadden said, “At least we have a window.”

  “Deck?” Fidelity suggested.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Neither had taken off her coat. They had to shoulder the heavy door together before they could step out into the moist sea air. Their way was blocked to the raised prow of the ship where they might otherwise have watched the cars, campers, and trucks being loaded. They turned instead and walked to the stern of the ferry to find rows of wet, white empty benches facing blankly out to sea.

  “You can’t even see the Gulf Islands this morning,” Troy McFadden observed.

  “Are you from around here?”

  “Yes, from North Vancouver. We should introduce ourselves, shouldn’t we?”

  “I’m Fidelity Munroe. Everyone calls me Fido.”

  “I’m Troy McFadden, and nearly everyone calls me Mrs. McFadden.”

  They looked at each other uncertainly, and then both women laughed.

  “Are you going all the way to Prince Rupert?” Fidelity asked.

  “And back, just for the ride.”

  “So am I. Are we going to see a thing?”

  “It doesn’t look like it,” Troy McFadden admitted. “I’m told you rarely do on this trip. You sail into mist and maybe get an occasional glimpse of forest or the near shore of an island. Mostly you seem to be going nowhere.”

  “Then why…?”

  “For that reason, I suppose,” Troy McFadden answered, gathering her fur collar more closely around her ears.

  “I was told it rarely gets rough,” Fidelity Munroe offered.

  “We’re in open sea only two hours each way. All the rest is inland passage.”

  “You’ve been before then.”

  “No,” Troy McFadden said. “I’ve heard about it for years.”

  “So have I, but I live in Toronto. There you hear it’s beautiful.”

  “Mrs. Munroe?”

  “Only technically,” Fidelity answered.

  “I don’t think I can call you Fido.”

  “It’s no more ridiculous than Fidelity once you get used to it.”

  “Does your mother call you Fido?”

  “My mother hasn’t spoken to me for years,” Fidelity Munroe answered.

  Two other passengers, a couple in their agile seventies, joined them on the deck.

  “Well…” Troy McFadden said, in no one’s direction, “I think I’ll get my bearings.”

  She turned away, a woman who did not look as if she ever lost her bearings.

  You’re not really old enough to be my mother, Fidelity wanted to call after her, Why take offense? But it wasn’t just that remark. Troy McFadden would be as daunted as Fidelity by such sudden intimacy, the risk of its smells as much as its other disclosures. She would be saying to herself, I’m too old for this. Why on earth didn’t I spend the extra thirty dollars? Or she was on her way to the purser to see if she might be moved, if not into a single cabin then into one with someone less…more…

  Fidelity looked down at Gail’s much too large duffle coat, her own jeans and hiking boots. Well, there wasn’t room for the boots in her suitcase, and, ridiculous as they might look for walking the few yards of deck, they might be very useful for exploring the places the ship docked.

  Up yours, Mrs. McFadden, with your fur collar and your expensive, sensible shoes and matching bag. Take up the whole damned cabin!

  All Fidelity needed for this mist-bound mistake of a cruise was a book out of her suitcase. She could sleep
in the lounge along with the kids and the Indians, leave the staterooms (what a term!) to the geriatrics and Mrs. McFadden.

  Fidelity wrenched the door open with her own strength, stomped back along the corridor like one of the invading troops, and unlocked and opened the cabin door in one gesture. There sat Troy McFadden, in surprised tears.

  “I’m sorry…” Fidelity began, but she could not make her body retreat.

  Instead she wedged herself around the door and closed it behind her. Then she sat down beside Troy McFadden, took her hand, and stared quietly at their unlikely pairs of feet. A shadow passed across the window. Fidelity looked up to meet the eyes of another passenger glancing in. She reached up with her free hand and pulled the small curtain across the window.

  “I simply can’t impose…” Troy finally brought herself to say.

  “Look,” Fidelity said, turning to her companion, “I may cry most of the way myself…it doesn’t matter.”

  “I just can’t make myself…walk into those public rooms…alone.”

