Elliott’s intellect lacked any but the most basic dimension, and he was able to resist his wife’s faith with complete non-comprehension. Although this pained her, she found security in the narrowness of his mind and was happy to dwell within its boundaries. The word ‘why’seldom crossed their lips. When she offered him her version of their son’s escapade he accepted it as she expected he would, without asking the questions which would have occurred to a person of normal curiosity.
His anger, a feeble force, was reserved for the foolish waste of a month’s earnings. He decreed that the shortfall should be recouped by greater industry in the coming month, and wrote out an appendix to the schedule on the kitchen wall: ‘Straighten out garage: $2. Wash windows: 10c each. Paint window frames: 25c each. Paint back fence: $1.’
‘I want you to notice, son, that I have set down a rate for the entire job here, not a rate by the hour.’ His liver-spotted hand moved slowly over the figures. ‘These sums are estimates, what I think each task should be worth to the household. I am not proposing to pay you by the hour or by the day, because when you pay a man on time it pays him to be idle. Pay a man for the task and you’ll get it done and finished in the best time he can manage because that way he’ll make the most money. Now that’s a good lesson I’m giving you – you remember that.’
Since outside painting would not be practical until the snow melted, Alex began with the garage the next day after school. It was already neat and ordered, but his father wanted a space cleared for their old refrigerator, which would need to be stored now that a new one had been purchased. At the back of the oil-stained area occupied by the family Ford towered a wall of old packing cases which needed to be disassembled and rebuilt higher with a place for the discarded appliance. The Wolfes did not throw away their old household equipment, but preserved it with care in case it should be needed one day. Elliott and his wife shared the belief that catastrophes were always poised to strike their home. After death and accident, scarcity was their keenest fear. Alex put these worries down to working in the insurance business and being too familiar with other people’s disasters.
He set up the stepladder and began methodically to bring down the highest cases. Old heaters, a toaster, outgrown shoes and worn clothing were stacked on top of each other, a dusty record of the family’s life. There were boxes of PTA records, bundles of the church magazine, issues of the recipe circle’s bi-annual booklet. Near the bottom he knew he would find his old toys and the glass bottles from which he had taken milk as a baby, their perished rubber teats wrapped separately in blue surgical paper. Several boxes contained paper dress patterns and precisely folded remnants of fabric; his mother held that the clothes she made herself were far more stylish, and of course more economical, than anything store-bought. At the front of the pile where she could reach them easily she stored her jam jars; by this season one third of them would be empty.
By the end of the morning he had the pile down, and the space for the refrigerator measured and marked out. Elliott Wolfe undertook no physical work of any kind himself. When the new fridge was delivered he would give his wife a quarter to give to the men to carry the old one out to its new home.
Putting back the boxes was quicker work than taking them down, although it had to be done carefully so that nothing was in danger of falling. The stack grew fast and the anticipation of finishing made him careless. He picked up one of the older boxes, containing mostly his infant clothes and yellowed leaflets on child development, and hoisted it roughly to shoulder height. The side of the case broke away in his grasp and the contents spilled on the ground.
With three new carpentry pins the box was easily reassembled, and he began to pick up what had spilled out of it. Here his mother’s obsession with order at last betrayed her. Without question, everything needed to be refolded and packed neatly. Alex was straightening a small bundle of papers when he saw, among the recipes for baby dinners and patterns for romper suits, the corner of a letter with a strange stamp, bearing the head of a woman in a helmet.
He pulled the letter from the bundle and looked at it. It was addressed to his mother in erratic brown ink writing, and readdressed in a more disciplined hand in blue. The letter inside was completely incomprehensible apart from his mother’s name: Marie.
For some time Alex had known that his mother’s silences were more eloquent than her words. She was most strikingly dumb on her life before her marriage. He had no idea where she had been born or who her folks were. The Wolfes, his father’s family, he was told had lived in Ohio for three generations, and before that had emigrated from ‘the middle of Europe’. This was a euphemism for Germany which most families in their circle used. There was a black morocco photograph album with black silk tassels which contained some yellowed old photographs of Wolfes at harvest suppers or works outings, a few formal family portraits, his parents’ wedding photograph and his own christening picture. Visits to his father’s brother in Akron were made at Christmas or Thanksgiving.
If he asked, Marie would say, ‘My life began when I met your father, Alex. Surely that is all you need to know.’ When he pressed her further, she changed the subject. To a youth with a burgeoning sense that he could not follow his parents’way of life, the denial was a goad.
The letter might lead to the answers he wanted. He put it in the pocket of his work jacket and completed his task. Later he transferred it to the inner pocket of the jacket which he wore to school, where it lay forgotten for three months until he walked Jennifer McIlwaine to the bus stop after a movie and decided to pass the time until the bus came in kissing her. She put her hands against his chest to make him keep a decent distance apart, and felt something crackle under her fingers.
