The Age of Hope

by David Bergen

She went to the phone in the kitchen and picked it up. When Penny answered, Hope said, “Your father passed away during the night. You should come.”

  For Hope, tossed about by Roy’s death, the funeral was like a shelter from the storm. Penny, who had written the eulogy, ordered the flowers, and, over the last three days, spoken in soft tones with the funeral director, was constantly at her side. Nothing was required of her. She wore a charcoal-coloured dress that Roy had always favoured, and she clutched a small handbag throughout the service. The handbag held her lip gloss and Roy’s money clip, now empty. The funeral took place at a small north-end Mennonite church. Hope, who had always enjoyed singing, was surprisingly put off by the hymns and the choice of music. It was all so gloomy, and she wished, during the service, that she had asked for chamber music to be piped in, rather than the stolid thumping coming from a piano played by a very tall thin woman she had never seen before. She told herself to remind Penny that when she died she wanted a pine box, a single violin playing, and a minor speech prepared by one of her children. She certainly didn’t want this preacher, a youngish man who was far too evangelical. Roy wouldn’t have liked his tone or his fervour for salvation.

  Emily sat with the family, as did Berta and her husband. Roy’s brother Harold kept leaning forward to blow his nose. He was a solid man whose wife of forty years had recently died of cancer. He had hugged Hope in the church foyer, next to the casket, as if they were now more connected. Hope’s cousin, Frida, and her husband, George, sat next to Conner at the far end of the pew. Hope, looking at Conner at one point, thought that as Roy’s son he would suffer the most. She feared for him. He sometimes appeared with a certain woman on his arm and the next month there would be a different one. His love life was a blur. And would he ever work again?

  To Hope’s delight, and she imagined to Conner’s as well, Rudi and Ilke were at the funeral. They came for the whole day, brought by Penny, who had made the arrangements, and Hope caught herself experiencing too much joy as she clutched their sweaty hands. When she lost sight of them—at the burial for instance, the cold air sweeping across the bare ground—she called out their names several times in a high desperate tone, until she saw them and beckoned wildly to come. Come here. Ilke was a little princess. In fact, she was a miniature version of her mother. Gorgeous, with long wavy hair and a button nose and perfect skin. She even walked like her mother and, to Hope’s horror, had already acquired her mother’s haughty assertiveness. Rudi was a rounder smaller version of Conner, or this is how Hope saw him. He was ten now, and had gained some pounds. He seemed to be only interested in the food. She tried to get him to sit beside her and though he did this briefly, he soon disappeared. That was Conner way back, she thought.

  Ling, from Merry Maid, was at the service and Hope was surprised by her strength when they hugged and the ferocity of feeling in her face. “I remembered all the stories you told about Roy,” Ling said. “He was a funny man. And kind. And I never met him.” She laughed and squeezed Hope’s hands.

  Hope introduced her to her children. She was proud to be seen with Ling, who represented a world separate from Eden and Mennonites. It gave her some worldly purchase. Her life had become bigger after the bankruptcy. Though this might not be true, she imagined others might think it was.

  At the reception, which took place in the church basement, a man in a yellow suit stood at the microphone and praised Roy. What are you doing? Hope thought. It’s too late. Where were you when he needed you? This was during the freiwilliges, the Mennonite term for “open mike.” Hope hadn’t wanted to have an open mike, but everyone insisted. She knew what they wanted: redemption. No one would speak ill of the dead, and all reports would be glowing, and Roy would be remembered as a quality man. Well, she ‘d always known who Roy was, and she didn’t have to have some stranger going on and on about how he had known Roy. In fact, when Rollie Tiessen, the bank manager from Eden, approached the mike, she sat up straight and clutched her coffee cup. She smiled carefully and looked off into the distance and heard not a word Rollie said. Later, when someone told her that Rollie’s acknowledgment of Roy’s tenacity had been wonderful, she smiled and said, “Yes, he was tenacious, wasn’t he.”