  “How long have you been alone?” Fidelity asked.

  “My husband died nearly two years ago…there’s no excuse.”

  “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Shame’s the last stage of grief.’ ‘What a rotten arrangement then,’ I said. ‘To be ashamed for the rest of my life.’”

  “You’ve lost your husband?”

  Fidelity shook her head, “Years ago. I divorced him.”

  “You hardly look old enough…”

  “I know, but I am. I’m forty-one. I’ve got two grown daughters.”

  “I have two sons,” Troy said. “One offered to pay for this trip just to get me out of town for a few days. The other thought I should lend him the money instead.”

  “And you’d rather have?”

  “It’s so humiliating,” Troy said.

  “To be alone?”

  “To be afraid.”

  The ship’s horn sounded.

  “We’re about to sail,” Troy said. “I didn’t even have the courage to get off the ship, and here I am, making you sit in the dark…”

  “Shall we go out and get our bearings together?”

  “Let me put my face back on,” Troy said.

  Only then did Fidelity let go of her hand so that she could take her matching handbag into the tiny bathroom and smooth courage back into her quite handsome and appealing face.

  Fidelity pulled her bag out from under the bunk, opened it and got out her own sensible shoes. If she was going to offer this woman any sort of reassurance, she must make what gestures she could to be a bird of her feather.

  The prow of the ship had been lowered and secured, and the reverse engines had ceased their vibrating by the time the two women joined the bundled passengers on deck to see, to everyone’s amazement, the sun breaking through, an ache to the eyes on the shining water.

  Troy McFadden reached for her sunglasses. Fidelity Munroe had forgotten hers.

  “This is your captain,” said an intimate male voice from a not very loud speaker just above their heads. “We are sailing into a fair day.”

  The shoreline they had left remained hidden in clouds crowded up against the Vancouver mountains, but the long wooded line of Galiano Island and beyond it to the west the mountains of Vancouver Island lay in a clarity of light.

  “I’m hungry,” Fidelity announced. “I didn’t get up in time to have breakfast.”

  “I couldn’t eat,” Troy confessed.

  When she hesitated at the entrance to the cafeteria, Fidelity took her arm firmly and directed her into the short line that had formed.

  “Look at that!” Fidelity said with pleasure. “Sausages, ham, bacon, pancakes. How much can we have?”

  “As much as you want,” answered the young woman behind the counter.

  “Oh, am I ever going to pig out on this trip!”

  Troy took a bran muffin, apple juice and a cup of tea.

  “It isn’t fair,” she said as they unloaded their contrasting trays at a window table. “My husband could eat like that, too, and never gain a pound.”

  Fidelity, having taken off her coat, revealed just how light bodied she was.

  “My kids call me bird bones. They have their father to thank for being human size. People think I’m their little brother.”

  “Once children tower over you, being their mother is an odd business,” Troy mused.

  “That beautiful white hair must help,” Fidelity said.

  “I’ve had it since I was twenty-five. When the boys were little, people thought I was their grandmother.”

  “I suppose only famous people are mistaken for themselves in public,” Fidelity said, around a mouthful of sausage; so she checked herself and chewed instead of elaborating on that observation.

  “Which is horrible in its way, too, I suppose,” Troy said.

  Fidelity swallowed. “I don’t know. I’ve sometimes thought I’d like it: Mighty Mouse fantasies.”

  She saw Troy try to smile and for a second lose the trembling control of her face. She hadn’t touched her food.

  “Drink your juice,” Fidelity said, in the no-nonsense, cheerful voice of motherhood.

  Troy’s dutiful hand shook as she raised the glass to her lips, but she took a sip. She returned the glass to the table without accident and took up the much less dangerous bran muffin.

  “I would like to be invisible,” Troy said, a rueful apology in her voice.

  “Well, we really are, aren’t we?” Fidelity asked. “Except to a few people.”

  “Have you traveled alone a lot?”

