by Kurt Palka
* * *
—
During Margaret’s time at Lakewood, Aileen came to visit her twice, once in late October and the second time during Christmas. It was a long journey for her, from Halifax by train to Montreal with a nighttime wait and change of trains, and then on to Toronto and north from there with Father and Grandmother in the car. Margaret offered to pay for the train tickets from her allowance, but Aileen would agree only to a fifty-fifty split.
At Lakewood there was a visiting room in the basement, but there were usually other parents and girls present. People whispered and there was no privacy. And so on both visits she and Aileen snuck out the back door and propped it open, and they hugged, and at first Margaret was teary-eyed because it was so good to see Aileen.
In October Aileen told her that the house with the green shutters had been rented full-time now, and it seemed that Xavier’s family would not be back for the summers. Margaret listened. She looked away from Aileen and down at the ground, and after a while she looked up and said it did not matter.
She told Aileen about the boats going by and how they were choosing parents, and how that might seem imaginary but it helped them and so in some way it was also real.
And she talked about day-to-day life at Lakewood and how here, unlike at St. Gregory’s, the high school where she’d been in Toronto, there was real camaraderie and mutual support among the girls. Perhaps the closeness of survivorship, she said.
She could laugh about that, here among the flaming bushes in the fresh air with Aileen. Aileen in her cords and running shoes and a windbreaker, with her black hair blowing and her clear eyes so attentive. Margaret described how sometimes in the night, when one of the new girls could be heard sobbing in the dark, the eight- or nine-monther whose turn it was that week would pad barefoot over there and sit in silence on the edge of the girl’s bed for company. It was something they’d come up with and worked out among themselves.
By the time of her Christmas visit, Aileen was already candy-striping part-time at the hospital. She described her duties at length, and as she did so her face was flushed with excitement. Margaret had rarely seen her so happy, and it made her happy too.
“I think I might actually manage to do it,” Aileen said. “Get to be a real nurse someday. Can you believe it, Margaret? It’s so amazing. A real nurse!”
* * *
—
Both times when she came to visit, Aileen managed to smuggle in a bag of chocolate chip cookies, which the girls shared the same night, sitting on their bunks and nibbling away like kittens. The telltale cookie bags she’d crumple up and sneak them out to the incinerator and watch them flare up in the dark.
Four
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON she watched Michael from the cottage window as he walked along the path. He had on a grey vested suit and a burgundy bowtie, and he was carrying his scuffed brown doctor bag. When he arrived she met him in the doorway.
“This is nicer than I thought,” he said. “No one would guess it from the street. And smack in the middle of Rosedale.”
“You’ve never been down here? In all these years?” “Never. I’ve seen the roof through the trees from the main house, and I know some of the story with Jack’s father. But I’ve never been in it.”
“Jack’s grandfather had it built. Colonel Bradley, after his wife died and he wanted to be alone. Jack says they were a wonderful love story. He says his grandfather was everything that his father was not. Especially after the war.”
She led him through the kitchen into the living room, where one window gave a view toward the ravine and the other showed the main house, behind trees perhaps thirty yards uphill.
“And you fixed it up yourself,” Michael said. “What did you have to do?”
“Quite a bit, actually. Flooring, walls, and some of the roof. Would you like a coffee? I just made some.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
She stepped through the doorway into the kitchen and came back and set a full cup in front of him. He took it black.
“What’s this?” She nodded at two little pill bottles on the table.
“It’s something for the odd bad night, to help you calm down. And stronger codeine for the migraines. Give them a try.” He leaned back and looked around with interest. “And this is where Jack’s father killed himself?”
“Not in here. Among the trees down the slope. With a British Army revolver that belonged to Jack’s grandfather. The colonel had served in the second Boer War and in the First World War. The gun was locked away and the shells were in a different place, but Jack’s father knew where to find them.”
“And he took it and shot himself.”
She nodded. “That’s how much the war had messed him up. He came back an angry and hollow man. He would beat Jack, and then at nights Jack could hear him weeping through the bedroom door and his mother whispering to him. War, Michael. Not the heroic blather that’s always followed by the never-again stuff, but the reality of it. Combine that with what I saw in Paris after the war, and you’ll see why I feel the way I do.”
“Yes, I know.”
He waited a moment, then said, “Can we talk about your X-ray for a minute? In the States and in Britain they are working on a new kind of deep imaging system, but it’s not quite ready yet. X-rays are not good with soft tissue. Still, at low power settings we can see blood vessels and we can see, or guess at, the denser rims of soft tissue. Like in the brain. We’ve done yours twice now and the results were always negative. So we just don’t know, but X-rays are radiation and I wouldn’t want to do another one with you. Chances are your condition will correct itself over time. Until then we should be able to keep it in check with medication, and you can do a lot with what we’ve been talking about. Stress, blood pressure, moods, exertion, what sorts of thoughts not to allow to come up. I am not saying it’s all mind over matter, but it’s worth trying.”
