by David Bergen
She was awakened by a cry, a scream or perhaps a laugh. It pulled her from her sleep and up out of bed and to the window. Roy still slept. Her hearing was much better than his. She stood in the darkness, her hand parting the cotton curtain. A figure appeared. Anita Stark, stark naked. She was crying out in fear, or so it seemed, and then Flip, Denise’s lover, ran down the path and caught Anita, who laughed and then whispered. All of this was too much for Hope and she turned away and climbed back into bed. Eventually, the human noises disappeared and were replaced by the croak of frogs, the breeze, and once again the surf. When Hope thought about Denise she felt sad. How did this happen? Poor thing.
In the morning, she and Roy ate breakfast on the patio café that faced the ocean. Roy read the local paper while Hope delicately ate fresh pineapple and stared at the sky and watched the other guests. They had just finished their last coffee and were rising to leave when Flip and Alistair appeared and took a table at the far end of the restaurant. Roy made his way over and talked to them. She was amazed, as always, by Roy’s ability to push past discomfort and face the facts. She left, sliding down the path, hoping not to meet any of the group. Later, safe on the plane, she took Roy’s hand and held it. “I had a good time,” she said.
“Did you?” He seemed surprised.
“Yes. I did. Thank you.”
“I’m glad.”
“Denise was a lost little thing, wasn’t she.”
“I thought she held her own.”
“It seemed so, and then it didn’t seem so.”
“Flip was crazy for her. But then, why wouldn’t he be?”
“If I were to rank those people, I’d put Flip and Anita Stark at the bottom of the ladder,” she said.
“Anita did have a high voice.”
“Always at full volume.”
“What’s the ranking based on? Looks?”
“On goodness.”
“Your problem, Hope, is that you think everyone is as full of effort as you are. They aren’t.”
She wondered what that meant. That she tried too hard? Trusted too much? That she was too forgiving? So be it. She wasn’t going to change now.
Eight months later, Judith returned from Europe and announced that she had met a man in Paris, a collector and seller of art. Within the month, she planned to return to Paris, where she would be living with Jean-Philippe in his apartment in the 6th arrondissement. “It’s gorgeous,” Judith said. “You walk into his place and come face to face with a Monet. And there are books everywhere. He has parties and suddenly a famous movie director shows up, or an actress.” Roman Polanski had been at Jean-Philippe’s one evening for a late dinner. French dinners began around 11 and went till 2 a.m. It was marvellous. And the most marvellous thing was that Jean-Philippe saw possibilities for Judith’s photos. “He thinks I should have a show.”
Roy asked who this Mr. Polanski was.
“Oh, come on, Dad.”
Later, in Judith’s room, watching her pull dirty clothes out of her backpack, Hope sat at the edge of the bed and asked how she had met this Jean-Philippe.
“At a café. I was working as a server and he talked to me and then asked me for a drink and things took off from there.”
This was bewildering, this notion that “things take off,” as if there were numerous paths and one just chose a path willy-nilly and then, that having failed, chose again. Well, that wasn’t how life worked, and Judith would have to discover the hard way that the world was an unforgiving place. Hope worried that her children did not adequately understand the ways of the world. Well, perhaps Penny did, but sometimes she could be too cynical.
“I wish we could meet him,” she said.
“Oh, you’d love him, Mom. He’s very sophisticated. And kind. And brilliant.”
It turned out that he was forty years old. Judith managed to slip that in at some point, in an offhanded way, as if it were a minor detail.
“But, Judith, that’s almost a twenty-year difference.” Hope was breathless and felt panicky.
“He looks way younger. Like thirty. And his spirit, his mind, is very young.”
“Has he been married before?”
“Once, for two years. To an actress. It ended badly.”
“And does he have children?”
She shook her head, exasperated. “He loves me, Mom. And I love him.”
Hope told Roy that he needed to have a talk with their daughter. “This man will break her heart, I can see it already. French men do that. They have a different code that they live by. He probably wears a scarf. And her photographs? It’s terrible to say, but they don’t seem especially original.”
Judith had proudly shown a number of black-and-white photographs to her family, laying them out on the kitchen table. They were of people in the streets, but taken from above, from windows and fire escapes. Judith explained that the perspective was objective. “Jean-Philippe calls it godlike.” She pointed at one photograph. “And then suddenly, there is a face, looking up, and it is intimate.” Her voice, when she said this, sounded French, and Hope imagined that she was parroting someone, probably Jean-Philippe. At the table, studying the photographs, Melanie had exclaimed, Conner was indifferent, and Penny, skeptical like her mother, had shrugged and said, “Nice.”
Roy said now, “She won’t listen to us, Hope. That’s Judith. So we can either take pleasure in her plans or fight her, and fighting her will only cause more friction.” He paused, and then said, “And if this Jean-Philippe thinks she can make money from her art, good for her.”
He was far too practical, Hope thought, though she knew he was right. Still, sometimes she wished he would be more emotional. Did he not care that their eldest daughter had a French lover who would eventually abandon her?
One day after supper she found Judith in her bedroom. She stood in the doorway and said, “May I come in?”