‘What is that?’ she asked him, playing for time. She had picked Alex Wolfe to date in the hope that he might let her off without an hour of heavy petting at the end of the evening; other girls he had dated said he was really quite a gentleman.
‘This old letter.’ He pulled it out to show her. ‘I found it in our garage. It’s addressed to my mother but I can’t read it. Maybe you can?’
‘I believe it’s in French.’ Intrigued, she scanned the uneven lines. ‘This word here, Chère, that’s kind of like chérie, isn’t it?’
‘Why, so it is. I never thought of that.’ Words in any language were difficult for Alex. He was in awe of girls like Jennifer who could read a book in a day and seemed able to chatter for hours, never lost for expression. His head was full of things he wanted to say, but nothing ever came out right, especially if he had to write it down.
‘Hey listen, maybe my sister can tell us what this means, she’s a senior and she’s doing some French, I think. If you give it to me I could show it to her tonight when I get home.’
Her eyes were bright with interest and sympathy, but he hesitated, suddenly afraid of losing the only reason he had to suspect that there might be a romantic secret in his origins. ‘Gee, I don’t know, it is kind of special to me. It isn’t that I don’t think you’d take care of it or anything…’
‘Oh, sure. Listen, I understand, really I do. Of course you must keep hold of it. But if you like you could show it to my sister yourself.’ She recalled that she had found the letter in a place which might be described as lying close to his heart, and was attuned to his unspoken yearning for mystery. ‘Why don’t you come over to our house on Saturday?’
The older McIlwaine girl could only pick out a few words in the letter, but confirmed that they were in French, although the writing was so elaborate it was barely legible. She offered to ask her teacher for a translation and he agreed to entrust it to her. The three of them passed a delicious afternoon speculating on the significance of the find. The girls, who were very alike in their cleanly rounded limbs and fleecy fair hair, both favoured the idea that it was a love letter, perhaps the tragic last farewell of a wartime sweetheart, but Alex could not imagine his mother being loved. Lately she had taken to emphasizing that chastity was the cement of civi
lization and progress.
Word came back that the French teacher would like to talk to Alex privately, and so he and Jennifer went over to the high school and the two girls accompanied him to her classroom door. She was young for a teacher, with very glossy long brown hair which she wore pulled back in an artistic-looking wooden slide. She sat beside him and he glimpsed black lace inside her orange sweater.
‘Well, Alex, I thought I ought to talk to you face to face about this letter because I really don’t know if I would be doing the right thing in telling you what it contains. Now tell me, what about your grandmother, your mother’s mother?’ By her soft accent she was a Canadian. He felt as if her voice was stroking him.
‘I wish I could tell you about her, honestly I do, but I don’t know anything. Mom just clams up if I ask her anything about where she came from.’
There was something about him that was so eager and fresh, his eyes were so clear and he stammered slightly, his full lips rosy and wet, that the teacher’s misgivings evaporated.
‘And you really want to know all that, don’t you?’
‘Why yes. I want to know about all of my family, not just half.’
‘I think that’s very natural, Alex. But your mother is keeping a secret here, and perhaps for good reasons, so she could get mad if you find out.’
‘I do understand that being a teacher you might be on my parents’ side.’ He sounded so reasonable but he looked crushed. His shoulders drooped inside his jacket.
‘There aren’t any sides in this,’ she told him with a sympathetic touch on his arm. ‘I would like to tell you what’s in the letter and actually I think it’s important that you know.’ She paused, asking herself if she had gone crazy, then opened her folder and took out the envelope. ‘Now there are a few words in this which I didn’t recognize, they seem like little pet expressions which people might use with a child. But the gist of this letter is that your grandmother is writing to your mother to say she has heard that she is married now and that she has a child of her own. And she says – and it’s really quite emotional, Alex, I think she must have had very strong feelings here – that now she is a mother herself perhaps she understands what mother love is, and how much she is missed back home.’
‘So it sounds as if she ran away or something?’ Alex felt almost betrayed. If his mother too had run away from home, why had she been so stony towards him when he did the same?
‘And then your grandmother writes that she is alone now, which I don’t fully understand because then she goes on to ask your mother to write saying that the letter would be received with great joy by herself and her brother and everyone at home. And there you see she has set down the address, which is in the town of Nice in France.’
As she spoke she saw the young man begin almost to glow with excitement. His great grey eyes grew wet with tears and he quickly turned away his head and felt for his handkerchief, wiping his eyes under cover of blowing his nose. The French teacher was herself quite breathless with feeling when she finished. She took his hand in both of hers and squeezed it. The heave of her chest, the slight quiver of her breasts, was the most erotic thing he had ever seen. Alex was dizzy with emotion.
‘If there’s anything you’d like to talk to me about, I’m always here,’ she told him when they parted after a little more discussion. She leaned against the door after she closed it, wondering what the boy possessed which had caused her to lose her head that way.