  Her children surrounded her. Melanie, unfortunately, wore a very short black dress, and it seemed that whenever Hope looked this way or that she saw Melanie’s long legs flashing, and she wished it weren’t so. The girl had every physical charm imaginable, but she lacked a certain social sensibility. Hope wondered if her sexual leanings made her more flamboyant, less aware of what was acceptable. She knew that she couldn’t ask Melanie that, but as she had discovered long ago, private thoughts were private and therefore safe, though her children might be surprised by her private thoughts. Judith had flown in from Paris alone. Jean-Philippe was busy with meetings he couldn’t postpone and this seemed fine with Judith, who spent her time complaining about Jean-Philippe, who was predictably French.

  “Well, what else should he be?” Penny had asked.

  “Mature. Kind. Thoughtful. Like Ted.”

  Judith thought that Ted was dreary, but then so did Penny. She was quite vocal about the fact that she preferred a predictable dreary man to some French playboy who was probably bedding a young Catalan girl right at that moment. It was known that Judith and Jean-Philippe’s relationship was somewhat “open,” and that Judith suffered jealousy in a larger way than Jean-Philippe. Hope had talked to Judith only once about this, about a year earlier, and all Hope had said was “Do you think that’s smart, to share yourself in that way?”

  Hope thought that Judith was far too thin. She wore a dark blue wool sleeveless dress that showed off her ropy arms and legs. She had pulled up her hair and this accented her sharp jaw and forehead. She now worked alongside Jean-Philippe in his gallery. She was looking more and more French, Hope thought. Emily, who sat beside Judith at the reception, felt the same way. She said, “You look like you’ve stepped right off the Champs-Élysées.”

  Emily and Judith talked about Angela, who was now living in New York. Hope watched them lean into each other and recalled that time, long ago, when Emily had smoked marijuana in her new apartment while Hope breastfed Melanie.

  She brought that up. She described the scene and asked if either of them remembered that day.

  Judith shook her head and said, “You were smoking a joint, Emily? I had no idea. When was that?”

  “You kids,” Emily said. “You think we didn’t have a life. Fact is, we blazed the trail so everything would be easier for you.”

  “It was 1964,” Hope said. “You had just left Paul.”

  “I don’t think you ever blazed a trail for me,” Judith said.

  “Well, that’s what you would think,” Emily said. “You can’t imagine that your mother and I had big lives, that we courted danger, that we had to tolerate chauvinism.”

  “Dad wasn’t a chauvinist, was he?”

  Hope lifted her shoulders helplessly. It didn’t matter anymore.

  “You take your freedom for granted,” Emily said.

  Judith shrugged. It appeared that she couldn’t imagine it all going wrong, or perhaps she didn’t want to consider it.

  After the funeral, and after Rudi and Ilke had been picked up by Charlotte (Penny had walked the children out to the street so that Charlotte and Conner wouldn’t have to face each other), Hope’s children sat at the dining room table in her small apartment and talked about her future as if she were not present. In fact, she felt so left out of the conversation that she stood at one point and walked to the bedroom. She left the door ajar and listened to her children plan her life.

  Melanie was concerned that she would get lonely now that Dad was gone.

  “She might,” Penny said. “But she’d feel the same even if she was surrounded by people.”

  “Have you seen the kitchen?” Judith asked. “It’s filthy.”

  Was this true? She cleaned quite studiously, perhaps missing a corner here and there, though it
was true that since Roy died, she ‘d let the dishes lie dirty.

  Penny, always one for a solid plan, said, “There’re some retirement homes I could look into.”

  “I could live with her,” Conner said.

  “Oh God, no,” Penny said.

  “That’s ugly.” This was Judith, who was actually agreeing for once with Penny.

  “There’s nothing more clichéd than an older son living with his mother.”

  Melanie laughed, cheerfully. She said, “Find a woman your age, Con. You’re still young.”

  Lying on the bed, listening to her children talk, she realized that they had no clue about death and loss and grief. She wished they would leave so she could be alone with her thoughts and her loneliness and her sadness. Now that the funeral was done, she felt overwhelmed by sadness.

