It’s a handwritten letter. “Winnipeg,” I say, reading the return address. The rest I read to myself:
Dear Mr. Kirk:
As Helen Grace Kirk’s common-law husband, it is my sad duty to inform you that she passed away on July 19th of lung cancer. She went quickly and didn’t suffer unduly. The reason I didn’t notify you about the funeral is that it was a small affair, at Grace’s request.
We never had much in the way of possessions, but Grace said she wanted your daughter, Louise, to have the wedding rings you gave her so that Louise would have something to remember her by. She also wanted Louise to have the ashes to scatter where she sees fit. I’m sending these along by special delivery mail. I hope this isn’t too much of a shock. She said you were always good to her and that Louise had a fine sense of humour.
Yours truly,
Wendell Wells
“Lung cancer,” I say.
“Are you all right?”
“Well, it is a shock, isn’t it? Wendell Wells.” I rub my temples—the headache’s coming back.
“He’s a gardener.”
“How do you know that?”
“I tracked down his number and gave him a call.”
“When?”
“This morning. Just before I called you.” He retrieves the letter and returns it to his pocket.
“And you got hold of him?”
“Oh, yes.”
I only now notice that his eyes are red-rimmed. “That must have been hard.”
“It wasn’t too bad, easier than I expected. He was very civil, said he was glad to hear from me. He was in pretty rough shape, though. Broke down a couple of times. It seems he and your mother met five years ago at the place where they both worked. Some rich big-wig banker’s country estate. She was the housekeeper.”
“Housekeeper!”
“Apparently she ran the place. She’d have been good at it, making sure everything was ship-shape, spie and span. Before that, she moved around quite a bit, so she told him. Worked all over the Prairies.”
“As a housekeeper?”
“As a cocktail waitress.”
“Cocktail waitress! How could she have been a cocktail waitress? She hated hearing people slurp their drinks. She must have lost her mind.”
“Wendell—” he makes a helpless gesture, acknowledging the unlikelihood of the first-name basis,“he said her mind was as sharp as a tack, right up until the end. He had no idea that she’d been married or even what her real name was, but in the last few days she decided to make a clean breast of it. He had thought she was a spinster named Grace White.”
“White. After her teeth. After her skin.” I take the sandwiches out of the bag. “So. Dead at forty-six.”
“Forty-seven in November,” he says quietly.
I start eating one of the sandwiches. I wasn’t hungry before, but now I’m famished. “Does Grandma Hahn know?”
“Wendell says he tried to get hold of her but couldn’t find her. It’s possible she died a few years back. No records turned up, though.”
“Boy, the women in that family sure know how to make themselves scarce.”
“You’re a woman in that family, may I remind you.” He picks up a sandwich. “I’m glad about the rings. I’m happy about that.”
“‘To remember her by.’ Well, I remember the rings.”
“It’s the right thing that they come to you.”
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“You could have them reset.”
“I don’t wear jewellery. And what about the rest of her things? I guess Wendell, the gardener of few possessions, is holding on to them.”
He sets the sandwich back down. ‘You’re still angry. Still hurt.”
“I’m not still angry and hurt. I’m suddenly angry and hurt. ‘Louise had a fine sense of humour.’ Is that all she told him? Is that all she remembered?”
“It may be all he remembered from the many things she said.”
“Scatter the ashes where I see fit. Where would that be? In the path of an Eaton’s delivery truck?”
“Well.” He looks crushed.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I reach across the table and put my hand over his. “It’s just all so crazy. I can’t believe it.”
“It’s hard to believe, all right. A bolt from the blue.”
The ashes and rings arrive in Greenwoods the following Wednesday afternoon. He offers to drop them by the apartment but I say they can wait until Sunday when Troy and I come for dinner. After hanging up from that call, I phone Troy at the store and say,“I’m inquiring about the two rooms in the sunny downtown flat. Are they still available?”
“As far as I know, yes, they are.”
