Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  “I’ll make fresh,” she said, shocked at the idea of microwaved coffee.

  “It’s the way I like it,” he said. “I make a pot in the morning in the church office, but I’m the only one there most of the time, so I reheat it all day.”

  Clara was about to ask why he didn’t go to the good coffee place beside the church, but remembered in time that of course he didn’t make enough money for lattes and Americanos.

  “Good thing you happened to come over today,” she said, instead.

  He took his cup out of the microwave and went back down the hall to the new children’s room. She thought he had not heard her, and she followed to say again, “Good that you chose today—”

  “My wife left this morning,” he said.

  He put his cup down carefully on the dresser and opened the exacto knife to slit the plastic on the first mattress. It made a satisfying zipping sound as it ripped.

  “Where’s she off to?” Clara asked, before she realized that it could not be a trip. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, idiotically.

  Paul laughed slightly again, that deprecating, priestly laugh he used to make people more comfortable. Clara was sorry to have occasioned it twice in one visit.

  “No—yes, she’s left me,” he said. “Everyone will know, soon enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clara said.

  “Well. I’m sorry about it too.” He took the corner of the mattress cover she handed him, and they fitted it around the square edges of the new mattress.

  When Paul stood up from stretching the last corner he cracked his head on the upper bunk, and yelped. He smacked his hand to the bump and ground it around, as if to smear the pain away.

  “Ice?” Clara asked.

  “Ow. No. Thank you. It’s making my eyes water,” he said, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.

  She sat beside him. “How long were you married?”

  “Twenty years next May. A long stretch,” he said, thinking of an elastic band pulled all that time, getting thinner and thinner. How it would hurt when it snapped on the fingers.

  An egg had bulged on his forehead. Instead of bustling off to fetch ice or rubbing alcohol as he would have expected, Clara sat still beside him.

  “Are you heartbroken?” she asked.

  He bent his head toward his knees. “I think I’m stomach-broken, more than anything. I threw up after she left, and again after lunch. Do you think that’s normal?”

  “I felt terrible when my husband left me,” Clara said. “Physically. I lay in bed for days. It was an ache in my chest. I thought I was dying.”

  Her gravity made him laugh. “I’m not dying. I think I’ll calm down soon.”

  “We were only married for a year. I was being left when you were marrying your wife.”

  “And do you feel better now?”

  “Oh, yes. A million times. Today, in fact, I’m happy as a lark. But I think that’s the new bunk beds, and the crib, and the children.”

  “We didn’t have children.”

  As of course she knew. As everyone knew. “That was hard, was it?”

  “It would have been easier, better for us, perhaps, if we…I wanted to very much.”

  She looked at his face, what she could see of it, his head still bowed in his hands.

  “You would have enjoyed having children,” she said. “From the little I know of the whole business. I’m certainly enjoying it, in between the worry.”

  “I should have gone out and found some,” he said.

  Late at night Dolly and Trevor lay in their new beds. Trevor was sleeping, but Dolly kept herself awake. She could hear Clary walking down the hall to her room. Crooning to Pearce, telling him some story about how good he was, what a good boy. You start out good, and then you turn into Dad, or Gran. How does that happen? Or you start out good and you get sick—No talking about her mother. She quickly switched it to Paul. He must be good, he was the priest. He had a big bump on his forehead.

  Darwin. Darwin is the best of our family, she thought. She could think about Darwin as she went to sleep, as long as she didn’t think of him at the where-he-was. He would be sleeping on the pullout couch in the basement tomorrow, he would be there.

  Clara’s spine had grown used to the living-room chesterfield, and back in her bed she had a ragged sleep. About midnight Pearce woke, hot and cranky. She gave him a sponge bath by the kitchen sink, with only the stove light on in the dim night kitchen. Poor lamb. Was this mild fever from illness, or new teeth coming in? Or withdrawal from the Benadryl. He was good-natured about it, lying peacefully on the towel as she sluiced him with trickles of water. His legs slid open and relaxed, and he turned his melon head on his small neck to look at the dark gleaming window over the sink, and through the window, to the moon shining out there in the night.