Judith was sitting on the bed, her knees drawn up towards her chest. She was writing a letter to Jean-Philippe. The thin airmail sheets crackled as she laid them aside, face down.
Hope took that as a yes and stepped forward. She stood in the middle of the room, aware at that moment of her daughter’s hair colour and the shape of her face and the angle of her eyes, and she said, “Oh, you look so much like your father.”
Judith wrinkled her nose, not exactly in distaste, but impatiently, and said, “What do you want? I’m busy.”
“This man, is he trustworthy?”
“God, Mother. Of course I trust him. What’s wrong with you? Are you jealous?”
“What do you mean?” She was standing in the middle of the room, wearing a housedress and slippers, and she saw herself as Judith must see her, and she was embarrassed. Certainly, any French woman her age, at this time in the evening, would be wearing a dress and high heels and makeup. “I haven’t met him. All I have is your description. Do you have a photograph?”
“No. I don’t. Anyways, what would that prove?”
“I love you, Judith. And your father loves you. If this is what you want, then we want it for you as well.”
“I know, Mom. Thank you.” And she went back to her letter writing.
That night Hope lay in bed, unable to sleep, and she thought about what she might be jealous of. Judith’s freedom? Her youth? Her love life? When she was Judith’s age there had been no room in her imagination for an older French lover who lived in the 6th arrondissement. Even now, there was so much that Hope could not imagine. It made her head ache. She wondered if jealousy was a form of desire. Sure it was. But the two were not necessarily attached. She desired Roy, and she wasn’t jealous of him. Thinking in this manner, and resolving nothing, she fell asleep
The following year, travelling to Berlin for an automobile show, Roy and Hope stopped in Paris for three days to visit Judith and to meet Jean-Philippe. They stayed in a small hotel off boulevard Raspail. During the days, Judith took them to all the tourist spots—the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre—though she did this grudgingly. She had l
ittle interest in the traditional fare. One night they met Judith and Jean-Philippe near Les Halles and ate in a tiny French restaurant. “Isn’t this place amazing?” Judith whispered. “It’s three hundred years old.” Jean-Philippe was a real gentleman. He greeted Hope by kissing her on the cheeks, once, twice, three times. He would not be distracted. He focused on Hope, and Hope was immediately besotted. His hair was long and slightly grey and he wore a purple silk scarf that he kept throwing backwards with one hand as the other held a ubiquitous yellow Gitane. He was short but well dressed. His shoes were exquisite. Hope had an eye for shoes. He spoke English with an up-and-down accent and Hope understood almost immediately why Judith would love this man. They ate short ribs and drank red wine and by the end of the evening Hope was quite drunk. As they walked through the narrow streets later, Jean-Philippe took her arm and guided her. Judith and Roy followed. Jean-Philippe whispered, “You have a most beautiful daughter, Hope.” Her name, coming out of his mouth, was missing the “h.” It went up in the air and floated away, as her heart was also floating away.
That night she dreamed that she was walking gaily down a Parisian street carrying a baguette under one arm, and suddenly the heel of one shoe snapped and she fell to the ground and skinned her knees. A crowd gathered around and pointed at her, jeering in a language that she did not recognize. She woke, confused, and heard the street washers outside the window. A grey morning light filtered in. She was losing Judith, and she was helpless to change that fact. Roy would have said, “Hope, you worry too much,” and yet what a fine line there was between joy and sorrow. She had given her children every possible tool to survive, hadn’t she? Or had she failed to instill in them the ability to judge others, and themselves? To raise a child was more than plopping down little clones of oneself. Who needed four more little Hopes romping through the world? What folly. The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one’s children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices, and the utter determination. In the light of the morning, she feared that Judith would be terribly hurt by this Frenchman with his suave flirtatious manner. Was he solid? Was he faithful?
In her more dire moments Hope saw how bleak the future was becoming. The world was spinning out of control and it was scooping up her children, one by one.
And so it was that she and Roy arrived home from Europe to discover that Penny had fallen in with a religious group that spent time handing out tracts warning people about the end of the world. It was a small group, based out of the Pentecostal church in Eden, and was run by a man named Garry Doerksen, who preferred to be called simply Eli. One night at the supper table, two days after her parents’ return, Penny handed out a tract to each family member and proceeded to proselytize. She had become a robot, spouting nonsense. And yet Hope couldn’t help but be impressed by her salesmanship, her knowledge of Armageddon. “Behold,” she said, “a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him; and he went out conquering, and to conquer.”
“What a load of shit,” Conner said. He tossed aside the tract and helped himself to meatballs and potatoes.
“Your language,” his father said.
“Well, it is.”
Penny was very calm. “It’s okay, Dad. For the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
“Oh my,” Hope said. “Isn’t that a little harsh, sending your brother there?” She thought a little levity might be necessary.
“I didn’t send him,” Penny said. “He chooses.”
