Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  “Why, Nolan, what a beautiful story,” Sherry said. “Is it true?”

  “Of course it is,” Nolan said. “I honour the truth, Sherry, you know that.”

  Car lights shone in the window. A car door slammed and a moment later the doorbell rang. No one else got up, so Nadia went into the hall and opened the door. Maurice walked in. He was wearing a white open-necked shirt and beige pants and Birkenstocks.

  “I was driving around,” he said. “It’s too damned hot to do anything else. Do you know how depressing that is, driving around at night alone?”

  “Come in,” Nadia said, stupidly, because he was already in the hall. “Everyone’s in the living room.”

  He leaned against the far wall, beside a table with a Tiffany lamp on it. He folded his arms. “How is Nadia?” he said.

  “I’m fine. Thank you,” she said. Maurice had brought the scent of sun-warmed pine needles in with him, from the tree beside the driveway. As she’d opened the door, she’d glimpsed the tree’s bulk against the night sky. It seemed to have inched closer, as if drawn to Nolan’s voice.

  “Nolan was telling us a story,” she said to Maurice.

  “Well, I am here to rescue you,” he said.

  The light in the hall was dim, the lamp set low. The hall was wide, almost as large as a room. On the other side of the wall behind Maurice was the room with Eleanor’s portrait. In the warm night the gold of her hair and the gold of the frame would pulse weakly, like a decaying element. Nadia had seen a cloud chamber once, on a school field trip. She remembered the delicate tracings of cosmic particles, like a malfunctioning Etch-a-Sketch. Or the mind, the way the mind worked, stray thoughts.

  Maurice pushed himself away from the wall. He came over to her. “Nadia, you are lovely,” he said. “Already you’ve attained a very fine control over your life, haven’t you? That’s not a bad thing.” He brushed her face very lightly, very slowly, with the back of his hand. A tremor passed through her. She breathed very quietly. She wanted to touch his scarred face. She wanted to know what the scars felt like, what they would feel like to him. She felt as if something inside him, in his mind, had burned them into his skin.

  Marni and Gavin came into the hall. Maurice had moved away from Nadia a second earlier. He went and kissed Marni. He shook hands with Gavin. Marni took a set of keys from a bowl on the hall table, as if plucking a grape. “I’m taking your car, Sherry,” she called. “Is that okay?”

  Sherry called back. “Drive carefully.”

  Marni grimaced. She and Gavin left. Nadia noticed they didn’t invite her along. She followed Maurice into the living room. He said what an uncomfortably humid night it was and Sherry said, yes, indeed. “August can be like this,” she said. Maurice said there would be a storm. Nadia thought perhaps there already had been a storm and this was its aftermath. She thought of the ending of Rebecca, the sun rising, the air filled with the bitterest of ashes.

  In the morning Nadia went back to the island. She didn’t see Sherry and Nolan again until just before classes started in September, after she’d spent a day at the university campus, paying the balance of her housing fees, searching the bookstore for her textbooks. When she got to Sherry and Nolan’s, they were in the backyard, where Nolan was cooking salmon steaks on the barbecue. He greeted her affectionately. He even gave her an awkward, moist kiss on the cheek. She kissed the air beside his face. She had brought flowers for Sherry, and Sherry went into the kitchen to put them in water. When she came back to the patio, she told Nadia how nice she looked. Nadia laughed, because they were all wearing black. She was wearing the blouse Sherry had brought her back from France. Sherry was wearing a black shift. Nolan was wearing a black golf shirt with khaki shorts. How suitable, Nadia thought: the family in black. She thought that she, like Nolan, had at last learned who she was. Not that the knowledge was all that edifying, but still it was there. This was her family. This was one part of it, anyway. Jonah and Laurel. Marjory. Eleanor. Samantha, of course. The sons, James and Simon. A broken, patchily reassembled family in the early years of a century no one had yet learned to trust or had any reason to trust. Gavin was right, Nadia thought. She, too, believed history had moved beyond human control. She hoped not. But everyone she knew agreed something was wrong: the summers too hot, the clouds strange, the sun too intense. She thought of the red-tailed hawks evicted from their forest, their panicked shadows passing over her, as ominous and misplaced as Nolan’s deer in the snowy night. It wasn’t easy to achieve a balance. She remembered, at the wedding, listening to “American Pie.” She remembered the part about music saving the immortal soul. Could it be done, the song had asked.