  “No,” Fidelity said, “just about never. I had the girls, and they’re still only semi-independent. And I had a friend, Gail. She and I took trips together. She died last year.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too. It’s a bit like being a widow, I guess, except, nobody expects it to be. Maybe that helps.”

  “Did you live with Gail?”

  “No, but we thought maybe we might…someday.”

  Troy sighed.

  “So here we both are at someday,” Fidelity said. “Day one of someday and not a bad day at that.”

  They both looked out at the coast, ridge after ridge of tall trees, behind which were sudden glimpses of high peaks of snow-capped mountains.

  Back on the deck other people had also ventured, dressed and hatted against the wind, armed with binoculars for sighting of eagles and killer whales, for inspecting the crews of fishing boats, tugs, and pleasure craft.

  “I never could use those things,” Fidelity confessed. “It’s not just my eyes. I feel like that woman in the Colville painting.”

  “Do you like his work?” Troy asked.

  “I admire it,” Fidelity said. “There’s something a bit sinister about it: all those figures seem prisoners of normality. That woman at the shore, about to get into the car…”

  “With the children, yes,” Troy said. “They seem so vulnerable.”

  “Here’s Jonathan Seagull!” a woman called to her binocular-blinded husband, “Right here on the rail.”

  “I loathed that book,” Troy murmured to Fidelity.

  Fidelity chuckled. “In the first place, I’m no friend to seagulls.”

  Finally chilled, the two women went back inside. At the door to the largest lounge, again Troy hesitated.

  “Take my arm,” Fidelity said, wishing it and she were more substantial.

  They walked the full length of that lounge and on into the smaller space of the gift shop where Troy was distracted from her nerves by postcards, travel books, toys and souvenirs.

  Fidelity quickly picked up half a dozen postcards.

  “I’d get home before they would,” Troy said.

  “I probably will, too, but everybody likes mail.”

  From the gift shop, they found their way to the forward lounge where tv sets would later offer a movie, on into the children’s playroom, a glassed-in area heavily padded where several toddlers tumble
d and stumbled about.

  “It’s like an aquarium,” Fidelity said.

  “There aren’t many children aboard.”

  “One of the blessings of traveling in October,” Fidelity said. “Oh, I don’t feel about kids the way I do about seagulls, but they aren’t a holiday.”

  “No,” Troy agreed. “I suppose I really just think I miss mine.”

  Beyond the playroom they found the bar with only three tables of prelunch drinkers. Troy looked in, shook her head firmly and retreated.

  “Not a drinker?” Fidelity asked.

  “I have a bottle of scotch in my case,” Troy said. “I don’t think I could ever…alone…”

  “Mrs. McFadden,” Fidelity said, taking her arm, “I’m going to make a hard point. You’re not alone. You’re with me, and we’re both old enough to be grandmothers, and we’re approaching the turn of the 21st not the 20th century, and I think we both could use a drink.”

  Troy McFadden allowed herself to be steered into the bar and settled at a table, but, when the waiter came, she only looked at her hands.

  “Sherry,” Fidelity decided. “Two sherries,” and burst out laughing.

  Troy looked over at her, puzzled.

  “Sherry is my idea of what you would order. I’ve never tasted it in my life.”

  “You’re quite right,” Troy said. “Am I such a cliché?”

  “Not a cliché, an ideal. I don’t know, maybe they’re the same thing when it comes down to it. You have style. I really admire that. If I ever got it together enough to have shoes and matching handbag, I’d lose one of the shoes.”

  “Is that really your coat?” Troy asked.

  Fidelity looked down at herself. “No, it belonged to Gail. It’s my Linus blanket.”

  “I’ve been sleeping in my husband’s old pajamas. I had to buy a nightgown to come on this trip,” Troy confided. “I think it’s marvelous the way you do what you want.”

  Fidelity bit her lip and screwed her face tight for a moment. Then she said, “But I don’t want to cry any more than you do.”

  The waiter put their sherries before them, and Fidelity put a crumpled ten dollar bill on the table.

  “Oh, you should let me,” Troy said, reaching for her purse.