Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  But she didn’t do either of those things. She stayed there in the shop, Stella shaking and crying, Audrey immobile between her and the store counter. Audrey had had enough of it. This was not the first time Stella had come bursting into the place wanting Rachel back, though it was the first time she had come this late at night and in this bad a state. If she came in the daytime and looked half-sensible, and if she had a stroller with her, Audrey would let Stella take her daughter for a little walk, though she had started to wonder if even that much was safe.

  The state she was in tonight, there was no way Audrey would let her take the baby. Audrey had been up with Stella’s fussy child for an hour after being on her feet in the shop all day, and she had no time for Stella’s foolishness.

  “You needs to go home to your husband and stop your shenanigans,” she said. “You’re a big girl, Stella. You can’t be getting on like this no more.”

  “What do you know about it? What the hell do you know about my life?” Stella tried to push past, but she was a little squirmy thing, no match for Audrey, who grabbed her arms again, this time to hold her back.

  “What do I know?” About being married too young, having a baby without my mother or any of the rest of my family there to help, about wanting to grab my baby and run away from it all? Audrey didn’t say any of that. Stella had no right to Audrey’s confidences, and anyway, she was in no place to be thinking about anyone but herself.

  Stella spat a word at her—it took Audrey a minute to even pick it apart and understand what she had said, and when she did, it was a word that nobody in Audrey’s life had ever called her—at least, not to her face. She tried to grab Stella, to keep her from running away—which made no sense, because she didn’t want Stella there in the first place. Certainly not anywhere near the baby. But the thought of the girl running out into the rainy night in this state worried Audrey. Where was Henry? He should be here, dealing with this crazy girl he had himself chained to.

  Stella wrenched away and ran, not for the staircase up to the living room, but back out the front door. “Get back in here!” Audrey called—though she still wasn’t sure why. She went to the door in time to hear a car engine start and the screech of the tires pulling away. Whose car was Stella driving, and should she be behind the wheel in a state like this?

  Audrey went back into the shop and called Henry. The phone rang and rang and rang. That damned house they were living in, a bunch of feckless young fools who between them couldn’t tell their arse from a hole in the wall.

  Back upstairs, Audrey put the kettle on. Ellen was sitting up in the armchair with Rachel in her arms; they were both asleep. Audrey hoped a cup of tea would settle her nerves, but she was so worried about Stella and Henry she was like a cat on hot bricks. She was waiting for another sound from downstairs, and when she heard it about half an hour later—the scrape of Henry’s key in the lock—she went down into the store.

  “Is she here?”

  Henry was like a drowned rat. He was breathing hard, like he’d run all the way up here from downtown.

  “Who—your wife or your child?”

  “I meant Stella. The baby’s here, isn’t she?”

  “Only because I told Stella she couldn’t take her.”

  “She was here? She wanted to take Rachel?”

  “Henry, that girl is in trouble. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I swear to God I got no idea what to do.”

  “Well I s’pose you got to go find her. Whose car is she driving?”

  “Nick’s. Can I take your car, Ma?”

  “Do you even have a clue where she’s gone?”

  Henry just stood there, dripping, shaking his head. “I don’t know. She can’t be gone back home, can she? To her parents?”

  “Her father’s said a dozen times he won’t have her in the house. Don’t she have friends? Anyone she’d go to?”

  Again he shook his head. “No…I don’t think she’s seen any of her friends in a while. I called Beth Hussey and what’s her name, Lois, but they both said they haven’t talked to her in ages.”

  Audrey went upstairs and got the car keys out of her purse, brought them back down to Henry. Maybe she should go out with him; maybe he was no more fit to be driving than Stella was.

  He came back two hours later, when nobody in the house was awake but Audrey. She heard the car pull into the spot by the curb and went down to let him in. “I looked everywhere I could think of—even drove by all of her sisters’ houses. There’s no sign of her.” He looked up, his eyes searching hers, and suddenly he looked ten years old again. “Do you think she could have left town? Would she really take off like that? Should I call the cops?”

  “If she haven’t shown up by morning, maybe. Come upstairs now and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  He came up, drank a cup of tea, went over and over with Audrey all the places Stella could have gone. “Nick says he’ll have her up on charges for stealing his car if she don’t have it back by morning,” he reported after calling back to the house to see if she’d shown up there.

  “I’m sure she’ll be back by then,” said Audrey, who was not at all sure. “Or she’ll call. She’ll phone and let you know she’s all right.”

  It was two o’clock in the morning by then. The phone didn’t ring, and there was no knock on the door. Henry lay down on the couch. Finally Audrey herself lay down to get a few hours’ sleep.

  The knock on the door didn’t come till Audrey went down to open the shop in the morning. Upstairs, Wes was getting ready for work, Ellen was feeding the baby, and Henry was still asleep. Audrey heard the ping of the door and looked up to see a policeman in uniform asking for Henry Holloway.

  ELLEN

  Nobody knew what to do about the funeral, not even where to have it or what minister or priest would have the service. Poor little Stella’s body—what there was left of it, after they pulled her out of the car at the bottom of the cliff—stayed in the morgue at St. Clare’s . Audrey and Tony shouted at each other. Ellen tried to hush the baby; Bridget and her daughters cried. Henry should by rights have made all the decisions, being the husband of the deceased, but he was like somebody shell-shocked, sitting there in the chair staring off into space.