  She thought of Sherry at the wedding in her beautiful dress, flowers in her hair. If only, Nadia thought, it really was possible to spin straw into gold. She would give the gold away. She would dress in black exclusively, as a sign, a sign of her seriousness and devotion to an elusive dream. She’d give everyone gold from a vast, inexhaustible storehouse. She’d do it out of love, like the miller’s daughter.

  SAND AND FROST

  ONLY ONCE THAT SEMESTER did Lydia feel happy, and that was when it snowed and everything got quiet and acquired a sense of gravitas and beauty that made her think it must have been like this in the nineteenth century or at an enclosed monastery somewhere, where no one spoke or raised their eyes and all thoughts remained secret and hidden. But the snow quickly turned to incessant rain, and many little things began to go wrong. She lost her only pair of gloves. She woke at night, thinking she heard her grandmother’s voice. During the day, as well, she heard the same voice, always goading her, telling her: Lydia, this is what happened in our family, we have this shame we can’t get rid of. In her direct, bossy tone, she blamed the unspeakable event in their family’s past for Lydia’s present unhappiness. What can you expect? she said. It was their heritage. It was in their genes. Which Lydia did not, frankly, disbelieve. Something made her different. She was twenty years old. She was the recipient of a small scholarship. She had no friends, apart from Declan, another outcast. The only other people she ever spoke to were her parents, when she called home on Saturday mornings from the pay phone at the end of the hall. They didn’t want to hear that she was lonely or hated the food or couldn’t concentrate on her work. They said, Ah, student life! Her father said she must refrain from burning her candle at both ends, as Elinor Wylie advised.

  You mean Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lydia said.

  Oh, my, yes, of course, her father said. St. Vincent Millay it is! Something about oh my friends, oh my foes, and the candle giving a lovely light as it burns. Isn’t that it? Lydia, how I envy your supple young mind! Oh, dear, he said, he had a call on the other line, from a parishioner. Take care, my love, he shouted, and then he was gone.

  Her father was an Anglican priest. Her mother was a secretary at the same elementary school Lydia had gone to. She sent Lydia parcels of cookies and sweaters she’d knitted in strange nubbly wool. In the communal washroom on the third floor of the residence, girls whose names Lydia didn’t know, their shoulders pink and moist from the shower, would pluck at her sleeves and say, Oh, cute sweater, when what they really meant was: That sweater is ugly as hell! In the steamed-up mirror Lydia could see for herself: the sweaters made her breasts look heavy, her waist thick, nothing like as supple as her mind was supposed to be. Even her hands looked pudgy, like her mother’s stodgy dumplings in a stew pot. In class she kept her coat on and tucked her hands inside her sleeves. She tried to concentrate on Dr. Julian Schelling’s lecture on Matthew Arnold, how the poet had considered the English church a civilizing influence, how he’d insisted the Bible should be approached as if it were an epic poem, full of blood and lust and infamy.

  The way Julian pronounced those words — blood, lust, infamy — sent a delicious chill down her spine. It seemed he’d discovered, through osmosis or divination, the precise, startling details of her unspeakable family history. But he didn’t glance once in her direction. His voice was
low, indistinct. Or maybe she just couldn’t hear over the grandmother’s lament: We deserved better, Lydia. We deserved to live, all of us.

  After class, she followed Julian as far as the car park. That morning he’d assigned “Stanzas on the Grand Chartreuse,” by Matthew Arnold. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born. She loved the poem and also the poet — his tender, abstemious mouth and lavish, frizzy sideburns — but mostly she loved the professor, his elegant, fawn-coloured leather jacket, the complicated knotting of his scarf. He set his briefcase down to unlock his car and when he turned to pick it up he must have seen her, but he gave no sign. Long after he’d gone she stood there, watching two black squirrels skittering around in the bushes beside the path. Her breath, visible on the still air, looked like small cartoonish pleas for help.

