May 28, 1952
Dear May,
Your father and I will be at your wedding. But you must not think, dear, that we have given our consent or agreed to go because we are any more reconciled to the situation, or that we feel happy at all about it. Rather, it is because of our great love for you. If you want us to be there, we want to go, and if you have your heart set on Winnipeg, then so be it.
I hope you will understand my feelings, and realize that I mention the causes of my concern only because I love you so much. I hope now that, as you say, “we can close the subject entirely.”
Love and Kisses, Mother
Lillie helped May get ready for her wedding day. Lillie and Malcolm held a big dinner for May and Fred the night before the wedding, at their big posh house. No doubt they all had drinks celebrating the impending wedding, and laughed, and had a jolly old time saying, What would Opal think! It wasn’t right. Where was the bride’s mother in all this? In a hotel room with her cranky husband who wanted to be at the party instead of with her, that’s where.
So Opal went to her daughter’s wedding in the end, but she wore her second-best dress and would not shake hands with her new son-in-law in the minister’s study.
Opal and Mac arrived in White Rock on a Wednesday afternoon in May after their visit with May and Fred down in Seattle. The train trip across the border had been pleasant enough, and uneventful. It was a nice surprise to see all of Pearl’s family, excepting Tom, gathered at the station to meet them before taking them to the town of Beresford, where Tom and Pearl lived. They had gone to a restaurant for lunch, but both the food and the service were poor; Mac would describe it later as about as crummy a meal as he had ever experienced. Unfortunately, the situation would turn out to be the same at the Beresford Hotel, where Pearl had arranged for them to stay.
The visits they had every day with Pearl and her family were pretty nice, though Pearl was often dreadfully late picking them up at the hotel. The household was somewhat hectic and sometimes chaotic. The eldest, Ruby, was nowhere to be seen much of the time, squirrelled away with a book; the second, Laurel, was rather unruly and disobedient—she had painted the wall of her room with her watercolours while they were there—but Opal put that down to attention-seeking, and being a little jealous of the attention the two younger girls necessarily got from their mother. But they were much smaller children, three and four, and Amethyst had both allergies and asthma, and needed more attention. Actually, Pearl seemed to favour Amethyst above all the children, so it wasn’t all fabrication on Laurel’s part. Little Vivien, the youngest, seemed often to get lost in the shuffle, and had glommed right on to her grandmother as though she were a lifebuoy. Opal always found her hanging around nearby, asking to climb up in her lap, putting her little hands on Opal’s face, lifting the netting of her hat off her face, planting wet kisses wherever she could find space. Opal liked the child. Together they brushed their hair and got ready for bed, and more than once Vivien fell asleep curled up against her.
Pearl and Tom’s house was looking much better than it had during last year’s visit. It had a new roof, and Pearl had hired a neighbour man to put in some gardens, which looked quite nice—a triangular pansy bed near the front door, and a rose arbour through the middle of the front lawn left to right, with a cherry tree on either end. Opal and Mac escaped the house and went for a bit of a stroll after supper one evening when the rain let up—temporarily, of course—and they had discovered raspberry canes, and a thicket of blackberries that would soon be in bloom. The family seemed right at home. The rose arbour looked especially nice from the living room and bedrooms. Improvements were still under way. Tom spent one Sunday digging a large hole for what he said would be a lily pond. He mixed cement in a wheelbarrow, and worked away until past dark, and Pearl was cross with him for being late for dinner.
On the Saturday, the day of their departure, Pearl drove them into Vancouver, taking Ruby to her piano lesson and Laurel to a ballet lesson. The two youngsters had been dropped off at a babysitter’s, and how they had cried and carried on, saying goodbye to Gramma and Grampop! They had hung off her legs, hopped up and down—what a scene! Opal herself had found it hard not to join them with her own tears.
After the girls’ lessons, they had a light lunch on the sixth floor of the Hudson’s Bay before Pearl drove them to the CPR station, where she had let them out at the front doors and left them to fend for themselves with their luggage. Their train didn’t depart for another four hours, so they had plenty of time. They could have had one more hour of visiting, but Pearl was clearly glad to be seeing the backs of them. “We’ve been visiting for a week,” she exclaimed, as though she’d survived an ordeal. Not only that, she added, but she really had to get back to get Tom’s supper on.
