The Age of Hope

by David Bergen

  Roy had organized for her a bank account into which he put a small amount of money on the first of every month. Groceries, clothes for the children and for her, makeup, general upkeep of the house—these things were paid for by Roy from his bank account. The other account was completely hers to do with as she pleased. Before the children were born, she found that the money went quite quickly. Now, because she was busy and didn’t have time to drive into the city to shop for a new dress or to take a meal at Eaton’s, the money began to accrue, and as the account grew, she wondered what she should do with it. She found an orphan in Vietnam through a church organization and donated five dollars a month to that child. The child’s name was Trang, and one day there arrived in the mail a black-and-white photograph of Trang and a letter from her. The letter was in her own words, or so it appeared, and Trang described her house and her life and the school she was attending and she thanked Hope for the support. Trang’s face was thin and she wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a blue skirt, a school uniform, and on her feet she wore rubber sandals. She was seven. Hope pinned the photo to the bulletin board.

  Strangely, she had been experiencing morbid thoughts in the last while, thoughts of Roy dying and leaving her and the children bereft and poor. She had no occupation. On certain days she was sorry she had quit nursing to marry, but for the most part she had convinced herself that she hadn’t enjoyed nursing to begin with. She liked the sound of certain occupations, such as law, and she had it in mind that she might want to look into the education required to become a lawyer. In high school she had always achieved the top marks in her grade, and there had been the sense, both from her teachers and from her mother, that she could go far. She had also been a top debater. And so, one morning, Hope arranged for Mrs. Tiessen, the neighbour, to watch the two younger children, and she drove to the city, to the University of Manitoba, where she had made an appointment to see a counsellor about studying law. The counsellor was younger than Hope and she wore a tight skirt to mid-calf and her hair was high on her head. She sat beside Hope and together they talked about Hope’s having dropped out of nursing and Hope’s burden of having children. At first Hope didn’t understand what the counsellor was saying, this notion of a burden, and then she realized quite quickly what she was implying.

  She said, “Oh no, I love my children. They’re not a burden. I was hoping I might study part time, or be able to take courses by correspondence.”

  “Almost impossible,” the counsellor said. “Have you written the LSAT?”

  Hope shook her head. She felt suddenly lost. She pushed back her chair and thanked the woman and then wandered about the campus. Everyone was younger than she was. She found the bookstore and on a whim bought a Russian grammar text and workbook. Roy’s father spoke Russian, had in fact come over from Russia in 1926 along with the second wave of Mennonites, and there was also the Cold War, something with which Hope had been keeping up, more out of fear than interest. She took the textbooks home, and for the first week she worked one hour a day at learning the Russian characters. One night Roy found the textbook and picked it up and said, “What’s this? Are you planning on being a spy?” He said no more but she was slightly humiliated and saw the futility of her studies. Eventually, the books were relegated to a shelf near the fireplace, and finally they found their way up to the attic, where they sat in a box alongside Hope’s high school diploma and her mortarboard.

  One evening in late June, Hope asked her mother to watch the children and she drove over to the church for a counselling session with Pastor Ken. Ken was quite young to be a senior pastor. He had been educated at a seminary in California and he carried himself with tremendous aplomb and a certain arrogance. Some of the members of the church, especially the men, found him to be puffed up, but most of the women thought he was genuine. He had a mellifluous voice and he was a fine listener. On this evening, Hope found him in his office, reading. He was dressed in casual slacks and a short-sleeved shirt and he wore runners. He had just returned from a game of golf, nine holes with his wife. They didn’t have children, not yet, and so their lives were more open, less structured. Hope found that she suffered a moment of jealousy as he described the round of late-afternoon golf. She herself had considered taking up golf, in order to be with Roy, but he had discouraged it, had in fact been downright impatient with her swing. And besides, she didn’t have five free hours in her life on any given day.