  In December Lydia went home. She took the bus out to Horseshoe Bay, where she walked onto the ferry. There was a storm. The sky was black. A woman with three small children came and sat on the bench facing her. The two smaller children kept crying, or grizzling, as Lydia’s grandmother would have said, and their mother, who had long curly hair and very large pale eyes, tried to mollify them with cans of pop and gummy bears. The oldest, a little girl of about five, planted herself in front of Lydia, keeping her balance in spite of the ship’s fractiousness. She was wearing patent leather shoes with ankle straps, a short, flared skirt, like a figure skater. She looked like her mother, but with small, shrewd eyes. She began a long unvoiced indictment of Lydia’s primary failings, admittedly legion: her introversion, her possessiveness, which concealed a gaping maw of insecurity, her willingness to live exclusively in the milieu of disgruntled dreams. Lydia knew the little girl wasn’t real. She was a vision, a device of the gods, put on earth to destroy the last shreds of Lydia’s self-esteem.

  The ship juddered and veered sideways. Navigation in a storm. What could be more invigorating, more receptive to risk? The little girl showed off for Lydia, standing on one leg, arms out. Lydia prayed for shipwreck. She wanted to grab the little girl’s tatty unwashed hair and drag her down with her, down into the cold, uncharted recesses of the Georgia Strait.

  In the end the ferry docked safely and Lydia took a taxi to her parents’ home, arriving just as the rain let up and a few tinselly winter stars glittered overhead. Her parents were in the living room. On a side table there was an advent wreath, with one candle that had been lit and extinguished. Her father drowsed in his reclining chair, a tattered paperback copy of Christian Believing by Hans Küng open on his chest, while Lydia’s mother knitted, her feet up on a hassock. The grandmother sat upright, ankles crossed. She was and was not the grandmother who had haunted Lydia’s sleep. She got up and took Lydia’s hand and said, Darling, darling girl, what a surprise!

  Lydia’s mother went into the kitchen and made a cold roast beef sandwich with Dijon mustard, a favourite of Lydia’s, usually, but she was too wrought up to eat. She put the sandwich in the fridge, beside a triple-layer chocolate cake destined, no doubt, for a church bake sale or a Parish Council meeting. She stuck a finger in the icing and licked it clean, sugar flooding her brain like anaesthesia designed for a low-functioning, panicky lab rat. Her mother, in the living room, was saying things like: But it’s the end of the term, she should be studying. I’m going to have a serious little word with her, right now.

  Sit down, June, Lydia’s father said.

  Leave her be, the grandmother said. Just leave the child alone.

  The grandmother had fine white hair she combed out and let lie flat against her head. Her bedroom slippers were threaded with gold, like ancient dancing shoes. Her name was Pauline. In the morning she came to Lydia’s bedroom door. Since you’re here, she said, you might as well get up and make us a cup of tea.

  Lydia got up. She got up, but her body remained on the bed, palms open like a mendicant. The trueness of it, the accusatory blankness, the blunt refusal to wish for more, more of everything: poetry, love, a real life. In the kitchen she filled the kettle and put it on the stove. Her parents left for work early, in separate cars. Her father ate breakfast at a café, where, he said, roughly the same people assembled at the same hour, every morning, like an unusually faithful and receptive congregation. Later, these same people made brief, luminous appearances in his sermons, which possessed the easeful veracity of parables: there was a blind man with a small brown dog; there was a retired pilot who’d developed a fear of heights; there was a woman who sang Janis Joplin songs to herself, in a rich and emphatic voice: the blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad. Her father loved the parade of life, the mishmash. Not Lydia. Even around the grandmother she felt shy. She thought regretfully of the campus silent beneath snow, the earth’s soft wintry breathing. She thought of Julian. How lonely he’d seemed, and yet how self-sufficient and contained, as if he needed no one.

  Her grandmother spread marmalade to the four corners of her toast. She sipped her tea. She said, We will take this one day at a time, Lydia.

