I rise stiff and aching in the morning, as if I’ve run for miles without stopping to stretch or eat or drink, and have collapsed and slept in a clump on the bare ground.
“Won’t you come home, now, Aggie?” Cora asks as I’m leaving.
“What?” I make no effort to disguise my surprise.
“I can’t manage him all by myself.”
Our father, she means.
It is September, the leaves on the trees green but tinged with rust, crumpling at the edges. Soon will come the winds of fall and the chill of winter, and I can’t even imagine it just now—returning home.
I’m bent over, packing my small suitcase. Can she see it on my face? How eager I am to be leaving, how my mood is already lightened to be so nearly gone? She doesn’t repeat her request.
SMART, JESSICA EVE (née Liddel). Suddenly, at home, aged seventy-five. Remembered sadly by her husband, Robert Smart, of Stony Hill Farm, New Arran, Ontario, and by her daughters. Predeceased by several stepchildren. Mrs. Smart was unofficial midwife to many babies born in Clyde County. In later years, she remained a friend to those in need. Her death, the result of an accident, leaves many bereft. May she rest in peace.
I FIND MYSELF considering Cora’s request. Perhaps I am flattered to think she wants me. I take myself for a long swim on a Saturday morning, and decide that I might agree to return home, to help with Father. It all looks so clear under the water, the pebbled bottom, the roar inside my head. My breath comes cleanly, every third stroke. My turns are crisp. I am weightless in the water, ageless.
Freshly towelled and dressed, hair brushed flat against my skull and drying into flyaway strands, I walk shivering from the pool to The Peacock to meet Miss Alexandrine Gibb, the news of my decision clapping loudly in my head.
Miss Gibb and I meet every third Saturday of the month for coffee and sandwiches at The Peacock, where they haven’t changed the decor since we first started coming here, autumn 1931, which was just after I began working for Miss Gibb’s newspaper. Twenty years on, 1951, the cracked red booths, thick tabletops covered in plastic, and steamed windows remain the same. We hold fast to our habits too. We both like the club sandwich on white. I add a side of fries. She doesn’t like pickles, but gets them because she knows that I do. Neither of us order the pie, but we always say we might, and if we do it will be the lemon meringue. But we never do. And though I try, I cannot call her Alex, as she would prefer. She will always be Miss Gibb to me.
“My sister Cora wants me home again. I’m stuck at obits. I wonder whether I might as well retire,” I say, tucking my damp hair behind my ears. It is still blond, but fading as blond hair does, by discreet degrees, the white threads silvering out the yellow ones.
“Don’t go home,” she says. “There are few enough of us as it is. You’d be giving up.”
“I’ve been thinking about success, Miss Gibb. What makes a champion?”
“Don’t you know, Miss Smart?” She makes a point of calling me Miss Smart when I call her Miss Gibb, to remind me not to. Or perhaps we’re both more comfortable calling each other by the names that belonged to us when we first met, when she was so much my superior, manager of Team Canada’s girls, a woman of middle age, if thirty-something is to be considered middle-aged, and I was nothing but an untested runner, a girl of twenty, and we were hurtling forward, not knowing the way, but certain we would find it. “I should think if anyone would know, Miss Smart, it would be you.”
“But I don’t, Miss Gibb. I don’t.”
She waves to the waitress for more coffee. We watch the waitress pour. Miss Gibb’s spoon clinks against the thick rim of the cup. She says again, “If anyone would know success, Aganetha Smart, it would be you.”
“I know that a gold medal doesn’t make you a champion. Nor does winning. I know that.”
The clink of her spoon. The spoon upon the shiny tabletop. My eyes on the spoon.
“Ah, I see,” says Miss Gibb, and I am reminded that once upon a time we were not friends, once upon a time she was my superior who frightened me with her knack for seeing what I thought was hidden. “But that was never why I thought you were a champion, Aganetha.”