  She had called Pastor Ken the week before to arrange this appointment, and when she set it up she had been feeling unstable, she couldn’t breathe properly. Even though she did not attend church regularly, Pastor Ken had sounded quite open to meeting with her. She thought that he might be able to help her. She hadn’t mentioned any of this to Roy, who might have bristled. He saw Ken as an effeminate man who had too much time on his hands—time spent with the women of the church.

  “Tell me what it is you would like,” Ken said as he sat and leaned forward.

  “If I knew that, then I wouldn’t be here,” Hope said.

  Ken laughed. He was so easy-going she felt immediately that she could speak her mind and nothing would come of it, that there would be no repercussions.

  She told Ken exactly this.

  He said, “Who punishes you for speaking? Not Roy, certainly.”

  “No, no. Not Roy. It’s just sometimes I feel mad. Crazy. As if my thoughts are the opposite of everyone else ‘s. In church sometimes, I walk out and I swear under my breath. I say terrible things. But only to myself. But it’s like I can’t help it. Everyone’s so perfect, so pious.”

  “Well, that’s not true.”

  “But it seems so. Mr. Geddert was mowing his lawn the other day. Perfect diagonal rows. I wanted him to slip, to veer off. I imagined his foot getting caught and him losing a toe. Awful, isn’t it?”

  Ken smiled again. He asked, “You walk out on my sermons?”

  She was embarrassed. “Sometimes.”

  He applauded silently. “Good for you.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t need more sheep, Hope. And you are certainly not one of the sheep. Your thinking is vivid and contradictory.”

  “Roy says it’s crazy thinking.”

  “To him. He sells cars. He runs a business. Raising three children is much more demanding and can lead to bigger questions and ennui.” He said this last word with a certain flourish and though she didn’t know the word she thought that this was exactly what she was suffering from. “Don’t get me wrong. Roy’s a good man. He is big-hearted and generous and I imagine he is a good father and husband.” He lifted his eyebrows.

  She nodded.

  “But that doesn’t mean he understands your existence at home. Be clear, Hope. If you need something, then ask for it. The worst that can happen is he’ll say no.”

  She wondered if he would pray with her, but he didn’t. Perhaps it was too intimate an act, something one did on a grander scale with a congregation or alone in one’s room. Certainly not with a young woman, in the office, kneeling side by side. Driving home that evening, she felt buoyed up. Funny thing, she felt sensual as well, something that she hadn’t experienced for a while. She was looking forward to seeing Roy.

  Judith, at the age of nine, had become engrossed in painting and drawing, and for her birthday Hope bought her a watercolour set of twenty tubes and three brushes of graduated sizes. Watercolours, to Hope’s mind, leaned towards soft bucolic settings and pastoral images: church bell towers, flowers, cows at pasture, or perhaps small birds on bare branches that were beginning to show little green buds. Not so with Judith. She preferred dark shades and darker subject matter. Her paintings were miniatures, almost requiring a magnifying glass to discern the details. Every painting, regardless of the setting, had at least one human in it, if not more. The humans, however, were not normal. Their limbs were elongated and out of proportion. The eyes were much too large and resembled the sockets of a skull. Hope, leaning over Judith’s shoulder one Sunday afternoon as she paint
ed at the dining room table, exclaimed, “Isn’t that arm a little stretched?”

  Judith shook her head. Her hair was fine and blonde and cut short and she had pulled it back with bobby pins and there was nothing especially pretty about her hairdo, but it was impossible to suggest a different look for Judith. She would just say, “I like it this way.” And now, she shook her disordered head of hair and bit her lower lip and set to, ignoring her mother. The skyline in the painting revealed storm clouds, perhaps a tornado, while the girl in the foreground was beneath a tree and she was reaching, with her elongated limb, for the hand of another girl who was sitting in a topmost branch. The girl in the tree was looking away.

  Hope thought the whole endeavour was deeply depressing and she worried about Judith’s state of mind. She showed Roy the painting that night as he was sitting on the edge of the bed, removing his shoes. She thrust it at him, as if it were to be feared, and said their daughter’s name, “Judith.”

