by Jane Rule
“It’s depressing,” Fidelity said.
“I wish we knew how to expect something else and make it happen.”
“I’m glad nobody else was living on the moon,” Fidelity said, turning sadly away.
The Indian families were in the cafeteria where Troy and Fidelity went for their belated breakfast. The older members of the group were talking softly among themselves in their own language. The younger ones were chatting with the crew in a friendly enough fashion. They were all on their way to a great wedding in Prince Rupert that night and would be back on board ship when it sailed south again at midnight.
“Do you work?” Troy suddenly asked Fidelity as she put a large piece of ham in her mouth.
Fidelity nodded as she chewed.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a film editor,” Fidelity said.
“Something as amazing as that, and you haven’t even bothered to tell me?”
“It’s nothing amazing,” Fidelity said. “You sit in a dark room all by yourself, day after day, trying to make a creditable half hour or hour and a half out of hundreds of hours of film.”
“You don’t like it at all?”
“Oh, well enough,” Fidelity said. “Sometimes it’s interesting. Once I did a film on Haida carving that was shot up here in the Queen Charlottes, one of the reasons I’ve wanted to see this part of the country.”
“How did you decide to be a film editor?”
“I didn’t really. I went to art school. I was going to be a great painter. Mighty Mouse fantasy number ten. I got married instead. He didn’t work; so I had to. It was a job, and after a while I got pretty good at it.”
“Did he take care of the children?”
“My mother did,” Fidelity said, “until they were in school. They’ve had to be pretty independent.”
“Oh, Fido, you’ve done so much more with your life than I have.”
“Got divorced and earned a living because I had to. Not exactly things to brag about.”
“But it’s ongoing, something of your own to do.”
“I suppose so,” Fidelity admitted,” but you know, after Gail died, I looked around me and realized that, aside from my kids, I didn’t really have any friends. I worked alone. I lived alone. I sometimes think now I should quit, do something entirely different. I can’t risk that until the girls are really independent, not just playing house with Mother’s off-stage help. Who knows? One of them might turn up on my doorstep as I did on my mother’s.”
“I’d love a job,” Troy said, “but I’d never have the courage…”
“Of course you would,” Fidelity said.
“Are you volunteering to take me by the hand as you did yesterday and say to the interviewer, ‘This is my friend, Mrs. McFadden. She can’t go into strange places by herself?’”
“Sure,” Fidelity said. “I’ll tell you what, let’s go into business together.”
“What kind of business?”
“Well, we could run a selling gallery and lose our shirts.”
“Or a bookstore and lose our shirts…I don’t really have a shirt to lose.”
“Let’s be more practical. How about a gay bar?”
“Oh, Fido,” Troy said, laughing and shaking her head.
The ship now had entered a narrow inland passage, moving slowly and carefully past small islands. The Captain, though he still occasionally pointed out a deserted cannery, village or mine site, obviously had to pay more attention to the task of bringing his ship out of this narrow reach in a nearly silent wilderness into the noise and clutter of the town of Prince Rupert.
A bus waited to take those passengers who had signed up for a tour of the place, and Troy and Fidelity were among them. Their driver and guide was a young man fresh from Liverpool, and he looked on his duty as bizarre, for what was there really to see in Prince Rupert but one ridge of rather expensive houses overlooking the harbor and a small neighborhood of variously tasteless houses sold to fishermen in seasons when they made too much money so that they could live behind pretentious front doors on unemployment all the grey winter long. The only real stop was a small museum of Indian artifacts and old tools. The present Indian population was large and poor and hostile.
“It’s like being in Greece,” Fidelity said, studying a small collection of beautifully patterned baskets. “Only here it’s been over for less than a hundred years.”
They ate delicious seafood at an otherwise unremarkable hotel and then skipped an opportunity to shop at a mall left open in the evening for the tour’s benefit, business being what it was in winter. Instead they took a taxi back to the ship.
“I think it’s time to open my bottle of scotch,” Troy suggested.
They got ice from a vending machine and went back to their cabin, where Fidelity turned the chair so that she could put her feet up on the bunk and Troy could sit at the far end with her feet tucked under her.
“Cozy,” Troy decided.
“I wish I liked scotch,” Fidelity said, making a face.
By the time the steward came to make up the bunks, returning and new passengers were boarding the ship. Troy and Fidelity out on deck watched the Indians being seen off by a large group of friends and relatives who must also have been to the wedding. Fidelity imagined them in an earlier time getting into great canoes to paddle south instead of settling down to a few hours’ sleep on the lounge floor. She might as well imagine herself and Troy on a sailing ship bringing drink and disease.
A noisy group of Australians came on deck.
“You call this a ship?” they said to each other. “You call those cabins?”
They had traveled across the States and had come back across Canada, and they were not happily prepared to spend two nights in cabins even less comfortable than Fidelity’s and Troy’s.
“Maybe the scenery will cheer them up,” Fidelity suggested as they went back to their cabin.
“They sound to me as if they’ve already had more scenery than they can take.”