That afternoon, Opal had finished planting her glads, and now she surveyed the patted earth outside the dining room window with satisfaction. The hardest work was done; she could simply wait until she saw green shoots poke through the earth, as the plants began their work making the tall, strong stalks. When she held the bulbs in her hands each spring, she was amazed and awed each time at God’s handiwork. How could such an unremarkable-looking brown, wrinkly, rootlike thing produce such spectacular flowers?!
Now she had changed out of her gardening clothes and straightened up the bedroom. She could smell supper cooking in the kitchen. She’d asked Audrey, their new girl, to have their meal ready for six. Maybe she was going to work out after all. Now that girls no longer lived with the people they worked for, Opal had found them less reliable, more likely to be late arriving and doing their work, though never late when departing. Audrey would be changing into her street shoes and slipping out the back door at the earliest possible moment.
Right before dinner, the florist delivered Opal a lovely rose corsage, a Mother’s Day gift from May. How happy its arrival had made her! She would ask Mac to help her pin it on when he came down for dinner. What a perfume it had! She would wear it to church in the morning. What a fine daughter May was! She never missed an important date, and she never failed to write or telephone every week. Thank goodness for one daughter with a heart and a conscience. Opal’s mouth tightened into a straight line. She hadn’t heard from Pearl. Or the granddaughters. In fact, there hadn’t been a word from any of them for ages, not for Mac’s birthday last month or Mother’s Day now. What was the matter with them?
This morning Audrey had helped Opal carry the bulbs up from the basement, and before he left for an afternoon golf game Mac had helped her prepare the soil, turning it over with a gardening fork. It would be a while before she saw signs of growth: the weather all week had been chilly, and looked to continue that way for a while yet. This morning, before she had gone outside, there had been rain, and then as she finished and was coming back in the house, some snowflakes had started falling. In May! Well, you never knew in this climate. Now, though, as she turned to go into the dining room for dinner, she saw that the sky was clear and there were stars coming out.
Opal took her place at the table and waited for Mac. She was hungry. Her hands fidgeted in her lap. The telephone hadn’t rung once today. Well, perhaps tomorrow. After supper, and a cup of tea in the living room with Mac, Opal drew the drapes across the living room windows, across the stars and the deep blue sky, and went up to bed.
Their next trip to Beresford was no better than the last, except that the children were older. It rained the whole time and the sky was so dark and gloomy that the atmosphere both inside and out was truly oppressive. Pearl complained endlessly about her lot, and about Tom and all that he was not doing that Pearl thought he should be doing. Tom was uncommunicative. Tom shirked his responsibilities. Every day, the wife of Tom’s medical partner went off in her pickup truck to spend the afternoon in the beer parlour (how sordid! thought Opal). The four girls sulked and wailed and fought and clamoured for attention Pearl did not give them, until Opal felt she couldn’t hold her tongue one minute longer, though she had.
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At home, Mac spent much of his time fishing, or golfing, or reading up in his study, while Opal puttered about below. Mac liked spending time alone more than she did. But they did go out together. Just last Tuesday they had gone to the Jubilee Auditorium to see the National Ballet, and the performance was on the whole pretty good, Opal had thought, especially the part called “Offenbach in the Underworld.” But Mac had not cared much for the second part, which featured five male dancers wearing ballet tights. If she and Mac hadn’t been in the middle of the row, he might have got up and left. In the car on the way home, Mac had ranted about the performance and how he did not get much of a kick out of seeing men cavorting around in tights. Indeed, he said, once or twice he had felt like bursting out laughing. Thank goodness, thought Opal, that he hadn’t.
Well, Mac was in better humour overall these days, why she could not say, but as a result so was she. He hadn’t flown into a rage since who knew when, and he got more upset about golf scores than about anything else. There were good things about getting older, though not many, as far as Opal could tell. She disliked the weight she had gained; she disliked how much more difficult it was for her to get around, even to go up and down the stairs. When the last girl had quit on them, Mac had suggested doing without, but she had put the kibosh on that in a hurry.