  Tony Nolan, suddenly willing to claim his daughter now that she was dead, said Stella should be sent to Caul’s and they would have Father O’Keefe to do the service. But Father O’Keefe caused more trouble than he was worth. He met them in the Holloway’s living room because everything had to be done around Henry, even if Henry never said a word.

  “There’s a question, though, isn’t there?” the priest said. “I hate to bring it up, at a time like this, but from what the police have said—well, the poor girl—isn’t it likely that she intended to take her own life?”

  Bridget wailed and blew her nose. “How dare you say a thing like that?” Tony Nolan demanded. “As if my wife isn’t already upset enough, losing our little girl in a terrible accident, and for you to suggest—to say that she—”

  “But that’s what everyone will be saying,” said Audrey.

  “Who gives a damn what everyone says?”

  “Well, the state she was in when she came in here that night—”

  “What did you let her go out like that for?” Bridget burst out. “You never should have let her go!”

  “She wouldn’t have come here in the first place if she’d been allowed to go to her own home!” Audrey spat back.

  “She came here because she wanted her baby!”

  “And a damn good thing I never let her take it, because where would the baby be now?”

  “You don’t know that!” Tony shouted. Bridget was crying too hard to answer. “If she’d of had her child with her, she never would have been so desperate. She’d of been thinking of the baby, she would of drove more careful. It was an accident, is a
ll it was. She was upset, and she was careless.”

  “And whose fault was it if she was upset? When her own father—”

  “Now, now.” Father O’Keefe poured words like honey over the screeching voices of Audrey, Tony, and Bridget. “Now, my dears, it’s a terrible tragedy you’ve all been through, but there’s nothing to be gained by turning on each other, by fighting over whose fault it was. Any of you would have prevented it if you could have seen the end from the beginning, but God hasn’t given us that power, has He? For His own mysterious purposes.”

  They were still snapping at each other when he started speaking, but by the end of it they had settled down, like his voice had some magic that could soothe them all. A balm in Gilead, thought Ellen, observing the whole thing from the kitchen door.

  “I ’low you’re right, Father, but it’s some hard,” Bridget sniffled.

  “Mother’s destroyed over it,” said Elaine, who sat next to Bridget, rubbing her back. “She haven’t slept a wink since Saturday night. No more have I.”

  “Do you think young Henry’s slept?” Audrey said, nodding toward him. Nobody, Henry included, offered an opinion as to whether he had slept or not.

  “I understand how difficult it has all been for you, for all of you,” Father O’Keefe said. “The only difficulty is, if it was in fact suicide, the church has, as you know, a prohibition against performing a funeral mass for someone who has died by his own hand. Or her. Her own hand.”

  Stella’s hands, gripping the wheel of a car. Ellen hadn’t seen Stella that night so she didn’t have the pictures in her head that Audrey and Henry had, of how desperate she must have been. What a mercy she didn’t have Rachel with her! Of course Audrey would never have let her take the baby.

  As if knowing she was the subject of discussion, Rachel whimpered. Ellen went into Henry’s old room, which they had made into a sort of nursery for Rachel. Audrey had never wanted to admit the baby was with them permanently, so she had never put any effort into it, but Ellen thought now of painting the walls, maybe a nice soft yellow or pink, something cheery for a baby’s room. She was sorry for poor Stella, of course, but she couldn’t be sorry that Rachel might stay with them: Ellen loved having a baby in the house again, even if her back twinged in protest when she reached down to pick Rachel up.

  “…Enough of this foolishness,” Audrey was saying when Ellen went back out, cradling Rachel in her arms. She stayed back in the kitchen, reluctant to let the Nolans see the child. They hadn’t asked to see her yet, hadn’t acknowledged the existence of the baby who had caused all the trouble. Ellen felt sure that if Bride Nolan once got a look at Rachel, she’d lose all her righteous anger over this little merrybegot and latch onto the living child who was a piece of her Stella. And if the Nolans tried to take Rachel, then Ellen would fight like she had never fought for anything before.

  “Enough of this foolishness, and enough of your Holy Mother Church, sitting in judgement on a poor girl who wasn’t in her right mind,” Audrey told Father O’Keefe. “We’ll have poor Stella over to Barrett’s and we’ll get Reverend Gill to do the service.”

  “She will not be buried in a Protestant graveyard! That girl was baptized in the Church!” said Tony Nolan.

  “Much good that’ll do if your precious Church won’t bury her in consecrated ground!”

  Wes’s voice, slow and heavy, had not been heard in this conversation so far. He sat as he always did, listening much and saying little. Now he spoke. “Tell you the truth, Audrey, I’ve known United Church ministers wouldn’t bury someone who took their own life. There was a young fellow out home years ago—sad story, it was, not much older than poor Stella, hung himself in his father’s fish store….”

  “I’ll never believe poor Stella wanted to end her life, I never will!” wailed Bridget.