  He took it and examined it, holding one of his shoes in his other hand, and then he set the shoe down on the rug and said, “She’s got talent.”

  She knew that many people perceived Roy as wise. “Wisdom” was another word for level-headedness or prudence, though in Eden it was wrongly used in place of “parsimonious.” So Hope thought. Most people she knew were parsimonious, and this was not only in matters of money. Parsimony could be extended to narrow thinking, to religion, to the claim that baptism by immersion was superior to sprinkling or pouring—all nonsense, according to Hope. Not that she thought her husband was like that. He was far too reasonable. However, when it came to this painting and numerous other paintings like it that Judith had produced, Roy’s “wisdom” was beginning to smell of indifference.

  She snatched the painting from him, studied it again as if she might have missed something, and then pointed at the surreal outstretched arm. “It’s like a vision of some other world,” she whispered. “It’s not realistic.”

  Roy had removed his other shoe and was standing now, loosening his tie. “What are you worried about, Hope? Is she eating?”

  Hope admitted that she was.

  “Has she run away from home?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Has she talked of it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Are others worried? Mrs. Penner, for instance?”

  Mrs. Penner was Judith’s second-grade teacher, and yes, she had been troubled, but Hope decided at that moment, as Roy was hanging up his pants, standing with his back to her, his thin white legs sticking out of his shorts, that this was not something he needed to concern himself with. He worked far too hard as it was. And so she lied and said, “No, she’s not.” The previous week, though, at the parent–teacher meeting, Mrs. Penner had raised the issue of Judith’s drawings and her clinginess to Angela. All of this, the disturbing drawings, the clinginess, had troubled Hope. In fact, the whole situation was so complicated that she could not make sense of it, which is why she had thrown it so desperately at Roy.

  Angela was the daughter of Mrs. Emily Shroeder, a woman whom Hope had met at the beginning of the school year, and who had quickly become one of Hope’s best friends. In fact, she would say that Emily was her only true friend. She loved her. Emily was witty and well read. She had recently presented Hope with a gift of a book: Pascal’s Pensées. Emily had kept her own name when she married, a radical act. She worked part time at the local newspaper, writing obituaries, and with the money she made she flew to New York, where she went to the theatre and stayed up till all hours drinking in small bars. She travelled alone. Her husband Paul was an accountant who disliked travel. He made bird feeders and end tables in his woodshop in the evenings while Emily went to poetry readings in Winnipeg.

  It was Emily who had handed her a brochure for the Book of the Month Club, saying, “You’ve got to expand your reading beyond romances.” Hope decided to read Lolita and Dr. Zhivago and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She wouldn’t normally have chosen books such as these, but they came highly recommended by the book club. Lolita was a stretch for her. She thought that the characters were mad and off balance and she couldn’t identify with any of them and she found the general language of the novel very fancy. She thought that the author wasn’t as funny as he thought he might be. She knew that she was missing many of the subtleties of the story and didn’t understand the young girl, who was called Dolores, and various other things. Even though she couldn’t relate to the characters, she had a perverse desire to keep reading, and when she was done she felt that the world of this particular novel was cheerless. Lady Chatterley’s Lover she read very quickly and then she tore the book up and threw it in the garbage. Roy shouldn’t know about a book like that. The one time he had perused it, when they were climbing into bed one night, he had asked in his bemused tone, “Who is the lady’s lover?” She had snatched the book from him and said that it wasn’t for him. He’d get ideas. Dr. Zhivago was more her type of story. She felt no guilt reading it in bed beside Roy, who usually fell asleep within three minutes of settling down beside her.

  The girls, like the mothers, became immediate friends. After school, Angela came over and the two girls spent hours in Judith’s room, the door closed, plotting whatever it was that nine-year-olds plot. One day, Hope baked cookies with Conner and Penny, and she carried up a plate to the girls. She paused at the bedroom door and was about to knock when she heard Angela say, “On the bum.” Her voice was quite strident, almost shrill. Hope waited, thought she should enter, and then became frightened that the girls might be undressed, or that she would catch them in some sexual position. Again, Angela said the word “bum” and then there was the sound of a slap and a giggle, and then another slap. Hope set the plate down on the floor, knocked twice, and called out, “Girls, I’ve left you some cookies. They’re fresh and waiting right here by the door.” And she walked back downstairs.