My eyes shine and I blink hard. My fingers fumble with the tiny silver spoon in the sugar bowl, spilling a trail across the table. I am thinking of our first meeting here in the café, when she offered me advice I chose not to take: she told me not to show a story I had written to an editor whose attention I hoped to gain; it was not my story to tell, she said. Wasn’t it? I remain certain it was the wrong advice. Maybe she agrees. In any case, she does not tell me now what I ought to do. I rather wish she would.
Instead she asks: “Where do you want to be, Miss Smart?”
“Running,” I say without thinking.
“Ah.”
“I don’t know what that means myself, Miss Gibb.”
“Nor do I.” She waves for the bill. “More coffee?”
“How about pie?”
“Next time.”
And that’s when I know that I will refuse Cora’s request, because I would like a next time, and a next time, and someday, perhaps a piece of lemon meringue pie.
“Retire when I retire,” she says, “and we’ll travel the world together.”
Won’t we?
GIBB, ALEXANDRINE (Alex). Born 1891, died 1958, Toronto, Ontario. Daughter of John and Sarah (Sparks) Gibb. A talented athlete in her youth, Miss Gibb was also the founder of the Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation of Canada (1926–1953), the manager of Canada’s highly successful women’s Olympic team, Amsterdam, 1928, and for thirty years a distinguished editor and columnist for the Toronto Daily Star. Her influence on women’s sport in Canada shall never be forgotten. Miss Gibb is remembered by her siblings, her colleagues, and her many kind friends.
I AM SORRY to see the barn come down.
Why does my father begin to dismantle it, board by board, beam by beam, and haul the pieces into the back field beside the pond, where he resurrects its bones in the form of a lighthouse? What could set in motion such a strange undoing?
“He’s old,” says Cora. “That’s why.”
“He’s not that old.”
“He’s over eighty, Aggie.”
“Is he? He’s still so strong.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I can’t make him do anything he’s put his mind to not doing.”
Once upon a time, my job was to ask: Why? Why did she smother her babies? Why did he burn down the house with the children inside? Why did he stab his so-called friend on the street outside the bar where they’d been drinking all night? Well, the answer to that one seems obvious, I suppose. And yet, I can assure you, there are no obvious answers that satisfy. Because the simple rule of the inexplicable is that nothing does.
We will never know why. The person himself cannot tell us, and if he tries to—because some will, as if trying to tell themselves—we won’t buy it. It won’t cover the ground he’s razed.
Eventually I learn to stop asking why. I do my job. I crisply record unvarnished facts. I do it now. I note the fact that my father has drawn sketches onto a series of yellow cards, illustrating a building that appears to be structurally sound—in that regard, quite sane. Here the curving staircase will wind inside the sloped walls, leading to one tidy circular room high above the treetops, to be furnished with a simple cot and a table and chairs, and the means for cooking a meal. There will be windows all around the room, and overhead will swing the great light, a beacon in the night to warn the ships from the rocks, from coming too close to shore—in that regard, utterly insane.
“It’s a lighthouse, Cora, he’s building a lighthouse.”
“Do you think I don’t know it? I’m the one who has to make his breakfast every morning.”
“Someone should stop him.”
“Go ahead and try.”
Without telling Cora where I’m going I take the path through the woods to town to pay a visit to the doctor—Peter, son of the former doctor. He sits behi
nd his desk, nodding at my story: sister, father, crumbling barn, lighthouse. When I’ve laid it out before him, Peter, who used to be my schoolmate, says, “You’re looking tired, Aganetha. I’d advise iron pills.”
“This is about my father.”
“Are you afraid he will harm himself? Or somebody else?”
“No.”
“Does he seem happy?”
“He’s buried seven children and two wives, so I don’t think happy is precisely the word I’d choose.”
The doctor waits. Doctors are like reporters, if they know their business well. They wait, and the underneath bubbles up.
“He’s as happy as he’s ever been,” I allow. “But Cora’s not happy, not at all. And I’m in the city, and Olive lives on the other side of the planet with her own family, and that’s it, that’s all of us. Edith’s his daughter, but she doesn’t count. She scarcely visits, not according to Cora, and she’s never been strong, as you know—she’s no help. Think of what we were, think of the farm, think of what it was, Peter. You remember it.”
