Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson

  Daniel said, “Look, he’d been slogging away for years, he knew others were slogging away in the same field and might well get there first, he was sure that in the end he’d be proved right anyway.”

  I said that was a pretty paltry excuse, if you asked me. And after a pause, Daniel said, “Does the word empathy mean anything to you, Kate?”

  It was our first quarrel. Except that we didn’t quarrel, we withdrew, and were polite and distant with each other for several days.

  Daniel is naive in some ways. He hasn’t had to struggle for anything in life and that has made him easygoing. Undemanding. Not so much of himself as of other people. He is generous and fair and tolerant, all of which are qualities I admire, but sometimes I think he carries them too far. Sometimes he makes excuses for people in a way which almost denies them responsibility for themselves. I believe in free will. I do not deny the influence of genetics or environment—what biologist could?—and I’m aware that we are biologically programmed to do many of the things we do. But within those constraints, I believe we have choice. The idea that we are carried along by fate, unable to resist or change direction, sounds suspiciously like an excuse to me.

  But I’m getting off the subject. What I wanted to say was, I thought at the time that Daniel’s comment about empathy was very unfair, but it kept coming back to me, irritatingly, whenever someone did something really off the wall. And when I started thinking about Luke and Sally again, back in February when all this family business came up, I found myself trying to imagine what Sally had thought she was doing, all those years ago. What could have been in her mind? How could any girl want to become involved with someone as encumbered as Luke?

  The only explanation I could think of was that she failed to realize that Luke’s situation was for real. I think she was highly sexed, and not very bright and therefore more than usually at the mercy of her hormones, and something about Luke’s situation appealed to her. Big brother looking after two little sisters—did she find some illicit sexual thrill in the idea? Or was it more innocent? Maybe Sally looked at us and saw a pretty picture and simply wanted to paint herself into it. Handsome boy, pretty girl, two ready-made children— maybe inside her head Sally McLean was playing house. But then Luke took his hand away and spoiled the game.

  I can imagine the story she told her parents. She’d be a great storyteller. She’d have worked it out on her way home that evening and by the time she got there she would have believed it herself. She would have burst into the small living room the McLeans had at the back of the store, her hair dishevelled and her cheeks flaming with injured pride disguised as distress. Her parents would have looked up in alarm and stared at her, and she’d have stared back for a second or two and then burst into sobs.

  She’d have said, “Daddy … Daddy …” in a broken voice, and poor wordless old Mr. McLean would have found words and said, “What, baby?” (Or “sweetheart.” He would have called her something like that.) “What is it?”

  And Sally would have sobbed, “Daddy, you know Luke… .”

  “Luke? Yes. Yes?”

  “Well he … he tried …”

  You can just see it, can’t you?

  It’s possible that they didn’t believe her—however much they loved her, they must have had some knowledge of their own daughter. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. They would have known that if Sally had taken against him, it would be impossible to keep Luke on.

  They didn’t tell him straight away. They must have agonized about it for a week or so, while Sally raged in the background and Luke allowed himself to hope. I can’t imagine how they finally broke it to him, both of them being at a loss for words at the best of times. In the end, Luke probably made it easy for them. Probably when they were locking up one night, Mr. McLean cleared his throat half a dozen times and finally said, “Uh, Luke.”

  And Luke waited for a minute, hoping against hope that it wasn’t what he thought it was. And then the silence would have gone on until he knew it had to be what he thought it was, so he would have said, “Okay. Yeah. I know.”

  Mr. McLean would have looked ashamed. He’d have said in a whisper, “Sorry, Luke.”

  Though maybe I’m underestimating the extent to which even parental love is blind. Maybe they did believe Sally, and were disgusted by Luke, and felt that he had betrayed their kindness in the vilest way.

  I doubt it though. We still used their store, there being no alternative, and they still beamed at me whenever I came in, and when I got home I always discovered that little extras had somehow found their way into the shopping bag: a couple of blackballs, a twist of licorice— the odd little treat that they knew we couldn’t afford.