  Conner and Penny had finished most of the remaining cookies. Conner’s hands were full of chocolate and he was washing himself at the kitchen sink, spraying water everywhere. His hair stuck up. His pants were too short. Penny was swinging her bare legs at the table. She was humming to herself. Hope was mystified. She didn’t know how a child made the leap from this kitchen scene to the spanking incident she had just overheard.

  That night she tucked in Judith, brushed back her bangs, and asked how her day had been.

  “Okay.”

  “Did you have fun with Angela?”

  “Yeah. It was okay.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you like the cookies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It would be good to include some other friends sometimes, don’t you think? Sherry or Carolyn.”

  “They’re boring.”

  “Sometimes it’s good to open up your world.” She moved her hands out as if the world were indeed the small space they were sharing.

  “Well, you just see Mrs. Shroeder a lot. Don’t you?”

  Hope laughed and said, “I guess that’s sort of true, isn’t it? I’m a hypocrite.” She paused and then said, “When you play with Angela, sweetie, you keep your clothes on, yes?”

  Judith turned over and away from her mother.

  Hope patted her shoulder. “I love you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Good night,” Hope whispered.

  “Night.”

  She decided to talk to Emily about the games the girls were playing. They had gone to the library and then dropped in at a local restaurant for lunch. Hope had Conner and Penny in tow, and so she had to talk sotto voce. Emily had taught her this term and she thought of it now as she leaned forward in confidence. “The other day I caught the girls playing a game, a sexual game.” She stopped. Waited.

  Emily lifted her eyebrows and smiled. “Good,” she said. “They’re nine. Developmentally, they’re right on target.”

  “So you’re not worried?”

  “Not at all.”

  �
��Do you talk to Angela about this?”

  “Oh, Hope, of course. You should be talking to Judith. Haven’t you? People should talk openly about sex.”

  “Well, a little, I guess.” She was embarrassed. “I will. Soon.” And she changed the subject.

  The confusing thing about this was the irony in Emily’s life. Over the past year she and Hope had talked of everything, sex included, and it became clear that Emily did not have a good sex life with her husband. They rarely made love. Emily said that Paul wasn’t interested. He didn’t even want to talk about it. Hope, not given to hyperbole and not especially aware of what was “normal,” said that she and Roy had sex two or three times a week and she always had an orgasm. She didn’t try—it just happened. Emily had seemed surprised by this news, though she said that it was wonderful. “You’re lucky.” She paused, narrowed her eyes, and asked, “A vaginal orgasm?”

  “I think so. Is that bad?”

  “No. No. You’re lucky.” And this is how they left it.

  And yet, now, when they were discussing their girls, Hope heard the criticism in Emily’s voice and she felt angry. And sad. She didn’t want to lose Emily’s friendship.

  Hope continued to worry about the future of the planet. Roy sometimes mentioned what was happening in the world—the building of the Berlin Wall, the communists in Cuba, the buildup of nuclear warheads in the United States and the Soviet Union—and she became especially concerned for her children. She imagined that everyone she loved would die in a conflagration, or that Russia would invade North America and there would be a diminishment of the wealthy and suddenly everybody would be equal. She had grown used to her house, her status as a businessman’s wife, the new car she drove, the charge account Roy had arranged at the local restaurant. Having grown up poor, she had never dreamed that one day she could have so many luxuries, and now that she had them, she was anxious that they could be lost, like a sock that suddenly goes missing, never to be found again. Some nights she woke and visited her children’s bedrooms, and then climbed back into bed and told Roy her worries. He listened, told her that she was safe and there was nothing to fret about, and fell back asleep. In the morning she was exhausted by her lack of sleep and by her anxiety.