Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  “Is Dr. Rendell expecting you?” the epauletted doorman asks, and Charlotte is so taken aback by the doctor and by the marble counter behind which he is scanning four miniature screens, that she says, “Yes, yes, she is.”

  The doorman murmurs her name into a telephone receiver while Charlotte’s mouth goes dry, and then waves, gold buttons flashing, toward the farthest elevator. “Ninth floor, south side.”

  “The apartment number?” Charlotte asks, her voice low, almost a whisper, and cracking—surely he will not let her pass.

  But there is no censuring arm, only the doorman’s thin eyebrows arching in tandem with his epaulets. “No numbers. You take the one on the right.”

  Inside the elevator, Charlotte glances at herself in the enormous gilded mirror that forms the top panel of the back wall. How simple and naive and maybe even poor she must have seemed to the doorman: the mousy hair still cropped into the pageboy she’s worn since shearing her girlhood braids, the green parka with the hood that zips bulkily into the collar, the corduroy jumper the color of stewed prunes, the white cotton turtleneck, nappy from a hundred washes, the rubber-soled walking shoes ordered from a catalogue. She lost vanity so many years back, it is hard to remember when. Only about her eyes, still a large china blue, has she retained pride. Pride that they haven’t sunk into her face like Wen’s had, faded from wind and sand and sun and, she’s always thought, from the years of humiliations—the feeling of defeat when his back wouldn’t heal and he had to give up ice hockey and all his Icarus hopes; when, these last five years, the fishing gone bust, the fishermen having taken out more of the cod and mackerel and hake than the bay could reproduce so they’d gone from each boat bringing in upward of two thousand kilos a day to the whole fleet hardly hauling in that much, he’d had to take road work and then unemployment to make ends meet.

  On the ninth floor, the elevator opens onto a foyer with a high-backed chair to the left and a pedestal table with a glass orb filled with white tulips to the right. In front, there is a door with a brass nameplate on which DR. MARGARET RENDELL is engraved in small script letters. As Charlotte steps out of the elevator, a chime rings and then a young woman—redheaded, ponytailed, crisply aproned—opens the door.

  “Oh…” A hand, so freckled the white skin beneath is nearly hidden, flies up to cover her mouth. “Excuse me, only I thought he’d said Mr. MacPherson. Is … did Dr. Rendell know you were coming?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte says, this time the lie rolling smoothly, without pause, off her tongue.

  “Oh, dear. She just left, not even ten minutes ago. Said she’d be out for about an hour.” The girl seems flustered, which has the effect of calming Charlotte. “Would you like to wait?”

  “Please.” Charlotte follows the maid down a long corridor lined with sepia-tinted photographs of elegantly dressed black people, and then through a set of French doors into a large room with a blond oak floor and a rose Oriental rug covered in a pattern of blue-gray vines. She motions Charlotte toward a creamy couch with a fan of pillows against the back and a mohair blanket, also light, like the inside of an oyster shell, laid over one arm.

  Charlotte runs her fingers over the blanket and inhales: the sweet decaying scent of gardenias. Across from her, a wall of tall windows looks out over Central Park. There are no real curtains, just a sheer voile, left loose on one side so a shadow falls over the black grand piano, but pulled back with a braided cord on the other so the late afternoon light forms a gold pool on the floor. A ficus tree with shiny leaves brushes the ceiling, and on the walls there are pastel canvases, one of silvery cubes floating like bubbles, the other of what looks like a nude female. Folding her chapped country hands, she thinks of her own living room with its centerpiece of Wen’s television and recliner. When they built the house, a prefab ordered from a company in Ontario, they’d economized, putting in wall-to-wall carpet instead of finished wood floors, but what with Wen and Eric always coming in damp and muddy, the carpets had mildewed and Charlotte finally had the rugs ripped up, resigning herself to the linoleum underneath, which at least she could keep clean.

  The maid returns bearing a lacquered tray she lowers carefully onto a glass table. On the tray is a whimsical teapot, shaped like a Pierrot doll with an arm for the spout and a matching sugar bowl, creamer, and mug. To the side sit two oval plates: one with an array of sliced fruits—strawberries, oranges, pineapple rings; the other with a sampler of tiny bakery cookies—iced rounds, chocolate-filled straws, flowers with red jam centers.