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Wes said. “It might well have been an accident, and if it was accidental—”

  “Then of course there would be no objection, from the Church’s point of view,” Father O’Keefe said. “But it seems—”

  “Of course she wanted to kill herself!” They all turned towards Henry, as shocked to hear him say anything at all as at what he was saying, at the sudden angry energy in his voice. “She was always at it. She used to cut her wrists with the kitchen knives—you never knew that, did you, none of ye! She used to bawl at me that she wished she was dead, that if she was dead all ye crowd—” his glance raked the room and rested on Tony and Bridget and the sisters, “ye’d all be sorry for how ye treated her. She used to go on and on about being dead, and I’d be there, trying to calm her down and tell her she had to stay alive for me and for the baby, and finally she went off and did it. Stella hardly ever even drove a car—what would she of took Nick’s car for, that night, if not to go driving it off the cliffs in Outer Cove?”

  The meeting with Father O’Keefe fell apart after that, everybody stalking out of the house angry. There was another meeting the next day, this time just Ellen, Wes, Audrey, and Henry with the United Church minister, who also said what a tragedy it was. He didn’t come out and say he’d refuse to perform the funeral service for a girl who took her own life, but it was clear he was uncomfortable with the whole situation.

  “If her family is Roman Catholic, it might be better—” he said, looking around the room, helpless. He knew Wes and Ellen; they were his parishioners, but Audrey and Henry were Christmas-and-Easter strangers to him. It was a big church.

  In the end the Nolans put up another fuss and they went back to Caul’s. They found a different RC priest, from St. Patrick’s, who agreed with the family that it could easily have been an accident. The dark night, the wet road, a young girl with a husband and baby and everything in the world to live for. Yes, she was upset, and no doubt that made her reckless, but that wasn’t the same thing as going out intending to take your own life. This time Henry made no outburst; he sat slumped in silence as the priest agreed that surely Stella’s death was a tragic accident, and under the circumstances the Church could have no objection to him performing the funeral mass, nor to her being buried in the family plot in Belvedere Cemetery.

  And so here were Ellen and Wes in the backseat of the car with Audrey and Henry up front, driving to Caul’s for the wake. The baby was over at Treese’s for the night, being watched and fussed over by her girls, Judy and Nancy. Ellen felt a hard knot of dread along with the sorrow and grief lodged below her breastbone. This was going to be the hardest kind of a wake, the kind where there was nothing comforting or kind anyone could say.

  “Ah well, poor girl, she’s in a better place now, out of this vale of tears.” That was the best effort Nellie Taylor from across the road could make. Ellen smiled and nodded, but Audrey said, “She may be in a better place but she got a husband and child left behind here in this world.”

  “I know, poor things,” Nellie said, and Maggie Ryan leaned into ask, “How is poor Henry taking it? What a shock, at his age!”

  Ellen knew that all these women, so friendly and concerned when they came into the shop, had plenty to say when neither herself nor Audrey was around. They had passed comment, no doubt, on the shame of Henry Holloway getting a girl in trouble so young and having to get married. Although could you be surprised really, looking at his mother? Ellen could imagine their words and their tone of voice because she had heard them applied to others so often, at her very own store counter as the women tallied up the sins and misdemeanours of the neighbourhood.

  But this had caught them all off guard. A shotgun marriage and a baby you never expected—that was the rightful price to pay for fooling around, that and the knowledge that neighbours would talk behind your back. But this—this messy death that might or might not have been a suicide, a beautiful unhappy girl who might have been out of her mind—these things were outside the realm of the price you should have to pay for sin.

  Most wakes Ellen had been to h
ad soft tears and the quiet condolences punctuated by the odd shaky giggle, sometimes rising to a hearty laugh as people shared stories about the departed. The stories and laughter blunted the edge of grief like a fire in the stove took the worst of the chill out of a winter day. But there was none of that here. Maybe Stella had done cute and funny things they’d like to remember, but nobody felt safe doing so. There was nothing natural about this death, no sense of a life coming full circle.

  “He’s not taking it very well at all, but what would you expect?” Ellen said. She looked around for Henry and didn’t see him, either near her own family or over by the Nolans. In between the two families, ill-at-ease in their Sunday best, were a straggly crowd of young people, Henry’s and Stella’s friends, who buzzed around the room like bees in a flower garden, lighting here and there before moving on. No laughter even from this crowd; the girls were all crying and the boys looked like they were being strangled with their own neckties, so strained and panicked were their faces.

  She expected to see Henry with them, but he wasn’t there—maybe he was off having a smoke or a bite to eat in that little room they had for the families to relax in. Only when it was getting close to nine o’clock did she hiss at Audrey to go find Henry, and Audrey reported back that he was nowhere to be found.

  “I think he went off with Eddie Cadwell and Tom Walsh and them,” said a stringy girl Ellen identified only as a Hussey, and that was mostly by her nose. “They took off a while ago, I think Henry was with them.”

  Well, the likes of that. Running away from his own wife’s wake, not even telling anyone where he was going. Ellen tried not to judge the boy, though his own mother showed no such restraint. Audrey cursed him roundly all the way home. As for Henry, he didn’t come home at all that night, though he rang about midnight to say he was sleeping back at the apartment.