  How strange, Lydia thought, that each person was made up of innumerable past selves and these selves were hidden and unreachable. She could barely remember being three years old; she had no memory of her own infancy, and the grandmother across the table from her seemed completely unrelated to the grandmother she remembered from her childhood or even from a few years ago. Somewhere there must exist, still, the Pauline who’d walked innocently toward a house in which a terrible crime had assembled its mysterious, transgressive elements. Pauline’s mother and her sister and brother, what remained of them, had been in that house. Her father, the Reverend Elliot Saunders, had one day come home with a gun and had picked them off one by one, and then he’d gone outside and shot himself. When it was finished, no one but Pauline survived.

  An old tragedy, but persistent, the sole narrative at the heart of Lydia’s family. It made them what they were: good people, meek people.

  That day, on her way home from the bank where she worked, Pauline had thought she glimpsed her father up ahead of her on the road. He was there, then he was gone. It was a Wednesday in October, a clear, cold day. She remembered birches ghostly against dark firs, leaves like gold coins strewn across the road. A sense of urgency gripped her and she’d started to run, but she got a stitch in her side and had to slow down. What came next? The truth was, she saw only so much. Outside her house a little knot of people had gathered. They stood around her and wouldn’t let her pass. The police constable staggered out of the house and was sick on the ground. He wiped his mouth on his uniform sleeve. He ordered the others to take Pauline home with them and keep her there. Later he’d gone to see her, and had talked to her about what had happened and about how she felt. She’d said, Constable Morgan, I have no idea how I feel. He had smiled and told her to call him Henry. He became a good friend to her, she told Lydia. His sister, Jane, who was a professional photographer, with a studio of her own in Victoria, had been staying with Henry for a few weeks. The two of them had taken Pauline for meals at the hotel dining room. They’d made a trip out to the house for her, and brought back a few things she’d asked for: her sweater, her toothbrush, her mother’s Bible.

  Lydia remembered her own grandfather saying it could happen in the best of families, the crime passionnel, although in fact it didn’t, not usually. His advice was: never turn your back on a Saunders. His little joke caused Lydia’s parents to recoil. Lydia had recognized her grandfather’s audaciousness as a bulwark, a reverse charm. She remembered him clearly: a tall man, gaunt, with unruly silver hair. In the 1940s, he’d studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, in the Arizona desert, and something of that had stayed with him: an expansiveness, a warmth, a dry humour. When he’d died, after suffering a stroke, his widow had mourned like a vice-regent. She couldn’t be left alone; she couldn’t sleep. She sold her house in West Vancouver, the handsome, sprawling house with windows but no interior walls, or as few as possible, nothing to impede the line of sight. She’d
moved in with Lydia’s parents and then pronounced the rectory unliveable, an architectural nightmare with no view, nothing to look out at, unless you counted the asphalt in the church parking lot. She’d found a house more to her taste and had purchased it and turned the title over to Lydia’s parents, and that was where they lived.

  Lydia had been twelve when her grandfather died. She’d adored him. He’d given her a dollar every time she saw him. He’d told her about working with Frank Lloyd Wright under a canopy of canvas, the desert sun rising in a conflagration, stark shadows of Saguaro cactus like pen strokes on the sand, mountains of folded silk, rose, and coral. One spring he took Pauline on a driving holiday through the American southwest, with a side trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he’d introduced her to the famous architect. They’d hit it off at once. They’d talked for hours, although neither was aware of the other’s history, the chain of violent death and sudden inexplicable fires, although Frank Lloyd Wright, like one of those bright little desert lizards, had a knack for slithering out from under catastrophe. He was a visionary and a capitalist; he looked at the mountains and stars and did things with them, turned them to account. He didn’t let anything interfere with what he wanted out of life. Neither had Pauline. Nor should anyone, Lydia, her grandfather had said, touching a finger lightly to her nose. On Sunday afternoons, he took her to Queen Elizabeth Park and showed her a view of the gardens from a dizzying height, emerald lawns, spires of evergreens, etiolated broad-leafed shrubberies, winding arterial paths, a human world of beauty, harmonious, tamed, and yet still Lydia felt the delicious threat of letting go and falling.