  “Milk or lemon, ma’am?”

  “Lemon, please.”

  The maid pours the tea and lifts a lemon wedge with a pair of silver tongs. She points to a small bell on the tray—“If you need anything…”—and then disappears, closing the French doors behind her.

  *

  Three days before, on the morning she left Priest Pond, Charlotte woke thinking of her father. She hadn’t seen her father in twelve years, and then he’d been in his coffin, the remaining strands of his jet-black hair plastered to his head, his thick arms straining even in death against the suit he’d worn only to church and other funerals, the scar he’d brought home from the war hidden beneath. Charlotte’s mother, who would die less than four months later, had insisted that the wake be held at home, her father’s coffin placed in the room her mother had called the parlor. Charlotte had stood next to her brother, Bill, a year out of Princeton and in his first banking job. She’d been struck by how fitting it seemed, how the room, which her father had always hated, seeing it as her mother’s attempt at pretending that she wasn’t a plumber’s wife, had always felt like a funeral parlor, dark and heavy and stiff with the promise of chastisements.

  It was early, the morning light filtering through the white bedroom curtains Charlotte had sewn herself. She lay still for longer than usual, knowing there was nothing to do. The car was packed, her neighbor set to pick the fall garden crop. (Take it, Charlotte had urged when she’d shown her neighbor the kitchen garden—the beans, the acorn squash, the onions, beets, kohlrabi, red cabbage—unable, now, to even imagine why she’d planted all of this or how, in years past, she’d spent weeks at canning, at preparing the root cellar.) Arrangements made to spend the two nights she’d stay in New York with her brother and his wife, their apartment, Bill had explained, not far from where she was going, just a short cab ride across the park, Charlotte too embarrassed to tell him that she would be driving the pickup to New York.

  Twisting backward, she reached the window over the bed and pushed it open. Outside, the air was balmy, the island’s secret, God’s kiss, she used to tell Eric, the Gulf Stream that came from Florida warming the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the water warmer than anywhere north of the Carolinas, like the Caribbean, she’d heard tourists say, as though there should be palm trees and coconuts instead of fields of barley and stands of pine and spruce tumbling into the sea.

  She dressed quickly in her jumper and tights, made tea and a slice of toast from a loaf of bread one of her sisters-in-law had brought two days before. When she finished eating, she rinsed the cup, checked the stove, locked the kitchen door, and stuck her handbag on the front seat of the pickup.

  Charlotte walked down the clay road lined with wild blueberry bushes, the outer bunches shriveled and dry, but inside, where she reached her long fingers, filled with the tiny tart budlets. Although their ten acres ran from the road out to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Wen had insisted they build away from the water, where in the winter cold gusts of wind blew in from the north Atlantic, so as to save on heating costs. Then, Eric had been in his fourth year of ear infections, and Charlotte, tired out from her fights with Wen that the boy would never get well if Wen refused to let her keep the trailer a decent temperature and scared too that Eric’s keen sense of sound might be damaged, had gone along. Today, there was a warm breeze from the east and the field of hay that stretched west from the house made rustling sounds. On the dunes, the sea grasses would be blowing, soft, all in one direction,
a lime-green animal’s hide. This year, with Wen sick, they’d left the tract behind the house unplanted and wildflowers had grown, defiant, like children spinning wildly through a room where they know they should be still: yellow goldenrod, purple Michaelmas daisy, a spiky fireweed with leggy stalks and fluffed cabernet-colored flowers Wen’s sisters called rosebay willowherb.

  When she’d first come to the island, Charlotte had been amazed at the way the fields ran right to the edges of the bluffs, the land dropping off like those ancient drawings of the earth as flat. Before her, red clay cliffs abutted the gulf, this morning a sapphire blue stretching out toward a pale horizon, the water velvety with only the thinnest slivers of whitecaps toward the shore. Green lichen streaked the cliffs and, below, pools of water formed between the rocks. Floating in one, there was a wooden slat from a lobster trap, smooth, Charlotte knew from years of scrambling with Eric over these rocks—Eric, whose translucent skin she’d had to cover from head to toe with suntan lotion, the peaked white brow dotted with a tiny bluish star, the residue of a little piece of lead lodged under the skin after another boy had poked him with a pencil, eerily, in the exact spot where the mystics place the third eye. Eric leaning to examine each object that washed ashore: a starfish, a bottle embossed with Japanese characters, pieces of rope, once a braided gold chain he’d laid cold and wet against her then-still-young neck.