  As I said, it was back in February, when the invitation to Matt’s son’s birthday party arrived, that I started thinking about all this again. Normally when I’m about to go home for a visit the memories start drifting in, but this time they came in a real flood. Partly, I guess, it was the significance of Simon turning eighteen. But part of it, I’m sure, was due to the “problem” of Daniel.

  Daniel had indeed seen the invitation. He had read it. He knew that he could have been included in it if I had chosen to include him.

  That realization came to me slowly, but I got my first serious hint at an exhibition we went to the afternoon after the invitation arrived. The exhibition had the inspiring title “Microscopes Through the Ages,” and unsurprisingly, we were the only people there. In fact it wasn’t as bad as it sounded: there was everything from a collection of little flea-glasses from about 1600 to a magnificent and completely useless instrument that had been made for King George III, which was too tall to use if it was mounted on a table and too short to use if it stood on the floor, and had lenses which were incorrectly positioned. Apart from that, as Daniel said, it was perfect in every way. Fit for a king.

  What told me that Daniel had something on his mind, though, was that a number of the more robust instruments had been set out so that you could play with them, and yet he didn’t. Daniel the great fiddler, Daniel the microbiologist. He stood in front of them one after another, staring at them thoughtfully but hardly touching them. Then he stood for a ridiculously long time staring at a century-old micrograph of the proboscis of a Victorian housefly, and then he looked at his watch and said that it was time we headed downtown to meet his parents for dinner.

  Normally, I was happy enough to get together from time to time with the Professors Crane. I had to be feeling fairly strong to cope with a whole evening in their company, but they had accepted me without reservation from the first time we met, which had impressed me, considering the difference in our backgrounds, and biased me in their favour. In the early days I had found their battles at the dinner table stressful, but I think that was because I expected one or other of them to win. When I realized how well matched they were, I was able to relax a little. I was still sometimes enlisted or used as ammunition by one or the other of them, or even by both at the same time, but I was learning how to handle that.

  That evening, though, they were both on particularly prickly form. I had difficulty concentrating on what they were saying because I was so conscious of Daniel’s abstraction, and throughout the evening I could feel the levels of tension within me rising like mercury in a barometer. The restaurant was one of their favourites, small, expensive, and airless, or so it seemed that night. Daniel’s mother spent most of the evening reminiscing about his childhood, which was something she hadn’t done before, and for the first time in my life I realized that there are advantages in having your parents safely dead.

  “He was the most placid child, Katherine. From when he was still in diapers—I might say he was in diapers for an inordinately long time, but even so—you could take him anywhere, plonk him down in the middle of a cocktail party, an art gallery, a lecture hall—”

  “This happened, did it?” Daniel’s father said, sounding intrigued. “I don’t recall seeing Daniel in diapers in a lecture hall. Or at a coc
ktail party, come to that.”

  “You wouldn’t recall it, Hugo. By definition, you can only recall what you have taken in in the first place. Your mind was on higher things, dear. You were very seldom ‘with us’ in the mental sense. Physically very much so, but mentally, no. We did quite a lot of entertaining, Katherine, faculty get-togethers or dinners for visiting professors, you know the sort of thing, and so of course Daniel was very used to strangers. And he would come into the living room, dressed in his pyjamas, to say goodnight to the guests, and an hour later you would suddenly notice that he was still there, wide-eyed, taking in all that was being said, whatever the topic of conversation happened to be, politics, art, anthropology …”

  “Astrophysics,” Daniel’s father said, droning as if reading from a list, “economics—particularly Keynesian, took that in like nobody’s business—philosophy—at the age of two he was taking in three philosophers a week. You were particularly smitten with the works of Descartes, weren’t you Daniel?”

  Daniel was engrossed in the menu, but after a moment the silence reached him, and he looked up. “Pardon?”