Conner grinned. “Oops,” he said. For two years now he had been dating that beautiful girl from the photo Hope had come across. Her name was Charlotte Means, and she floated in and out of the house, often appearing at the dinner table though rarely speaking. Hope wondered if she didn’t like her own mother’s cooking, or perhaps her mother didn’t cook at all. Charlotte was present now, at Conner’s right hand, her long hair framing her perfect face. She did not seem curious about the conversation, though she became more alert when Conner spoke. There was always a sense of disdain attached to her, as if she were too good for the Koops.
Conner said, “This Garry Doerksen was in prison. Just got out.”
“Was not,” Penny said. Her lips tightened and she sat up straighter.
“Was. For pederasty or something.”
“What’s pedasty?” This was Melanie, suddenly all ears. Up until now she had been picking at a single meatball, cutting it up into little bits and moving them glacially towards her mouth.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hope said. She looked at Roy, whose nonchalance affronted her. She told Penny that it was her turn to clear the table and do the dishes. “Even if the world is ending, we want to have a clean house.”
Two weeks later, on a Saturday, Penny went out with the Pentecostal group in the pouring rain to a rock concert that was taking place in a nearby town. The intention was to blanket the large crowd with tracts and the message of the impending apocalypse. The rain descended and the farmer’s field turned to soup. By the end of the day, the concert was cancelled, Penny had been spit at and cursed, and Conner showed up with his father’s tow truck and made seven hundred dollars pulling cars out of the mud and back onto the highway, his golden girl beside him counting the bills. Penny came down with a cold and spent several days in bed.
The following Saturday, cleaning the bathroom, Hope found a stack of religious tracts in the garbage. When she asked Penny about them, she said something about Eli being a fraud. Hope was pleased. It was necessary for her children to have various experiences, to taste failure, to discover that not everyone was marching down the straight and narrow road, and it was also necessary to be able to pull back wisely from the precipice, as Penny had done.
And so Penny went back to studying biology and physics and chemistry with a vengeance. She was planning to go into medicine.
At the age of twenty-two, in 1977, Conner married Charlotte Means in the Eden United Church. It was an elaborate and large wedding, paid for by Eddie Means, Charlotte’s father, who owned the lumberyard in town. Hope didn’t believe that Conner should be marrying the girl he had dated since he was fifteen. He had become less and less the joyful and insatiable boy hungering after the world, and in his place there was a young man who seemed weak and soft. Hope anticipated that the security of marriage might free Conner once again.
The plan had been for Melanie to be the flower girl, but in the eight months leading up to the wedding, she grew half a foot, and by the time the wedding took place, she was taller than the bride and Charlotte asked her cousin Carly to take her place. Melanie was distraught and wept for a day, walking around the house in her nightgown. In the end, a compromise was reached, and Melanie lit the candles during the service, her long tremulous arms reaching up to touch the seven pink candles. She was incredibly skinny, as Penny had been once, and yet Hope saw only the beauty of her daughter, who, after completing her mission, reclaimed her seat beside her father. Really, children could break your heart.
Roy paid for the couple’s honeymoon in San Francisco. Upon their return they settled into a house that Charlotte had insisted on, a few doors down from her parents’ place. The whole situation was claustrophobic to Hope, but she kept her mouth shut. Charlotte was articling for a firm in Winnipeg, commuting back and forth, sometimes staying quite late, sometimes not coming home at night at all. Because Conner was Hope’s only son, and because sons were more vulnerable than daughters, she worried that he would not be cared for. But what was there to be concerned about? The dealership was thriving. Roy was on top of the world and had begun to plan an expansion, perhaps Winnipeg, perhaps another town in southern Manitoba. Units were flying off the lot, he was well respected, and in 1979 h
is photo adorned the cover of a Winnipeg magazine as businessman of the year. Hope had the cover framed and presented it to him that Christmas, during the winter vacation in Hawaii. The family members were all present for the holiday. Judith had managed to fly out alone from France for a week. Hope was surrounded by her children. She was loved. Goodness and mercy. She even found a way to have a passable relationship with Charlotte, who for some reason, in Hawaii, seemed more generous.
One night Hope and Roy returned to their hotel room after a family dinner. The children had decided to head into town to find a disco. Hope said, “Have you noticed how Charlotte orders Conner around? He’s a frightened lamb.”
“They seem to have figured out how to be married.”
“Was he always so passive? It’s scary to watch. Where did he get that from? You’re not like that. Do you think maybe I did something wrong? Or maybe it’s being surrounded by girls. He needed a brother.”
“He did. My older brother kept me tough.”
“I wish he would stand up to her just one time. She’d be flabbergasted.”
“She’s incapable of being flabbergasted.”
“Do you think she’s pretty?”
“Yes, she is.”
“I used to think so, but since I’ve got to know her, her beauty has worn thin. Listen to me. Running down my daughter-in-law.”
“Well, you didn’t marry her.”
“Thank goodness.” She paused, and then said, “Maybe Conner has my nature. Deluded.”
“Melanie gets along with her.”
“Melanie would get along with a rabid dog. I wonder sometimes what will happen to her.”
“You wonder that about all your children.”
“And so I should. They’re my children.”
“You’re a good woman, Hope. A good mother.”
“Do you think so?”
“I do.”
“Did you notice, today, down by the pool? My legs are losing their shape.”
“Never noticed.”