“I’m in a position to pay an exorbitant rent.”
“The rent is ridiculously low, as it happens.”
“Will the landlord paint one room canary yellow and the other amber?”
“Both yellow, you mean?”
“Different shades of yellow.”
“I believe that can be arranged.”
“Tell him he has a deal.”
A pause, while he rings up a sale, and then,“Have you changed your mind yet?”
“Not yet.”
“What made you decide?”
“I don’t know. My mother’s ashes arrived.”
“Louise …”
“I want to move in with you. I do.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I’m sure.”
We start clearing the rooms of boxes that evening. On Saturday morning we buy the paint. “Yellow for stimulation,” I say. “Yellow for cheerfulness.” That’s not why. Yellow for luck. Because I’m not sure.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
We are driving home from Greenwoods. The rings are in an envelope in my purse, the ashes in a white china urn I hold on my lap. It is both smaller than I thought it would be—about the size of a rose vase—and heavier. It is appropriately slim and curvaceous. Handing it over to me, my father said,“I was thinking, when you feel ready to do the scattering, we might make a more formal ceremony of it. Invite Aunt Verna to visit for a few days …”
“Don’t drag Aunt Verna all the way here for that. Invite her when somebody gets married or has a baby.”
Everyone—my father, Mrs. Carver, Troy—perked up. Whose marriage? Whose baby? (I had already surprised my father and Mrs. Carver with the news that Troy and I were moving in together.) But I was only offering the prospect of future developments in exchange for refusing to even consider a scattering ceremony. It was all I could do to take the ashes.
“Well, it’s for you to decide,” my father said, with a glance at Mrs. Carver, whose idea it probably was. Some gesture of appeasement toward my mother’s spirit.
In the car I hold the urn by what feels like its hips and try to recall if my mother ever said where she’d like to be scattered. The only time I can remember ashes coming into the conversation was when she told Mrs. Bendy some story she’d heard, and found hilarious, about a woman discovering that her dead husband had been unfaithful to her and so she used his ashes as cat litter. I tell this to Troy, who shakes his head. “Where will you scatter them?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I don’t have a cat.”
“Hey, that’s your mother you’re talking about.”
“Who was the least sentimental of women.”
For the rest of the ride home we don’t talk. I can guess from his pensive expression that he’s mulling over what I said about marriage and babies. When he pulls up in front of my apartment he offers to help me pack dishes, since it’s only nine-thirty, but I’m afraid he’ll launch into a discussion of our future, and I tell him I just want to go to bed.
“Don’t forget to call your landlord,” he says. To give my notice, he means. As I’m walking away, he calls out,“Pick you up around nine,” and I remember that he’s taking tomorrow off so we can start painting the rooms.
Upstairs, sitting on
my bed, I try the rings on. A perfect fit. My hands are her hands, without the manicured nails and cigarette. It’s weird though, wearing her rings, it’s too personal, like trying on her underwear (something I never did). I return the rings to the envelope and put them in the top drawer of my dresser. The urn I carry into the kitchen and set down on the table. After looking at it for a minute, trying to see it as a centrepiece, I stick it in the fridge, out of sight. Except what if I forget it when I move? I take it back out and prise up the cork-lined stopper. The smell is the smell of ash from any fire. I pour out a bit onto the kitchen table. Grey powdery chunks. I rub the powder between my fingers, expecting to feel … I don’t know, a rush of sadness or repulsion, but I can’t make the leap from what is essentially dirt, to her. I go into the living room and sit at my desk. Ash is all down the front of my sweater, which used to be her sweater. “So she has come back for her clothes,” I think, not cynically, not bothering to wipe the ash away.
I open the phone book to look up my landlord’s number. His last name is Salter. I leaf through as far as the R’s, then slow down. Ralston. Richie.
Richter, Karl. 241 Grenadier Road. Above that: Richter, Abelard. 249 Ontario Street.