Both she and Mac had felt pretty tired after their Christmas vacation in Beresford. Between the two of them they must have washed and dried a thousand dishes. Every time they turned around there were more to do, stacked up by the sink. Their dishwashing machine was on the blink, Pearl said, and the repairman hadn’t shown up. Pearl was still adding to her long list of Tom’s failings, the most recent entry being that he was lazy. It did not seem so to Opal. Tom appeared to be busy as could be, coming and going from the hospital and going out on calls in the middle of the night in addition to his office hours, but Pearl did not see it that way. Any word Opal or Mac might murmur in Tom’s defence was construed by Pearl as a word against her. “You always take his side,” Pearl would have objected had Opal said a word, and yet another topic would be closed and another source of tension added to the growing heap.
Pearl never seemed to respond to any of the little affectionate advances Tom made, which didn’t help matters, and the goingson of the children, who seemed particularly unruly—as if Pearl was letting them run wild and waiting for him to take charge in the discipline department while he clearly felt otherwise—obviously got on Tom’s nerves. The children were not even required to remain at the table from the time they sat down until they finished their meals. Tom would get fed up and go off to the living room and play the piano for an hour, off in his own little world, as if that was the only peace and enjoyment he could find in his own home.
Opal would have to write a note to May and then include it with the letter Mac had already written, which was lying on the sideboard. He communicated with May more often than she did; their relationship seemed to be the best of them all.
June 1960
Dear May,
Well, the papers this last week have been swamped with advertisements of “Father’s Day.” Thank goodness I warned Pearl and you off this Father’s Day business years ago, so that I will not have to look forward to thanking either Pearl or you for a Power Mower or a high-powered rifle.
I have omitted in my last two or three letters mentioning Doctor Zhivago. I struggle with it every night for half an hour or so after I go to bed. Possibly I have no true literary taste, but where this book gets its reputation is beyond me. Really I find it very boring but I soldier on in the hope that it may improve. I am two-thirds of the way through now.
I have now finished the story of Hannibal. What a general! Greater even than Napoleon, I believe. I enjoyed not only the reading of it but also translating the copious notes in Latin and Greek by Livy and Polybius respectively. Over the course of my reading I have developed a great interest in Hannibal. He was such a marvellous man and yet ended his life in frustration.
Our garden is looking quite nice now. However, the gardener is slipshod in his work and so the garden does not have the well-clipped look it should have. (One certainly has to be content with very little nowadays from workmen and cleaning women. I wonder what it will be like twenty-five years from now.) The gardener put the pansies and sweet peas in last week. Your mother’s glads are appearing and we have a few leaves on the trees. Everything is behind, though, as the weather has been rather cool much of the time recently.
I took a great deal of interest in the Democratic and Republican conventions, as I think did most Canadians. The last-minute alliances between Kennedy and Johnson for the Democrats and Nixon and Rockefeller for the Republicans left most Canadians like myself somewhat mystified.
Love,
Dad
Eventually, Opal broke down and wrote to Pearl asking her please to make clear whether she wanted them to go to her house for Christmas or not. She explained as nicely as she could that they needed to do some planning, so they needed to know. To be on the safe side Mac had gone down to make the reservations on the train, in case Pearl answered in the affirmative. Even so, he could not get them the dates they wanted; he had to take a bedroom leaving on the Thursday before Christmas, which Opal was afraid Pearl would not like, because after the time they had stayed a week, Pearl never wanted to be bothered with them more than two days before Christmas and two days after. Pearl might think Thursday was too soon for them to arrive, and tell them they would be in her way.