  “There is the world,” Clara told him. “There is the moon.”

  He reached his finger out to it, and looked back at her, to make sure she saw too. Beloved. She dabbed him dry with a couple of tea-towels from the drawer, so the water could evaporate and cool him that way. She dried between his fingers and his beautiful toes while he stared and stared at her, at the amazing presence of another human being. Clara had never understood that a baby could be so physically, solidly satisfying. When she picked him up to take him back to the crib he put his arm around her neck in a tender way, a partner in this. Not only a baby but a person, too, already.

  Pearce was still staring at the bears in his crib when Clara heard a noise from the children’s room. It was Trevor, awake and crying.

  “My mom,” he said—she could hardly make it out. She lifted him down off the bunk, took him to her room and tucked him into her bed. His shuddering gradually calmed.

  Dolly appeared at the door. One a.m. “What’s wrong?” she asked, tears in her eyes too.

  “They’re fine, Dolly. Come and sit with Trevor for a minute, and we’ll see if we can sing Pearce to sleep.”

  Clara went to their room, opened the window and left the curtains open, plumped up their pillows and added a fleece blanket over Trevor’s duvet. Then she put them back to bed. She sat in the semi-cave of the lower bunk, smoothing Dolly’s shin; Pearce lay curled on her lap, happy to be held.

  “Betty Pringle, she had a pig,” Clara sang for Trevor, and he chimed in softly, almost with the tune. “As on my way to Strawberry Fair,” she sang, and “Baby’s boat is silver moon, sailing in the sky.” She felt Dolly going limp as she patted her, and heard her breathing change. She stopped singing.

  “That was wonderful,” Trevor said from above her.

  Clara sat on in the little cave, wondering if she would be able to recall this later, when she was an old woman alone in some nursing-home, if she would remember Trevor saying wonderful, and the sleeping weight of Pearce on her lap, and Dolly under her hand, and how she’d done that herself, put them at ease, even though they were not her own.

  She counted to a hundred. Then she got up, slow and fluid. She glided Pearce down into his crib so that he didn’t wake, and got herself back into bed. Out in the hall Mrs. Pell’s door opened and closed, and the bathroom door. In a few minutes the toilet flushed, and Mrs. Pell stalked back down the hall to the kitchen, feet clomping on the tiles. Maybe her feet hurt. Some while later Mrs. Pell woke her again, shutting her bedroom door loudly, with who knows what in her hands, what mess. It didn’t matter. Clara turned over and shifted her pillow and went back to sleep for the last four hours of the night.

  11. Melancholy

  His car not being completely reliable, Paul took the bus to the Diocesan office in Regina to see the suffragan bishop. On the way down he read Stevie Smith (hardly a Christian poet, although presumably Anglican), her lines tramping through his head to the thrumming drone of the bus vibrating along the empty highway. Can God, / Stone of man’s thoughts, be good? / Say rather it is enough / That the stuffed / Stone of man’s good, growing, / By man’s called God.

  He had been leaving the church on Monda
y when the bishop’s secretary called to ask him to come in on Tuesday. Short notice. Away, Melancholy, away with it, let it go.

  The bus got in to Regina early, and Paul walked around the city aimlessly for an hour, dismayed as always by the number of street people, giving away all his change and two tens he happened to find in his pocket. When he arrived, on time, he still had to wait. The secretary gave him a plastic cone cup of coffee, the vessel he most despised. He fixed the cone more firmly in the holder and doled out cream powder, missing his own bad coffee. Bishop Vivian Porter, the first woman prelate in the diocese. Lisanne, suspicious, always waited to catch him in a compromising glance with Bishop Porter. He should have had the courage to scotch her stupid jealousy, for her own sake as well as his comfort.

  When she appeared, the bishop was wearing a purple wool dress, a nod to her position, and suede shoes so velvety-looking that Paul had to suppress a sudden desire to stroke them.