That spring became a season of wonders. The poignant secrets of his past were nectar to Alex’s starved spirit, filling him with energy and hope. Until then he had been a reserved and rather perverse boy. He could have been an athlete, but he lacked aggression and hated to get hurt, so that even on the running track boys with less ability but more drive could beat him. His father, a pigeon-chested weakling all his life, saw no merit in sports.
In the classroom Alex was equally hamstrung by his parents’ prejudices. His mother abominated science, his father the arts, and so his interests were doomed to frustration. In addition, even the teachers most taken with his pleasing manner had to acknowledge that his intelligence was weak. He was always attentive in class but much too quiet, and he had an absolute inability to extract facts from print. Socially too, Alex Wolfe was an outsider, rejected by every clique, not in need of close friends or ambitious for a sweetheart. He could have scored with the girls, but liked them too much to want to quarrel over doing dirty things with them.
In a matter of weeks all these obstacles disappeared. Alex found himself in a gentle, female world in which he was a source of fascination. Interest and sympathy bathed him like the water of life and the emotions which had previously been obscured in the mist of his mind became recognizable forces. His grades improved and he qualified for the track team. His probation officer concluded that running away had just been a typical episode of sophomore nerves, and Alex Wolfe was no longer a cause for concern. Jennifer McIlwaine, bewitched by the romance of his ancestry, became absolutely gooey over him and when he next kissed her she unhooked her brassiere herself, although she was grateful when he explained that he really respected her too much to go that far.
Alex Wolfe was in love. The object of his passion seemed to him the wisest, kindest, most accomplished and most beautiful woman in creation. In the smothering quiet of his home he lay awake half the night either wondering what he could do to follow the revelation of his French grandmother or masturbating over the memory of the French teacher’s quivering breasts. In the end he helplessly brought both problems back to their source and returned to her classroom.
She startled like a guilty cat when she saw him, then recovered and sat him down at the same desk.
‘I wondered if you could maybe give me some more help – if you aren’t too busy? Do you think – I mean – I thought’ – he took a deep breath, kept his eyes on the desk and ignored what he could feel – ‘I was thinking maybe I could write to this address.’
‘You could write? But, this was fifteen years ago, Alex. Have you thought that she might have moved in all that time?’
‘Well, yes, but I won’t lose anything if she has, will I? She sounded so unhappy and I hate to think of some old lady all alone, who is my grandmother, never knowing anything about me and maybe dying or something.’ He noticed that the skin of her neck creased in several places, wonderful marks of maturity. She smelt of face powder and there were smudges of make-up under her chin.
‘What a very good sentiment, Alex. You really have what French people call tendresse, tenderness.’ Again, she was moved to help him. With all the uncaring, destructive young men there were in the world, surely this one deserved appreciation for his fine heart.
She had that awesome facility of expression that he admired in most girls. The letter she composed said what he intended far better than he could have put it, and she thoughtfully suggested that she should add a postscript explaining that someone had helped with the translation.
‘Where is this place Nice, exactly?’ He pronounced it awkwardly.
‘You say it like niece, niece like nephew,’ she corrected him. ‘It’s in the South of France, the major city of the French Riviera. I haven’t been there myself but I think it has palm trees and some beautiful old buildings.’
A piece of fantasy made real; somehow he had suspected as much. ‘Could I possibly ask one more thing? May we put your address here? Because if she should write back and my mother saw the letter…’
‘Oh my goodness, I never thought of that. We would be in trouble, wouldn’t we?’ She turned to look him full in the face and she seemed so beautiful he thought he would pass out right there. The conspiratorial ‘we’was sweeter than birdsong. ‘You do realize that this is something I should not be doing, Alex. If people found out I would lose my job.’
To his heated sensibilities this sounded like encouragement. Alex shut his eyes and planted his lips on hers, reaching out to hold her and finding her upper arms. After a moment of shock, he felt her re
spond. Her mouth was confident, almost greedy, but all at once she pulled away.
‘Is that what you really came for?’
‘No. Yes. Both. I mean, I do want to send the letter.’
‘Just let me think, Alex. Give me a moment.’ She sat with her hands in her lap, considering. The help she had already given him was quite enough to cause a scandal. He was such a nice boy, so obviously unhappy and looking for a path in life. He seemed level-headed, trustworthy. It must be right to help him. In the fall she was moving back to Quebec to get married. Her evenings were lonely but she was still swallowing her pill every day. In all probability, no one would ever find out.
The letter was sent. He came to her apartment on Friday, telling his parents there was extra training after school, and with the gentle patience of a born teacher she showed him how to make love. It proved the most successful study he had ever attempted. In the realm of the physical he had complete confidence; his body always did whatever he asked of it and when he asked it to give him pleasure, and to give the woman pleasure, new instincts were born to direct him. Her secret hair, as he called it, mesmerized him; he felt he could pass a whole day nuzzling at the glistening mysteries beneath, while his cock swelled with impatience and her fingers stroked his neck.
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