  After Judith returned to Europe and Melanie left for Vancouver, where she was training, and Conner and Penny settled back into their local routines, she spent a desultory few days going through Roy’s things, trying to match socks, throwing out his underwear, stacking sweaters, and finding among his books and files the novel The Drifters, all three sections taped together, a bookmark stuck in the middle. Roy must have had a go at reading it, so many years ago. Perhaps he had been attracted to the adventure. Had he ever longed for something he didn’t have? She smelled the book and set it aside. She picked at scraps of paper in the bottom of Roy’s drawer: grocery lists (bacon, milk, dental floss) written in his slanted style, and a note to Hope that read, Hope, I will be meeting Elma at Art’s to discuss. See you tonight. She remembered Elma as the new accountant Roy had hired at the dealership five years before the business went under, a frightening blonde with a gash for a mouth and hands that fluttered and landed around her neck and clavicle. Hope hadn’t liked Elma from the get-go. She was the kind of woman who walked into a room as if she were on a manhunt. You could smell danger. Hope had no clue what Roy would have been discussing with Elma. It was perplexing. Though the note was fifteen years old, it held some import. Perhaps Roy had had secrets. This happened. Wife, suddenly orphaned, discovers mistress in the closet. For some time, though not excessively, she considered the possibility, and then dismissed it and tore up the note.

  She wondered if she might be trying to sort out the disappointment she felt in herself. That she had never experienced much passion, that she had been too careful, that the brilliant expectations she had had for her life had come to very little. At this point, in this meagre assessment, the children didn’t count. They were entities unto themselves. Her own life, a span of seventy, maybe eighty years, she judged as scanty, incomplete, lacking. But in what? Love? Safety? Success? Peace and understanding?

  These were her dark thoughts as she piled Roy’s clothes and shoes into green garbage bags and called the Diabetes Society for a pickup. She considered briefly that Conner might want some of his clothes, and in the end set aside a purple cardigan. She kept a shirt for herself, and for a while she wore it to bed, until Roy’s smell was erased and then she hung it in the closet.

  She found herself looking and waiting for Roy. She would walk from one room to the next and expect to find him there. Well, not really. She knew he was dead, and yet for a brief moment as she entered the kitchen, she expected to see him sitting at the table reading the paper. Or when she exited the bathroom at night and made her way back to bed, she was always slightly surprised to see his side empty, the blanket flat, the pillow unused. Or at night, she woke and reached for him and he wasn’t there, and she experienced outrage that he should just up and leave her. And then a sadness that made her hands and face numb. Several times, while puttering in the kitchen, she heard him call her name, and she said, “Coming,” only to discover as she walked from room to room that she could not find him. She was indeed alone.

  She realized, one spring evening, as she sat in her chair and looked out over the parking lot below, that she had been abandoned. And there was nothing to do about it.

  5

  Age of Hope

  She became contented with her life, and being contented, she felt guilty. More and more she found herself revelling in the present moment, simply accepting that what she was enjoying might never pass her way again. She wondered at times, as she drifted down the street to meet her daughter Penny for a late-afternoon tea, if she had ever been as happy. Over the past number of years she had discovered baroque music, playing it loudly on the compact stereo Penny had bought for her. Roy had never appreciated classical music, and now here she was, floating through her new condo, ecstatic about Bach. The condo was another pleasure. Purchased with the money gained through Roy’s life insurance plan, and with some extra help from Penny, it was clean and modern, eight floors up, with a balcony that offered a leafy summer view of the brown river below and in winter a glimpse of the skaters as they glided down the path created by the city.

  She had become selfish. Or perhaps simply self-contained and self-satisfied, as Penny would have put it. She rose in the morning at the hour of her choosing, dressing or remaining in a housecoat. She drove out to Eden for coffee with Irene Wall, returning when she liked. She gave up large meals for snacks of crackers and cheese, or perhaps a fried egg and toast. Roy had provided amply for her through the insurance, and she felt guilty that she was better off financially with him dead—she ate out at will, she spent money without having to account for it. She talked with Judith on the phone in the middle of the night, without having to worry about waking anyone else. There was no one else. Only Hope Koop.