True enough. The Australians paced the decks like prisoners looking at the shore only to evaluate their means of escape, no leaping whale or plummeting eagle compensation for this coastal ferry which had been described in their brochures as a “cruise ship.” How different they were from the stoically settled Indians who had quietly left the ship at Bella Bella shortly after dawn.
Fidelity and Troy stayed on deck for the open water crossing to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island, went in only long enough to get warm, then back out into the brilliant sun and sea wind to take delight in every shape of island, contour of hill, the play of light on the water, the least event of sea life until even their cloud of complaining gulls seemed part of the festival of their last day.
“Imagine preferring something like The Love Boat,” Troy said.
“Gail and I were always the ferry, barge, and freighter types,” Fidelity said.
Film clips moved through her mind, Gail sipping ouso in a cafe in Athens, Gail hailing a cab in London, Gail…a face she had begun to believe stricken from her memory was there in its many moods at her bidding.
“What is it?” Troy asked.
“Some much better reruns in my head,” Fidelity said, smiling. “I guess it takes having fun to remember how often I have.”
“What time is your plane tomorrow?” Troy asked.
The question hit Fidelity like a blow.
“Noon,” she managed to say before she excused herself and left Troy for the first time since she had pledged herself to Troy’s need.
Back in their cabin, sitting on the bunk that was also Troy’s bed, Fidelity was saying to herself, “You’re such an idiot, such an idiot, such an idiot!”
Two and a half days playing Mighty Mouse better than she ever had in her life, and suddenly she was dissolving into a maudlin fool, into tears of a sort she hadn’t shed since her delayed adolescence.
“I can’t want her. I just can’t,” Fidelity chanted.
It was worse than
coming down with a toothache, breaking out in boils, this stupid, sweet desire which she simply had to hide from a woman getting better and better at reading her face unless she wanted to wreck the last hours of this lovely trip.
Troy shoved open the cabin door.
“Did I say something…?”
Fidelity shook her head, “No, just my turn, I guess.”
“You don’t want to miss your last dinner, do you?”
“Of course not,” Fidelity said, trying to summon up an appetite she could indulge in.
They were shy of each other over dinner, made conversation in a way they hadn’t needed to from the first few minutes of their meeting. The strain of it made Fidelity both long for sleep and dread the intimacy of their cabin where their new polite reserve would be unbearable.
“Shall we have an early night?” Troy suggested. “We have to be up awfully early to disembark.”
As they knelt together, getting out their night things, Troy said, mocking their awkward position, “I’d say a prayer of thanks if I thought there was anybody up there to pray to.”
Fidelity was praying for whatever help there was against her every instinct.
“I’m going to find it awfully hard to say good-bye to you, Fido.”
Fidelity had to turn then to Troy’s lovely, vulnerable face.
“I just can’t…” Fidelity began.
Then, unable to understand that it could happen, Fidelity was embracing Troy, and they moved into love-making as trustingly as they had talked.
At six in the morning, when Troy’s travel alarm went off, she said, “I don’t think I can move.”
Fidelity, unable to feel the arm that lay under Troy, whispered, “We’re much too old for this.”
“I was afraid you thought I was,” Troy said as she slowly and painfully untangled herself, “and now I’m going to prove it.”
“Do you know what I almost said to you the first night?” Fidelity asked, loving the sight of Troy’s naked body in the light of the desk lamp she’d just turned on. “I almost said, ‘what a great setting for the first horrible night of a honeymoon.’”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You were so lovely, coming out of the bathroom,” Fidelity explained, knowing it wasn’t an explanation.
“You were wrong,” Troy said, defying her painful stiffness to lean down to kiss Fidelity.
“Young lovers would skip breakfast,” Fidelity said.
“But you’re starved.”
Fidelity nodded, having no easy time getting out of bed herself.
It occurred to her to disturb the virgin neatness of her own upper bunk only because it would have been the first thing to occur to Gail, a bed ravager of obsessive proportions. If it didn’t trouble Troy, it would not trouble Fidelity.
As they sat eating, the sun rose over the Vancouver mountains, catching the windows of the apartment blocks on the north shore.
“I live over there,” Troy said.
“Troy?”
“Will you invite me to visit you in Toronto?”
“Come with me.”
“I have to see Colin…and Ralph. I could be there in a week.”
“I was wrong about those two over there,” Fidelity said. “They sit side by side because they’re lovers.”
“And you thought so in the first place,” Troy said.
Fidelity nodded.
“This is your captain speaking…”
Because he was giving them instructions about how to disembark, Fidelity did listen but only with one ear, for she had to keep her own set of instructions clearly in her head. She, of course, had to see her children, too.
BLESSED ARE THE DEAD
“SUCH A SATISFYING DEATH!” Martin said, shaking out the Vancouver Sun and settling more comfortably in his chair. “Even in the eulogies, all his sins are being remembered.”
“Are we going to the funeral?” Lily asked, handing him a very much thinned scotch.