  “You’re showing strain,” the bishop said. She held his hand for a minute.

  He forced himself not to give an airy laugh, not to sally.

  “Come in,” she said. “We’ll be quiet in here.”

  Her office was a comfortable room. Much improved since her predecessor. (“Much improved since her predecessor,” he heard Clara repeat. He was stilted even in his thoughts.)

  “What a good room,” he said. “You’ve made it very handsome.” (Handsome? Fine! He spoke as he spoke!)

  Vivian Porter reached up and let her hand slide down the towering gold velvet drapes. “I love these, don’t you? My daughter did them up for me. And they have a secret, subversive side—look—” She turned back the ecclesiastical velvet to reveal the lining: cherry stripes on a lime green ground.

  “Perfect,” he said. He sank into one of the leather chairs by her desk. His knees seemed too large together. He splayed them apart, but that looked clumsy. He put his jacket on his lap and tried to forget himself. No matter how kindly Vivian arranged things, this summons was a visit to the headmaster. There must be something very wrong.

  She patted the drapes back, their sober sides out, and got down to it. “I received an awkward phone message yesterday from your warden. Rather than reply myself, I wanted to see if we could together come up with a response.” She leaned forward to the machine on her desk, the gold chain weighing down her bodice. She was fiftyish, young for a bishop, and intelligent. He admired and respected her.

  A click, then the tape beginning.

  “This is Candy Vincent calling, the people’s warden from St. Anne’s. I’m sorry to bother you with something so—hm. But I didn’t know whom to—to whom—to tell.” Candy Vincent’s familiar screechy voice filled the room, and filled the spaces inside his head. What was it going to be? His stomach was roiling. That hm of hers. The tape ran on, the voice ran on.

  “Father Paul’s wife—Lisanne Tippett—” Paul laughed, he couldn’t help himself. He had heard her say Xanthippe, rather than Lisanne Tippett. It struck him, sharp as a smack: he had married Socrates’ shrew of a wife. He had a moment of pure pleasure at the ludicrous joke of the world, and classical studies, and the joke of himself, his own ridiculous self.

  Vivian Porter looked up at him, lines on her forehead as her eyebrows double-arched. He shook his head, which she took to be an answer of some kind.

  Candy had gathered momentum. Paul could picture her holding one of the fundraising chocolates, at Tuesday’s vestry meeting, talking while the chocolate melted in her solid fingers.

  “She has never been involved in the parish, but there’s no escaping the fact: she wrote an article on—” It would take her a moment to get that out, Paul thought. “On masturbation.”

  There was a pause, a quiet space on the tape. Chocolate on her hands.

  Vivian Porter’s mouth had turned up at one corner. Possibly smiling, Paul thought. Difficult not to, at the word, at the word coming from Candy Vincent. “And other things—equipment.”

  The bishop pressed the stop button. “That’s enough, I think.”

  Paul was mainly conscious of relief that it had been something to do with Lisanne rather than himself. They sat comfortably enough, knowing one another to that limited degree that let them expect the best of each other. The bishop would not be unreasonable, Paul would not be defensive, and what Lisanne wrote was not the diocese’s business anyway.

  “But it’s awkward,” Paul acknowledged. “Lisanne and I are—dissolving our—” He had sawdust, leafmould in his mouth. “She’s left me. We will probably divorce. I only say probably because I still hope for a better resolution. Lisanne has no such hope.” Man, too, hurries, Eats, couples, buries, He is an animal also. With a hey ho melancholy, away with it, let it go… “The article was written more than a year ago, a commission. It’s hardly a sex magazine, it’s Women’s Fitness. The swimsuit issue is sought after, I understand, but the general tone of the magazine is clinical.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “I suppose a long time—nineteen years. We were married as students…”

  “I’m sorry, Paul.”

  Nothing more for her to say, and nothing for him to confide. Except that Lisanne was making his life excruciating any way she could, exacting revenge for some sin he had not consciously committed—the sin of not caring enough that she was leaving him, perhaps.