“I do,” he says.
“If my father wanted to build a spaceship to the moon, I wouldn’t blame him. I say let him build a lighthouse.”
The doctor nods to indicate he is listening patiently. We are both aged forty-four years, but do not imagine we are judged the same—he is a man and I am a woman, and the year is 1952. I dye my hair to keep the colour bright. If you were feeling uncharitable, you might describe the hue as “brassy.” I am not past the childbearing age, but my cycles have changed—not that I will mention it to the good doctor—and the blood arrives scanty and uncertain some months, or not at all, or in a terrible aching flood that brings on acne and cramping. A pregnancy this late would elicit pity, even if I were a married woman.
The doctor’s wife is younger. He says they are expecting their third child any day now, and he smiles at me, quite relaxed, as if we will now speak as old friends.
“Are you home often?” he asks.
“No,” I say, and leave it at that. In fact, I haven’t been home since my mother’s funeral, a year gone by.
The doctor scribbles something on a piece of paper and slides it across the desk, taking care to touch my hand, as if he expects me to turn my palm to him, to give him something in return. I do not. I fold the paper without looking at it and put it into my pocketbook and stand. He reminds me of a certain predictable variety of man, with a modicum of power at his disposal, and assumptions about a single woman’s status and desires. Or perhaps he only wants a friend. I’ve friends enough.
“Do you still run?” The doctor wants to keep me here, with him, a while longer. Late autumn sunlight, so rare, streams through the tall window behind his desk. He stands and is bathed in it. I remember him as a child. I remember running faster than him—faster than all of the boys—with the skirt of my dress hitched up. I remember that there came an age, around fourteen or fifteen, when a few of the boys could beat me in the short sprints, although I doubt any of them could have held on over a long pounding race. I can’t remember whether he was one who was briefly quicker. I think not.
“No,” I say again, though it’s not the truth. Do I still run? What could stop me? But I will keep saying no until he hears me, now that I think he’s shown his hand. Pregnant wife, bawling children, country life. He took his degree in the city, and I remind him of who he thinks he was. Perhaps I spark some dread, some doubt, about his choice, made years ago, to come home and take over his father’s practice, to live inside the life his father made for him.
He reminds me of Cora.
My presence draws her dissatisfaction like a good ointment draws a splinter—but the splinter never comes out of the wound. I know Cora wouldn’t speak to others as she speaks to me.
I know Cora to be helpful at births, and before, with the women whose wombs are unwilling, and afterward, dispensing teas and salves to new mothers, showing them how to latch their babies to their breasts. I know the doctor likes and trusts Cora, and that she works occasional shifts at the town’s new hospital, where most women in the area now give birth, painlessly, drugged and in a half-wake, walking sleep.
Cora does not approve of the new methods. She has told me that she believes the pain of childbirth is essential to the experience, ordained.
“Don’t go,” says the doctor.
I stop, my hand on the doorknob. I can pull it open in an instant and exit into the small reception area where his secretary, the butcher’s wife, Mrs. Guillame, waits at her desk with ears wide open. The reception area and this office are rooms in the doctor’s house, and the sound of a child crying can be heard, faintly.
Now it is my turn to wait, if I care to, for whatever is bubbling underneath to boil to the surface.
“I know your mother has been gone for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”
I wait.
“Your mother—” He clears his throat. He wants me to look directly into his eyes, to register the importance of this moment, and I oblige him, for my mother’s sake. “My father respected your mother to the end,” the doctor says, but he can’t hold my gaze after all and drops it to the desktop, where his fingers drum nervously. “My father said she’d spared more lives than anyone knew. I wanted to tell you. Contrary to what Cora says—and Cora’s a good woman, don’t misunderstand me—I think your mother was very brave. And you too.”
In shocked silence, I stare at him, the breath gone out of me.
“Your father will be fine,” the doctor says. “Cora is an excellent nurse, excellent. Leave it to her. Don’t worry yourself. You have better things to do.”