“I wouldn’t miss it, would you? There will be all the children and mistresses of the first marriage, the second Mrs. Kurr with all her children and all the—what does one call them?—companions of the second ‘open marriage,’ various bartenders and lawyers: a bloody circus!”
“You haven’t spoken to him for five years,” Lily said.
“The very best reason not to miss the opportunity to cut him dead one last time.”
“Doesn’t it scare you to be that callous?”
“Lily, my skin is as thin as my old mother’s. I quiver with feeling. How often in a life do we experience for ourselves a sense that—what’s that wonderful line in Christopher Fry?—that the brick has been ‘richly deserved and divinely delivered.’ Most drunken, whoring old buggers are rewarded with appointments to the bench and life into the nineties. I feel on the edge of conversion.”
“As a died-again Christian?” Lily asked.
“That’s going too far, of course. It’s more a Sunday school nostalgia,” Martin admitted, “when I really did believe bastards like Wally Kurr would be struck dead. I’ve lived so many years with irony, with knowing it’s more likely that boy scouts like me would drop dead at fifty, snow shovel in hand, after a life of one watered down scotch before dinner, a workout three times a week, and a cigar on my birthday. Now, even if I die on Friday of smug pleasure at his funeral, I’ll still have the satisfaction of having outlived him.”
“He’s the first one, isn’t he?” Lily mused, “if you don’t count Clara Kurr’s suicide or Jim Wilson’s plane crash.”
“The first what?”
“One of us to…just die.”
“Well, there’re your parents and my father…”
“I mean, our age, more or less. Wally was a year ahead of me at UBC.”
“And two years behind me. He was only forty-eight,” Martin said, checking the paper. “You know, I think we ought to go out for dinner and celebrate the fact that there’s some justice left in the world.”
“The way to get a man to go out to dinner is to put him on a diet. Then he’s willing to make anything a cause for celebration: an old friend’s death, a daughter’s abortion.”
“Wally Kurr was never really a friend of mine, and we don’t have a daughter and I didn’t know I was on a diet.”
“Daughter-in-law.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Martin said. “I’m perfectly willing to celebrate not having a daughter. Imagine living in incestuous terror for nearly twenty years of your life!”
“Oh, Martin.”
“Now, none of that fashionable feminist revulsion. Husbands don’t like it at all.”
“I’ll go out to dinner as long as it’s not the Club,” Lily said.
“But don’t you like to see your friends?”
“They’re your friends.”
“Friends are friends, Lily, and they are the best insurance there is for you against finding the company of your husband a bore.”
“You’ve never bored me,” Lily said.
“Where would you like to go?”
“The Club,” she answered. “I’ll have to change.”
Martin preferred to be recognized in public, and he could count on that only at the Faculty Club. Elsewhere Lily attracted admiring attention because of her Sunday talk show on Channel 2. Neither of them would be much noticed a hundred miles or more from Vancouver unless they went where Vancouverites go or to an academic symposium. Martin had an international reputation among a limited number of scholars for his work on the nature of tragi-comedy, its important Christian underpinnings.
“It’s still perfectly acceptable to write about Christianity as long as you aren’t one” was Martin’s social explanation, particularly at Lily’s studio parties which were short on professors and long on people who did things (as opposed to teaching them or writing about them).
Lily did allow a certain number of writers on her talk show, mostly in deference to Martin’s taste. As a breed, they didn’t interview well, either monosyllabic or
uninterruptable, vain about everything but their looks, probably because they spent most of their time with their backs to the world.
“I really think people who care about posterity should wait for it,” she said.
As a lecturer as well as a scholar, Martin felt he had the best of both worlds, the here and the hereafter, of which he had a clear picture in his mind. It was a library in which his book, The Nature o Grace, A Study of Tragi-Comedy, was prominently displayed. It was such a concrete reassurance against the unimaginable faces of his great-great-grandchildren about whom he knew only the one thing: they would remember him.
Martin finished his scotch and stood to greet his expensively dressed wife who wore, on a silk suit her public had not yet seen, the Tony Calveti pin he had given her on their last anniversary.
“Why on earth did we ever have children?” he asked her.
“How else would you know how to enjoy being free of them?” she asked him.
“If either of my sons had ruined your figure, I would have murdered them in their cribs. As it is, I don’t harbor an ounce of ill will toward them.”
Martin held the door of the Mercedes Lily had given him for an anniversary present several years ago and felt the satisfaction of knowing that he could sell it now for more than she had paid for it. With the house mortgage paid off, holidays already scheduled (Mexico for Christmas, England in May), Martin and Lily were on the good side of these bad times.
As they drove along the shore, the late sun shone on picnicing families at the beach, on freighters at anchor waiting for berths in the inner harbor, on sailboats, on the water itself, golden and slate grey. The bushes were still in wonderfully vulgar bloom in the rose garden, but the flag by the Faculty Club was at half mast.
“Not for Wally!” Martin exclaimed.
“He was a graduate,” Lily reminded him.
“We don’t lower the flag for every graduate! We’d have to leave it there permanently. Maybe someone’s shot the Prime Minister.”