  A quarter of a century before, sitting on the porch of her parents’ two-family house, when Wen, a roguish boy she’d met at a street fair—Wen and the other Canadian ice hockey players loud and bold from German beer and a winning streak that had left money in their pockets—had told her about the island, she’d imagined it as something between Pocahontas and Little House on the Prairie. Wen had talked about first-growth forest: red spruce, white spruce, black spruce. Pine, cherry, maple, birch. He’d talked of beef chickens and lane chickens and how his father had sheared their own sheep and his grandmother and great-aunts had spun a coarse white wool his mother and aunts had dyed and knit into bulky sweaters. There’d been a double outhouse—frosted over or bee-infested depending on the season—and an orchard with apples, peaches, and pears. He and his brother had trapped beaver, mink, and rabbit for pocket money. They’d walked four miles each way to a one-room schoolhouse by a river, where, after school, the boys would saw a hole in the ice and then lower a torch to attract salmon, six man’s hands long, they’d spear with a long spontoon. Winter nights, they’d drag his uncle’s combine down to the river to generate electricity for lights so they could play ice hockey.

  Before, before, Charlotte thought, gazing up at the white October sky, empty of clouds or color, and then out at the horizon, where she could see a tanker headed toward Newfoundland. That useless before.

  *

  On the ferry to Cape Tormentine, Charlotte sat in the second-deck cafeteria drinking tea from a Styrofoam cup. It was a forty-five-minute crossing over the Northumberland Strait, a trip Charlotte had made a half dozen times with Wen to shop in Saint John. A young couple sat at an adjacent table. The girl had long dark hair, stiff with hair spray, and athletic calves that peeked out between the bottoms of her Lycra pants and the tops of her slouchy socks. The boy, man really, had brought back a tray of food from the cafeteria line: two cups of coffee, a muffin for the girl, and, for himself, eggs, potatoes, bacon, and toast. The girl teased him, ignoring her muffin and instead taking nibbles from the crispest pieces of his bacon and the edges of his toast. He gave her hand a play whack and pushed the plate out of her reach. She giggled and lifted herself onto her knees, leaning over the table toward him, her sweatshirt falling forward so the tops of her large soft breasts were exposed.

  Charlotte tried to remember if she’d ever felt that way, proud and in full possession of her body. It had been a different time. Her mother’s brother had died in Honfleur, the first year of her own marriage. Her mother’s hair had turned white within the year, her grief draining the color from everything it touched. Her mother’s grief had not abated, it seemed to Charlotte, until Bill, her uncle’s namesake and nine years her junior, had been born, so that Charlotte would always think that she and her brother had grown up not only in different eras but in different households with different mothers. She’d been eighteen and in her last year of high school when she’d met Wen. Wen had mistaken her heart-shaped face, blue eyes, and slender shape for angelic temperament; she’d mistaken his tight muscular arms, his rust hair, always falling forward into his eyes, and his laugh, boisterous and from the gut, for the outward signs of a deep pulsing vital force. The next day, watching him play, his flat butt almost parallel with the ice, his eyes fixed on a spot far ahead, Charlotte had thought of an animal, a leopard or a lion, a creature with natural grace. A week later, they had eloped.

  The girl got up from her chair. Giggling, she walked around the table and plopped herself on the boy’s lap. Her thighs spread over his and he reached his hands around her and moved them under her zippered sweatshirt. Fascinated and then embarrassed, Charlotte averted her eyes.

  With Wen too, she’d been embarrassed at first, intimidated by his experience: the many girls he’d gone to bed with on the road. After Eric was born, when he’d hardly wanted her, she’d wondered if the girls had continued, but he’d slept peacefully wrapped around her, hardly like a man racked with guilt. Later, she’d wondered if it was his back, the injury when Eric was five. Over the years, though, she’s come to understand that it was none of these things—that it was simpler, sadder. Wen experienced himself as living on scarce resources. It took all he had to leave the house eight months a year at 4:00 a.m., to put on the damp yellow oilskins and head for his boat redolent with fish guts. After that, he could either love her or want her, and she supposes that if she’d been able to choose between his face pressed every night into her shoulder and something more like she’d imagined that first time watching him play ice hockey, she would have chosen what she’d had.