  “My wife may have drawn the article to Candy’s attention herself,” he told Vivian, suddenly filled with longing to tell her everything. She motioned with her hand, a closing gesture which he interpreted as distaste for tattling. Very well. He said no more. Away with it, let it go.

  Everything ends. The motion of the bus and his lack of responsibility for that motion were equally soothing, crossing the empty inland sea of prairie.

  They had not slept together—Paul corrected himself, they had relentlessly continued to share a bed—had not made love since she missed a period eight years ago. For the first few days, because they thought Lisanne was pregnant; then because she was in mourning; then for a few months because they hated each other, or at least she hated him; then for nothing. Because they didn’t make love any more, that was not them.

  Are not the trees green,

  The earth as green?

  Does not the wind blow,

  Fire leap and the rivers flow?

  Away melancholy.

  She had told her sister, in his hearing, that she wouldn’t care if she never had sex again. Carol had bridled and whinnied, but Lisanne was set, something admirable in her unbreachable self-possession. Admirable, implacable. Words flittering in his head.

  He had trapped her by agreeing with her, giving her no opportunity for rage. They had married too young, and he had not been careful enough to keep some dignity or authority or respect—which he could only have maintained by behaviour which he did not believe in: by coldness, or insistence on his own sovereignty. He had given over to her, and that was weak, and she hated him. Paul could not find it in his heart, not even in his brain, to blame her. But he deeply wanted not to be married to her any more. Maybe they had let it drag out so long, so painfully, in order for the pain of the actual event to be lessened. Telephone poles clicked past the bus window, tallying the distance, the wires swooping him on from point to point, back to his empty house. She had not been a good wife, even at the beginning. He knew of one affair and suspected others. She was selfish and base, and he was a fool, and between them that had been the best that they could do.

  His head hurt where he had bumped it on the bunk bed. He leaned the lump against the cool bus window.

  12. Comfortable, understandable

  Because of the crowded schedule, Lorraine’s chemo couldn’t begin until Tuesday. Darwin wheeled her around the halls while they waited for her chemo training session. For an adventure they explored the fourth floor, the osteo ward: unfamiliar peach walls, and more art. This hospital was big on art.

  “Can you believe the death pictures?” she asked. “Little plaques beside the
m: in memory of Grampa, with thanks for the life of Myra…They creep me out. There’s one on my floor where the boy is fishing with a ghostly grandfather beside him, all whited-out, smiling at the boy like he’s going to pat his head. Or maybe drink his blood.”

  “I saw that one,” Darwin said. “It’s just a print. Must be thousands of them, hung around hospital wards all over depressing the hell out of everybody.”

  They trundled past patients trying to walk, mostly old. A woman close to Lorraine’s age kept her eyes weirdly still, her whole face turning as she used her walker. She gave them a beautiful smile. Lorraine knew that same beauty hung in her own smile now, in her eyes. Bad trouble makes you feel loving, she thought. Nine days ago she’d been crying in the Dart because she could not find Darwin.

  Back in Lorraine’s room, a crop-haired, athletic nurse popped her head in the door.

  “You’re here. Great. So! I’m going to go through what you can expect from chemotherapy,” she said brightly. Her nametag said Nola. She fanned a set of pamphlets on the rolling table and pulled over a straight chair.

  Lorraine shut her eyes for a minute. She couldn’t stand to hear this. Darwin was listening, he would tell her about it later. Phrases fell through the air, names of chemicals, T-cell types, crashing around her like thin, thin glass, like the first film of ice on the puddles on a northern morning. Her boots crinkling through the delicate half-formed panes. Darwin was absolutely still beside her, the root of the world grown up through the floor.

  The nurse was practical, not frightening. “Chemotherapy affects tissues with a high rate of cell division, like cancer cells: the lining of the mouth, the lining of the intestines, the skin, and the hair follicles. That’s why hair falls out with some kinds of chemotherapy, and why it grows back again very nicely.”