  “I said that at the age of two you were smitten with Descartes. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

  “Oh,” Daniel said. He nodded. “Right. Smitten’s the word.” He returned to the menu.

  “He was a very, very rewarding child,” his mother continued smoothly. “But of course he did benefit from being exposed to such a range of ideas and opinions from such an early age. It was a huge advantage, there’s no doubt about it. Most children suffer from a crippling lack of stimulation. The brain is like any other muscle; use it, and it develops. Ignore it, and it atrophies.”

  Daniel heard that. “Just a small detail,” he said mildly, laying down the menu, “but the brain is not a muscle. It’s a shade more complex than that. I think I’m going to have the beef.” He looked around for a waiter and found one. “Is the pepper sauce very hot? Like, is it very peppery, or more creamy?”

  “I think it’s more creamy,” the waiter said doubtfully “I’m not sure.”

  “I’ll risk it. And I’ll have a baked potato. And carrots.”

  “And especially when we were abroad, Katherine. Especially when we were in England. And when we were in Rome! Daniel was six. Was it six? Maybe seven. Anyway, within a month of our arriving in Rome his Italian was better than mine.”

  I said, “I didn’t know you spoke Italian, Daniel.”

  “I don’t,” Daniel said. “The waiter is waiting to take the order. What does everyone want?”

  “But then neither does his mother,” his father said.

  “The chicken,” his mother said. She smiled at the waiter and he quailed visibly. “No potatoes. Salad— please make sure it’s very fresh. No dressing with it. Mineral water to drink, no lemon, no ice.”

  The waiter nodded, scribbling furiously. I found myself trying to picture Daniel’s mother in Crow Lake. It couldn’t be done. I tried to imagine her in the McLeans’ store, buying potatoes or toilet paper, and I simply couldn’t do it. I tried to imagine introducing her to Mrs. Stanovich and found that I couldn’t get the two of them into the same frame of my mind at the same time. Even Miss Carrington’s image slid nervously out of the picture if I tried to bring Daniel’s mother into it.

  For a moment—and with a feeling of relief, because it would have been such a neat and simple explanation— I wondered if my reluctance to take Daniel home with me might be related to this gulf between my two worlds. Maybe that was the problem—they were simply too different. But I knew even as I had the thought that it was not the answer. I might not be able to imagine Daniel’s mother in Crow Lake, but I had no trouble at all imagining Daniel there. He would look out of place—if ever there was a born city slicker, it’s Daniel—but no one would mind. He is the most open and least judgmental of men.

  They were all looking at me. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I’ll have the chicken. And a baked potato and salad.”

  “Steak,” Daniel’s father said. “Extremely rare. Fries. No vegetables whatsoever. Everyone all right with red wine?” He swivelled his head around, looking for dissent. “Good. A bottle of the Bordeaux.”

  Daniel’s mother said, “You cannot deny, Daniel, that the experiences of early childhood are hugely important to a child’s intellectual development. That’s why the parental role is so crucial. What you will be in adult life is set in childhood. ‘The child is father of the man’ and so on.”

  Daniel nodded slowly. I wanted to catch his eye, to have him indicate by some small gesture that he knew the evening wasn’t a success and that we would go as soon as possible, but he did not look in my direction.

  His father was talking to me, bending toward me confidentially and speaking out of the corner of his mouth so that his wife wouldn’t hear. “I’ve never had the faintest bloody idea what that expression means,” he said. “‘The child is father of the man.’ You happen to know?”

  “I think it just means that the characteristics you show as a child, you’ll also show as an adult. Something like that.”

  “Oh. So Einstein was Einstein while he was still a babe in arms?” He paused and narrowed his eyes, trying to visualize it. “And Daniel was Daniel and was always going to be, no matter whether his mother took him to dinner parties in a diaper or not?”

  “I think quite a lot is preset. Though I think circumstances have some effect.”