  It astounded her sometimes how she had managed to stay married for so long, given the freedom she now felt. But she hadn’t known, had she. She still got very lonely, but she managed the solitude by watching television, talking to her children, and riding the elevator in hopes of meeting other residents in the building. This method of lessening loneliness just fell into her lap one day when she missed her floor and continued to ride up in the presence of a young man who engaged her in the most civil manner. They had a brilliant conversation about movies and she let it slip that her daughter had had dinner with Roman Polanski, and this impressed the young man to no end. She did not tell him that the dinner had happened years ago, nor did she tell him that she knew very little about Mr. Polanski and had seen only the one film that Judith, during a visit home, insisted she watch. A film based on Thomas Hardy’s novel. A sad story.

  The young man in the elevator had long black hair and he reminded Hope of her son, Conner, back when Conner had hair, and as she said goodbye to this young man, whose name turned out to be Alexander, she experienced pity both for this Alexander and for her son. A strange and unexpected emotion. Once upon a time, during a discussion with Emily, the notion of pity had cropped up, and Emily, perpetually well-informed, had said that pity was a product of one’s own insecurity and was directly related to jealousy and failure. Well. She decided not to dwell on this.

  The lobby was also a fine place to meet people, even if on a one-time basis, and it was here too that Hope sometimes fell to talking with Ibram, the doorman. Ibram was originally from Lebanon. He still had family back there, and every five years he returned for several months. Ibram and Hope spoke of travel and food, and at Christmas they exchanged a little care package. She gave Ibram cookies and homemade chocolate, and he gave her sweet desserts made of honey and sesame oil and coconut, along with fresh almonds.

  The condo she purchased had cost a fair bundle and so had cut into her plans to travel. She mostly made do with looking at maps from various countries and reading travel guides, but she had enough money put away for one trip. She thought that a Russian Mennonite study tour might give her a sense of Roy’s history, but when she spoke with the woman organizing the tour, she found herself disagreeing with her, not with what she said about history, or the Mennonites, or even Russia, but with the manner in which she said it, haughtily, as if Hope were a child. And so she chose not to go to Russia.

  Instead, she travelled to France and lived for seve
ral weeks with Judith and Jean-Philippe, who spent most of their time hissing at each other or descending into outright arguments. Judith was no longer working at the gallery and had found a part-time job in a clothing store, very upscale, that catered to wealthy Parisians. She hated the job, and this, along with other financial demands, weighed heavily on the relationship. She often came home late. Because the apartment was small, Hope was constantly in the way, and so she found herself going out alone into the city, seeking shade from the brilliant sun, spending far too much on coffee served in little cups, nibbling at croissants. The heat wave that summer had taken the lives of numerous elderly folks, and for a time Hope believed that she too could easily be a victim of the heat.

  Perhaps because she was usually alone, with few distractions, and perhaps because her own daughter seemed to be avoiding her, she found herself thinking about her parents. Passing by a patisserie, she smelled the fresh pastries and baguettes, and she was reminded of her childhood when she would visit her father in the early morning at the bakery and sit on a stool and eat fresh cinnamon buns as he worked. His view was simple: there was nothing better than serving people bread. He had told her this only once, but she recalled it now with utter clarity. Memories of her mother, on the other hand, were less precise but more emotional. A scene, a song, an image from a movie could stir a recollection of her mother’s hands or her voice calling out softly, or of her crossing the backyard in Eden long ago during those months when Hope was ill. She felt a deep longing.

  One day on the sidewalk at the edge of the Seine, thumbing through some modernist prints, she came upon a replica of the Degas print that Emily had given her so long ago. At first she felt faint and out of sorts. She was taken back to a time in her life when everything had been topsy-turvy. She had been crazy, and then she was healed. The little open suitcase, the bent back of the small woman, the dark room. But the suitcase. How strange, she thought, but then realized that it was much more logical to find Degas here in Paris than in an insane asylum in southern Manitoba. Her confusion and wonder was a testament to her unsophisticated life. Later, she found a small café and sat for several hours watching the people pass by. She drank an espresso, and then ordered a toasted ham sandwich and drank some sparkling water. The shade of the umbrella protected her. Her mother, who had always wanted to visit Paris but never had, would have loved this scene.