“Are you sure it’s not what my mother had?” “Reasonably so. I don’t see any suspicious widening of blood vessels. Are they being helpful at the pain clinic?” “Yes. Zach is teaching me about Japanese techniques. And he wants me to concentrate on the good side of my brain and talk to the pain like I would to an animal. Kindly, firmly.” “Well, why not? If it works. Zach is different, but he’s good.” He nodded at the pills on the coffee table. “When it gets too bad, take one. Just one. They can be hard on your stomach and kidneys.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“Tell me more about you and Jack. About the phone call.”
“This time there was an edge to his voice. That’s new. And I rarely see lights on at the house any more. He used to come home between assignments, but now I think he often flies straight from one to the other. Sometimes I find a note, telling me where he is.”
Michael sat back in the chair. He looked at her face, at the black silk mourning band on her sleeve.
“Have you deliberately cut yourself off from him?” “Not exactly cut off, but withdrawn. I tried to explain it to him.”
“Margaret, you do know that I talk to him once in a while. Is that still all right?”
“Yes, it’s all right. It’s even helpful to know. You’re kind of like a bridge.”
“Good. Jack says you didn’t explain much at all, but also that it was not necessary. He understood, or at least he accepted. He asked me, and I told him that withdrawal is the classic overall symptom for women. It’s different for men, let’s say for Jack, than for you. For him, losing you and his life with you comes on top of losing his son. It’s true that mothers feel the loss of a child more keenly than do fathers, but fathers certainly feel it too. Perhaps remember that and don’t do anything abrupt. The death of a child is often fatal for a marriage. We’ve talked about that. And that it’s most often the woman who ends it, or causes it to end.” “Do you know why?”
“Because it was her child. It was what she wanted and needed and loved all along. For most women of a certain age, the child comes first. Which is not
to say they don’t love their man, but the instinct to have and raise a child is very powerful. Unless the couple has something exceptional, the husband is just a part of the overall plan. But Margaret, I think that you and Jack do have something exceptional, so just bloody well hang in there and keep fighting. At least until you have a bit of distance.”
For some time they sat in silence. They could hear a squirrel chattering up in a tree somewhere.
“The first year is the hardest, Margaret. After that your chances improve. Statistically.”
Michael was a family friend by then. For a while, when she’d thought she needed a second opinion, she’d seen Dr. Robson, but Robson had been useless. Too young, first of all. Too full of recent learning that had yet to settle into knowledge and experience. He’d used the word hysterics, and then had quickly added, “In the classic Greek sense, you understand. Etymology. The root word hystera, as in womb, for woman, for an excess of emotion and a lack of control.”
She’d never gone back to him, although the possible slip into something close to hysterics was a dark companion for a while, a tempting escape from reality. Especially once she’d begun suddenly to glimpse Andrew across the street, his posture, his walk. Or in a subway car from behind, because, since he hadn’t come home and hadn’t been in that coffin, where was he? And he’d never said a real goodbye. For that last trip they picked him up in a grey military bus at the top of their road in Sweetbarry, and he was happy, laughing, so heartbreakingly thrilled. She and Jack had flown out to spend Christmas with him, and on that last day they’d walked up the snowy road and at the top Andrew hugged them and gave her a peck on the cheek and then he shouldered his kitbag and climbed on the bus and the door closed. She never even saw him waving from a window.
“Dear Margaret,” said Michael. “Would it help you to switch to this? Perhaps to suggest some change or progress to yourself?” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a lapel pin in the form of a small black bowtie and put it on the table.
“You brought this for me?”
“I did. I thought it might help.”
She sat holding it in her hands, looking down at it. “Dear Margaret…” he said again. Then he said nothing for some time. Eventually he reached for his doctor bag and set it in his lap. “Jack’s a good man, you know. But I don’t need to tell you that. How is your sleep?”
“Not good. It’s fragmented, and I have dreams.” “Dreams can be helpful.”
“I dream of my childhood. Of my school years in France. Of Jack and me early on. And of Andrew. I think I’m searching my past to see if there’s anything that might help me now.”
“And is there?”
“Perhaps.”
She could tell he was waiting for her to say more, but she didn’t. Eventually he stood up.
When he left, he paused in the open door and looked out over the garden and the trees and the back of the main house in the late light. “Beautiful,” he said.
“It is. When the colonel’s family first came here, they were so British they kept peacocks. Until the neighbours complained about the noise, and then they switched to pheasants.”
“Pheasants! They couldn’t shoot them, surely. Could they?” “No. They hired someone to make it nice for the pheasants, and they imported the right food so the birds would stay. Heated stalls for the winter. And they imported English roses and planted these quince bushes. At one time there were many more. Jack’s mother made quince jelly. I did too, the first few years.”
She watched him leave. The sun on his back and on his greying hair, the hair stirring a bit in the breeze. She stood in the doorway until she couldn’t see him any more.