My heart starts pounding. I put my hand on the phone. I lift the receiver. If the Angel of Love is here, she’s keeping her distance. I dial the first number, a nine. The subsiding clicks sound explosively loud. I press the receiver against my shoulder while I dial the rest, then bring it back up to my head in a kind of horrified trance, as though it were a gun.
He answers on the second ring. “Hello?” His unmistakeable hoarse voice.
“It’s me. Louise.”
There is shouting and laughter in the background. “Hello?” he says again.
I clear my throat. “It’s Louise.”
“Louise?”
“How are you?”
A pause, and then,“Fine. I’m fine. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m … I’m okay, I guess. I just wanted to see how you were.” Now, on a piano, somebody is playing Chopsticks. “Do you have company?”
“Just the usual uproar.”
“Is there another phone? I can hardly hear you.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“My place. My apartment.”
“Where’s that?”
Obviously he never looked up my name in the phone book. “Spadina and Dupont.”
“Would you like to meet somewhere near there?”
“What, now?”
“Or I could come to your place.”
“Right now, you mean?”
“Unless you’d like me to call you back later, when it’s a little quieter around here.”
“No. It’s okay. You can come here.”
I give him the address. After hanging up, I go on clutching the receiver for several minutes. Then I run into the bathroom and brush my teeth and put on some lipstick. I figure it will take him about three-quarters of an hour if he comes by streetcar and subway, but he arrives within twenty minutes. He has ridden a bike and brought it up the stairs. A bizarre, rusty, high-seated, wide-handled contraption.
“Where’d you get that?” I say. The first thing I say.
“In the basement of the house where I’m living.” He wheels it in and leans it against the wall.
I can hardly look at him. His eyes. His hair, still long. He’s wearing a green T-shirt. Blue jeans. He’s taller but maybe not, maybe it’s only that I’m used to Troy.
In the bike’s wicker carrier is a large bottle of rum. “It’s already mixed,” he says. He notices the boxes. “Do you have any glasses?”
“Somewhere.” I find the box marked “Good Dishes” and unwrap two wine goblets. He fills them to the top.
“I don’t have any ice,” I say. “I mean, my freezer is one big block of ice.”
“This is fine.”
He looks around, at the leaded-glass windows and builtin bookshelves, the brass light fixtures. Through his eyes, I’m suddenly impressed by what a great place it is.
“Why are you leaving?” he says.
“I’m not. I’ve changed my mind.” Just this second I have.
“That’s good.” He smiles. It dazzles me. I sit on a box of books.
He sits on the box across from me. “So,” he says, and I look at him, and the roar of everything we know about each other and have done to each other seems to pass between
“Oh, Abel—” My voice breaks. I put my drink on the floor.
He puts his on a box. He reaches for my hand. The thrill races up my arm into my chest. I can’t speak for a minute, and then I say,“That letter I sent you …”
He lets out his breath.
“It was so cruel,” I say.
“No.”
‘Yes, it was. It was vicious.”
“I didn’t read it that way.”
“You didn’t?”
He shakes his head. He studies my fingertips.
“It must have hurt you, though.”
“I was hurt for you. For what you felt you … had to do.”
“I saw you with that girl.”
“You really flew out, then?”
“How do you think I knew about her? I spied on your house, all one morning, in the park across the street. I followed you downtown. I heard you play the piano in that bar. The Bear Pit.”
“Why didn’t you come up to me?”
“Why did you stop phoning me?”
He bites his lip.
“Well,” I say,“when I finally worked up enough nerve to come up to you, I found you kissing that girl. Who was she, anyway?”
He shrugs. “A girl.”
“Did you love her?”
He gives his head such a noncommittal shake that he may only be shaking off the question.
“I don’t know,” I say, agitated. I draw my hand away. “Maybe I’d have had an abortion no matter what you did. Maybe I didn’t want a baby.”