While they waited for a response, Opal fretted. She tried to focus on making her annual list of ingredients for her Christmas baking, but she couldn’t concentrate and kept misplacing the list and then having to start over. What if Pearl said no again? What then? What would her family in Winnipeg think if they weren’t with their grandchildren for Christmas? Pearl and May had always been in Winnipeg with their grandparents for Christmas. Watching as they opened their parcels. The uncertainty was breaking Opal’s heart. Each day, she fretted until the mailman came, empty-handed. Here it was, almost December. They simply had to get an answer from her pretty soon. She wanted Mac to telephone, but he wouldn’t. “That would be the wrong thing to do,” he said. “And you may have noticed that we are always doing the wrong thing as far as Pearl is concerned.”
“Pooh,” Opal had retorted.
On December 1, they received Pearl’s letter. Pearl did not want them to come. So that was that. Opal felt let down, and she knew that Mac did too, though he would never admit it. They would be alone for Christmas, then, here in Calgary. Opal wailed that Pearl hadn’t even given any reasons, any explanation at all. She hadn’t sounded sad or sorry for one second.
“Why should that surprise you?” said Mac.
“But why doesn’t she tell us what is the matter?”
“When has Pearl ever expressed any regard for our feelings? Being secretive is her modus operandi. You can never pry anything out of her unless she wants you to.”
Opal tried to talk Mac into going out to the coast anyway. They could stay at the Beresford Hotel and keep out from underfoot at Pearl’s. Mac flatly refused. He said he could not see where that would get them except into more hot water. He said she should go out alone. But she didn’t want to. “We should go together,” she said. Mac repeated that he would not butt in where he was not wanted. “Case closed,” he said.
Opal sat for hours every day on the green fibreglass chair outside Mac’s hospital room, steadily knitting her way through ball after ball of coral-coloured mohair wool. In the bottom of her knitting bag she had Mac’s book in case he should ask for it, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he had ordered as an early birthday present to himself. But she would not go into his room.
Once she finished this sleeve and sewed the pieces together and blocked the sweater and then sewed on the flat mother-of-pearl buttons, she would have knit each of her granddaughters a new cardigan. This coral one was for the youngest, Vivien. Opal concentrated on what she was doi
ng, increase, decrease, though given the number of sweaters she had knit in her life, she could have almost done it blind.
Inside the hospital room, Mac, conscious and aware that he was likely dying from this, his second heart attack, lay unmoving, his hands at his sides on top of the covers. He did not read. He did not eat or drink. His glasses lay folded on the bedside table. He did not ask for Opal, or for Pearl or May. He did not ask for a thing. And then, one week before his eighty-second birthday, he died, with the door of his hospital room firmly shut between him and his wife, and that’s the way their life together ended, with him on the inside and her on the outside, knitting.
Shortly after his death, Opal learned that Mac had made all legal arrangements long before. He had not said anything about them to her, he had not involved her in any of the decisions, and the instructions came as a terrible surprise. He had instructed his executor, a trust company, to undertake the selling of the house and car as soon after his death as possible. It would be too much for a woman alone to handle, he noted, and he had wanted, according to the man from the trust company, to simplify matters for her.
Simplify? Simplify? How did robbing her of her home simplify anything? Opal saw his actions as deliberate cruelty, a final affirmation of what she had always suspected: that he did not love her, nor even like her, and this—this was his coup de grâce. This house was hers. She had wanted to live here for the rest of her life. How dare he? How could he? How she had revelled in doing all that she had been unable to do before, in that other house. She had decorated the house completely, she had grown all the flowers in its gardens. This house was home, and she loved it with all her heart.
But there was no time to adjust to anything. Now, with the world shifted greatly beneath her, and long before she was ready to face further change, Opal faced the For Sale sign in the middle of the lawn. Trust company. Who could trust them? At night she cried in fear and loneliness, and during the day, if the agent brought people by, she hid in the summer house or downstairs in the cold room. She could barely make a cup of tea without losing track of what she was doing, and when the house sold and the date of her eviction neared, she became frantic with worry yet was unable to string two thoughts together to help herself. Pain and anger sloshed weakly around inside her as she stood empty and alone in her bedroom looking out, her eyes fixed on her large, unkempt flower beds, remembering how they used to be, the glads tall and beautiful, packed with their prizewinning blooms. This year she hadn’t even got the bulbs in; here it was July and they were still wrapped in paper in the basement.
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