I wait. I can’t move anyway.
“If you are not running, as you say, you should be. You were . . . magnificent.”
“I write about dead people,” I tell him, as if this cancels out my opportunities to run. “I used to report on people who killed people, but now I write about lives lived.”
I would like to leave now. I’m trembling.
“Aganetha.” His saying of my name, just the fact of it, stops me a little longer. “Won’t you meet me for a drink later?”
“No. But thank you,” I tell him in a voice not entirely my own, and with that I go, nodding weakly to Mrs. Guillame, whom I can’t make out clearly. My eyes have no time to adjust. The reception area is a small but opulently decorated room that receives almost no outside light. I suspect this puts Mrs. Guillame at an advantage with all comers. I suspect she can hear every word spoken inside the doctor’s office, and I suspect he has no idea—it hasn’t occurred to him. It won’t have.
She coos like a mourning dove. “Say hello to your sister for me, Miss Smart.”
Much later, when I am in the city, I find the piece of paper the doctor’s given me. I am digging around in my pocketbook for a different scrap, one on which I’ve written a phone number for the daughter of a dead man whose life I am to sum up before press time, and which I can’t for the moment locate.
I unfold the slip of paper. The words are written in the doctor’s scrawl, signed with his name. It is a prescription for iron pills.
I do not fill it.
SMART, ROBERT. Of RR # 3, New Arran, Ontario, on September 12, 1957, in his eighty-seventh year. Robert was born on the same farm on which he died, of natural causes. Son of Robert and Mary Smart. Predeceased by his first wife, Tilda, and seven of their eight children, and one grandson, and survived by their daughter Edith Miller and one granddaughter. Also predeceased by his second wife, Jessica, and survived by daughters Olive Gunn (Herbert), Cora, and Aganetha, and four grandchildren, all of Australia. A private burial has taken place.
NOW YOU COME HOME, AGGIE? says Cora. Now that there’s no one to look after? Now that you’ve no unpleasant duties waiting? Now that it’s only me and the house? Who says I want you now? Who says you’re welcome? Your name might be on the deed but this farm doesn’t belong to you. You left home. You left like everyone else did. Didn’t
that make them sad? Didn’t that make them weep? What would you know, Aggie, what would you know about giving up everything?
WHAT’S A WEEK, a month, a year or forty? It vanishes too.
Slowly, steadily, we empty and shutter room after room until our lives shrink to the space we can manage to occupy. We inhabit no more than we can. Even that can seem too much. One day in winter, I shutter the Granny Room. I empty out the drawers and hang the sheets over the window and door.
Lavender. Crumbling in my stiff fingers, mouldy. Dust.
18
Tattie
THE GIRL’S EYES meet mine in the rearview mirror. “Miss Smart, do you know you have a lawyer? Max and Mother have been to see him, and we don’t think he’s got your best interests at heart.”
A lawyer, yes, well, I’d forgotten. That would be Peter’s son, the doctor’s boy? His office the same his father kept clinic in, and there are papers to sign, my hand trembling with age not nerves, while Peter’s boy looks on. That would explain who’s been paying for the home that is not a home, which bothers me when it crosses my mind. I always paid my own way.
“I always paid my own way,” I tell the girl, but she mistakes my meaning.
“It’s different now, Miss Smart. You don’t know how much it costs—there’s coaching, physio, massage. There’s vitamin supplements, travel expenses, gear, gym time, you have no idea, or I can’t compete. I’m trying to get to Rotterdam, Miss Smart. If I can lower my time there, I’ll make the team, and I’m close. I think I can do it.”
I hear the words, but it’s like the girl is speaking a different language. The rules have changed from my day, she’s saying. It isn’t the same. The path is cluttered with obstacles. The obstacles are lit up in dollar signs.
I would like to tell her what matters, but I know better than to attempt it. She may be right, and it all comes down to the money. Who am I to argue? If I paid my own way, as I claim, who, then, was Mr. P. T. Pallister? I was lucky, as much as I was anything.
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