  He nodded. “In other words, it means the precise opposite of what the honourable doctor thinks it means. Which is what you’d expect, but it’s nice to have it confirmed by someone who actually knows what she’s talking about.”

  “I’m not sure—” I said.

  Daniel’s mother leaned in my direction. “Pay no attention to him, Katherine. I’m not denying that there are other influences than parental. Teachers, for instance, can play a critical role. For instance, in your own case. It is enormously to your credit that you have done so well having lost your parents so young, but I imagine you had at least one extremely good teacher, somewhere along the way?”

  Matt’s face came to me. I thought of the thousands of hours we had spent together. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I did.”

  Daniel’s mother smoothed her hair back with a long fine-fingered hand. A practised gesture of triumph. “And would I also be right in imagining that you had her at quite an early age? At public school, rather than at high school?”

  Daniel was studying the menu again. I would have worried less if he had looked bored or fed up or irritated, but he looked none of those things. He looked … absent. As if he had unhooked himself from us, and moved away. I gathered my thoughts with difficulty. “It was a him, actually. But yes, it was up until I was eight. Though I had pretty good teaching all the way through.”

  “Unusual for a man to inspire a young child. Men are usually hopeless with children, Daniel’s father being a case in point. Hugo was completely unaware of Daniel’s existence until Daniel was made a full professor. An envelope arrived from the university one morning addressed to Professor D. A. Crane—Daniel was moving house and had rerouted his mail to us in the interim— and Hugo said, quite seriously, ‘Who the hell is Professor D. A. Crane? We’ve been at that bloody university twenty years, and they still don’t know our names!’ I informed him that he had a son of that name, and he was thrilled to bits. Said we should invite him to dinner. Thank you, waiter. That looks lovely, apart from the potato. I said no potatoes. No, never mind, my husband will eat it. But of course there are exceptions to every rule. For instance, Daniel was telling us that you and your sister were brought up by an older brother? I think that is wonderful. I take my hat off to your mother. It absolutely proves my point. She must have been a wonderful person to have produced such a son.”

  Daniel’s father blinked. He said, “I think that takes the prize for the most convoluted bit of reasoning I’ve heard this year. Ever, maybe. Did you take that in, Daniel?”

  Daniel looked at him blankly. “Pardon?
Oh. Sorry, no. I missed it. I was thinking about something else.”

  “Good man,” his father said approvingly. “Have some wine.”

  On the way home I tried to tell myself I’d been imagining things. Daniel had seemed to recover himself when we got up from the meal, as if the problem had been one of circulation and he’d just needed to be shaken up. We said goodbye to his parents and hurried through an icy drizzle to the car. On the way home we talked about the evening and the waiter and the fact that his parents scare the living daylights out of everyone they meet, which somehow, incredibly, Daniel had failed to notice. I said something about him having had a remarkable childhood and he smiled his usual wry smile and said that was one way of putting it. I analyzed his answer and decided it was standard Daniel. I said that not many children got an opportunity to travel like that at an early age and he said that was true, and then added that an opportunity to stay somewhere long enough to make friends or settle in a school would have been nice, but you couldn’t have everything. I said that at least he had met some very interesting people, and he nodded gravely.

  “But what?” I said.

  “Nothing. Just that you aren’t interested in interesting people when you’re a kid. I’d have settled for the odd bit of attention from my parents. That business about my standing around for hours listening to guests? That was because I wanted to speak to my mother and she kept saying, ‘Wait a minute.’ But I’m making it sound as if I had a miserable childhood. It wasn’t miserable. Lonely, but not miserable.”

  I looked at him and he glanced at me and smiled. “Anyway, I imagine you’ve had about enough of my family for one night. I certainly have.”

  I said that actually I’d found it fascinating. He inclined his head, as if acknowledging a polite remark. There was something about the gesture … that and the negative tone of his last remark. I can’t quite describe it, except to say that it was a flatness. An emptiness. As if none of it mattered—as if nothing mattered.