Five
ON MONDAY WHEN SHE CAME home from the office, there were lights on at the main house. She could see Jack in the bright rectangle of the kitchen window, and she knew that, were she to hurry up there now and say his name and open her arms and mean it, he would turn to her and she would have reached straight through to his heart. And yet, when she had climbed the stairs and was in the kitchen and had set down her bags, she could not do it.
He stood watching her reflection in the window, and she stood shielding her eyes against the bright ceiling light, the gleaming tiles and white appliances.
He turned. “All this distance, Maggie. We’re forgetting how to be with each other. You must know we can’t go on like this. If you need help, would you please just go and get it.”
“I have help. I have Michael, and I have Zach at the pain clinic. They are both very good.”
“And?”
“And nothing. These things take time.”
In the bright light her vision began to shimmer, and she closed her eyes and stood rigid for a while. Not now, she said to her eyebrow. Not bloody now. She groped in her purse and took out her sunglasses and put them on. In her own kitchen, in this brutal glare.
“Can we go in the living room, Jack? It’s too bright in here.”
“Sure. How are you doing with the headaches?”
“I am getting help with them too. How are you doing? What are you doing?”
“You know what I do, Margaret. I go down mine shafts and I design geophysics and study core samples. I miss Andrew, but keeping busy with what I’m good at helps me. You know all about that particular trick.”
In the living room they sat far apart on the same couch. There was a newspaper on the floor that Jack must have picked up. In the photo under the headline about the Camp David peace talks, Jimmy Carter stood side by side with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.
Jack looked at her. “How are you really, Margaret?” “Honestly? Sometimes not so good. There are long moments when the entire world slides away from me and all I can do is watch it recede. The other day I had this feeling even at the office, where I’m usually safe. I dream that it’s my fault. Not paying enough attention to him. Our boy, killed in some conflict halfway round the world that he had no need to be in. And then I think it’s because we didn’t help him plant his roots deep enough in common sense. You and I, Jack, we failed at that.”
He shifted on the couch and without looking at her he said, “You need to stop that, Margaret. Always the same litany, we did this and we did that. We neglected whatever. When in fact his mind was made up and he’d stopped listening to us years ago.”
Which was true, and she knew it.
All those young pilots in training at the Air Force base in the valley coming out to the coast, summer after summer. Young men not much older than he, and some of them already observers or even co-pilots. Andrew had always admired them from a distance, and when he was at university working toward his engineering degree, he made a few friends among them. Sometimes they’d visit, and they’d sit in her kitchen and she’d make lunches for them, proper young men with a calm confidence about them. Once in a while one or two of them would bunk in the boathouse for a summer weekend, and then some of them would invite Andrew to the base so he could watch the enormous Hercules C-130 machines taking off and landing. The RCAF was being re-organized; new units were being formed that were looking for pilots, and during his last year at university some of those units were prepared to enlist and train fit young men who hadn’t gone to the military college but had studied engineering.
One day they let him sit as an observer in a cockpit when a plane did a turn around the valley, and she’d never forget the expression of awe and wonder on his face when he described it to her and Jack.
All those young men in uniform, skilled and disciplined. Boys about to become pilots. That was what he wanted, and he would have succeeded. They offered to sign him up as a trainee even while he was still writing the last paper for his degree, and from that moment on there was nothing she could do any more. Nothing.
Not for war but for peace, he’d say to her more than once in the weeks and months that followed, to soften her. Peacekeeping missions, Mom, all of them. Bringing medicines and clothing and food to people who need help. What could be wrong with that? And he�
��d watch her face, not the way he’d done as a little boy, but more and more from an inner certainty and decidedness that she recognized only too well because it was in her also and always had been.
* * *
—
Jack stood up and opened the window and sat down again. A breeze stirred the leaves on the maple tree and cool air blew in.
From his place far away on the couch he said, “Wouldn’t it help you to look at it from his point of view for a change? Flying those amazing machines halfway around the world to exotic places, even into danger—yes, that’s part of it, and you rely on your training and your discipline. What a thrill it must have been for him, Margaret. Why not let him have that? And then from euphoria to nothingness in a few seconds. Sometimes I think we should all be so lucky.”
She reached for a tissue in the box on the end table and dabbed her eyes. After a while she said, “I know you think that. You’ve said it before, and it wasn’t any help then and it isn’t now.” She balled the tissue and held it in her fist. “But l want you to know that I’m hanging in with all my broken fingernails. Until I can see more clearly. I’m determined to. I just have to find a way.”
“I know, Margaret.”
“And it may take a while.”
For some time they sat in silence, then she stood up.
“I brought something from the Thai place. Let’s eat.”
* * *
—
She carried in plates and cutlery and set the cardboard containers on the bare table.
“What is it?”
“Chicken with rice and chestnuts and mushrooms.”
They passed the cardboard containers. The serving spoon. Twice their fingers touched. It was the closest they’d been in a long time, but the touch felt wrong to her. Too soon. Somehow inappropriate.