He looks at me and then down. I look at his face. His full, crisply defined lips, his cleft chin, which is so familiar and dear to me, like his mother’s kitchen in Greenwoods, or the ravine. I pick up his hand again and bring it to my lips. I move it down my neck, down to my breasts.
We make love on the floor, among the boxes. I start crying, and we go into the bedroom, and this time the love-making is more deliberate, almost formal, restrained by our mutual amazement. “Do you have a girlfriend?” I say afterwards, believing that, now, I can bear to know.
But he says he doesn’t.
I turn to face him. “Is there a girl who’s under the impression that she’s your girlfriend?”
A small smile. “No.”
“I love you, Abel.”
I dream that Troy’s father is stomping around the Hungarian restaurant, shooting draft dodgers in the legs. I open my eyes. It’s morning. Somebody is knocking at the front door.
“Louise? It’s me!”
I yank at the sheet, which is bunched under Abel’s legs. He opens his eyes. I jump out of bed and grab my bathrobe from the chair. I am groping to find a sleeve when Troy appears in the doorway.
He looks me. At Abel.
Abel pulls a corner of the sheet over himself.
“Sorry to intrude,” Troy says with a tight smile. He walks away. I wait for a slam. It doesn’t come. Only the faint click of the lock catching.
“Who was that?” Abel says.
“A friend. He was going to help me pack. Oh, God, I should have phoned him.” I hear how natural I sound: embarrassed, but not extremely. Just a little guilty. It’s as if I’ve tapped into some emergency reservoir of cunning.
“Maybe you should go after him.”
A car door shuts. An engine starts up. “Too late,” I say.
An hour later I am scrambling the four eggs that I found at the back of my fridge. Abel is examining the ashes, a small pile of which are still on the kitchen table from when I showed them to him last night.
He says,“The unbelievable complexit
y that was your mother reduced to this,” and I am suddenly struck by the miracle of his being here, in my kitchen, without his shirt on. All I had to do was phone. All I had to do was stop resisting.
I go to put the plates on the table, but he makes me hold off until he has brushed every last speck back into the urn. Watching him, weak with love, my hands start to tremble, and I set the plates back on the counter. “If she were here,” I say,“she’d just wipe them up with the dishcloth.”
“If she were here confronting her own ashes,” he says. “Wouldn’t that be something?”
He leaves right after breakfast. He’s having coffee with some filmmaker friend and then he’s playing piano for another friend’s dance rehearsal. Later, around five o’clock, I’m meeting him at a bar, where we’ll have dinner together.
It isn’t until I hear the front door of the house close that I allow myself to think of Troy. I sink into a kitchen chair as the awfulness of what happened settles over me. The way he just stood there. Sony to intrude. I cover my mouth with my hands and start to cry.
I’ve got to talk to him right away, explain everything, how I never planned any of it. I, of all people, I know how it feels to be betrayed. Why would I want to put him through that? I didn’t want to. I wanted to love him.
I take a taxi to his apartment. Although I have a key, I knock. No answer. I knock again, then let myself in.
“Troy?” I peek into the bedroom. It’s as if I’m playing the part he played a couple of hours earlier. But in this version, the bed’s empty.
I look everywhere, just in case. In case what? I don’t know. I check the bathroom, kitchen, the two spare rooms. My heart drops to see that he has lain down newspapers in preparation for a day of painting.
“Oh, Troy,” I say. “Where are you?”
I go back to the kitchen and look out the window, and there’s his car, parked in the lane. I phone the store. Ginny, his sales clerk, answers. “Yep, he’s here,” she says cheerfully. “Should I put you through?”
“No, it’s all right, it’s not important.”
I hang up, stunned. He’s okay. He’s at work, behaving normally. Still, I’ve got to talk to him. ‘You’re better off without me,” I’ll say. “I never wanted to hurt you. I’m so grateful to you.” Nothing I can think of won’t sound like something I got from an old movie. But it’s all true, and if it goes unsaid, then what do I leave him with?
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