  *

  She must have dozed off, because she starts when she hears the chime ring in the hall, the fruit dish still balanced on her lap, the maid’s high voice saying there is a Mrs. MacPherson here, she said she was expected, and Charlotte tastes her mouth, a bitter metallic from sleep, and for an instant thinks how foolish to have said this, certainly there will now be a scene. But if Margaret, Dr. Margaret Rendell, responds to the maid it is very quietly, because Charlotte hears no disclaimers, only the maid coming in to clear the tea tray, the red wisps tucked back into her ponytail.

  A moment later, the rapid click-click of pumps announces Margaret Rendell’s entrance. She is tall and large-boned, clad in a red-and-black houndstooth suit with a jacket that buttons on a diagonal up the front, just glancing her ample hips, and a short straight skirt. Her gazelle’s neck is accentuated by her hair, slicked back from her face and secured in a chignon at the nape. What leaves Charlotte with her mouth ajar is Margaret’s skin, a deep mahogany so beautifully cared for it looks almost polished, and the tortoiseshell glasses, large and round with the lenses so entirely opaque Charlotte can only see her own reflection in their face.

  Margaret lowers herself into a white leather swivel chair. She crosses her long legs, and spins the chair in quarter turns with a tiny rotation of her ankle. “Would you mind,” she says, “closing your eyes for a moment? I’d like to take a look at you but I don’t let anyone see me without the glasses.”

  Confused but obedient, that obedient impulse she learned from the nuns at Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Charlotte closes her eyes. The chair creaks as Margaret stands, walking away from the couch and onto the bare floor by the windows. Charlotte hears the snap of glasses folding, and then what feels like Margaret’s eyes running over her, that old tingly sensation from morning services when she believed she could tell if one of the sour-breathed nuns was passing her eyes over Charlotte’s back, particularly Sister George, with her lashless lids and blue-veined temples, whose gaze would spark an electrical current that would spread across Char
lotte’s shoulder blades before racing down her spine.

  Margaret laughs. It is a friendly laugh, but with a sharp edge to it. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  “Excuse me?” Charlotte’s voice sounds small and weak and suddenly she feels panicky, an impulse to open her eyes and dash out of the room.

  “That I’m blind. Well, ninety-five percent. I can make out large shapes.”

  With her eyes closed, the street sounds that before seemed muffled and almost soothing, a gurgle of human life so unlike the unpeopled silence that blankets the Priest Pond house, now seem amplified, what Eric would call a cacophony of horns and gunning engines.

  “You’re an ectomorph like Eric. All skin and bones, with cold hands and cold feet.”

  Charlotte can hear her own breath, short and hollow. Since Wen’s death, now nearly a month ago, there’s been a hard tight feeling in her chest, as if a piece of ice has broken off from a frozen mass inside her, drifting up toward her heart so that she has to breathe around it. She’s been mortified to realize that this feeling is not grief for Wen—who’d been gone, really, for years, no, decades already—but the awareness of Eric’s absence, Eric whom she’d thought of as only temporarily estranged from them, not so unusual for a boy in college, but who, when Wen went into the hospital, she’d not known how to even contact. It came as a shock, that old ache of longing for Eric, followed by a sudden and terrible sense of shame that they, she, had let so much time pass, three years now that he’s been out of college, years in which their calls to Eric dwindled from once a month to birthdays and Christmas, his cards and letters growing less and less frequent so that the week after Wen’s first heart attack, she was taken aback looking through the shoe box where she kept Eric’s letters to see that the last she’d heard from him was six months earlier, a Christmas card in which he’d written only his name. With Wen’s second heart attack and the ensuing days when she tried to locate Eric, his phone disconnected, the school where he’d written that he worked unable to tell her any more than that he is on leave until January, abroad, they believed, the curtain of pretense lifted, and she had to acknowledge that it has been five years, more than a fifth of Eric’s life and all of Wen’s final years, of only polite gesturing between them.