In spite of the rather morbid subject-matter, Max’s slow, rich voice soothed me so profoundly I felt myself relaxing into an almost drowsy state of contentment.
“But enough of this philosophy. Time I got down to business. Because the fact is, dear, I’m the guy wants something here. I’ve come to ask a favour. Maybe you already figured that.”
My eyes snapped open. “Eh? What favour?”
“Well,” he said, stirring his tea carefully, “first thing I saw when I got home last night was that Billie had been crying.”
I frowned uneasily. Billie, for all her helpless, little-girl ways, was not a weeper. Indeed, I literally couldn’t remember ever seeing her cry. And after what she’d told me yesterday, that simple fact seemed the most revealing thing I might ever know about my mother.
“Are you sure?” I said foolishly. “I mean, did she tell you why?”
“No need for that. Only the day before, she was all excited about this holiday plan to take you to Santa Lucia. Told me all about it, thrilled as a kid. So I’m no great detective to guess you turned the offer down, right?”
“Yes, Max, because I simply can’t leave –”
“I know, I know.”
“But why does everybody think it’s so abnormal for me to want to look after my own kids?”
“Nobody said that, doll.”
Long ago he’d picked up Billie’s absurd set of endearments in the silly way married people echo each other’s speech habits. It was one of the few things I disapproved of in Max.
“She did say that,” I muttered sulkily. “She talked about my mental health.”
Max’s lips twitched, but he looked at me squarely under the black bar of his heavy eyebrows. “Tell me, did it strike you that Billie isn’t looking too good these days?”
“No, it didn’t.”
“No?”
“Well – nobody looks good this time of year.”
“There’s something wrong with her, sweetie. I don’t know what, but she’s running to the bathroom every couple of hours these days. Gets up two or three times in the night. Now it could be those stingers, or a chill, or a little touch of cystitis; no need to get all that worried, maybe. Just the same, I made her tell me about it, and I got her a doctor’s appointment for Monday. I’ll take her there in handcuffs if I have to. She’s scared, Anne. So that’s the story.”
“Well, she should have seen a doctor ages ago, if it’s like that. But what can I do?”
“You can make her happy. Go with her to the Islands.” Something in the straight line of Max’s lips reminded me that rich men get that way by having plenty of well-founded confidence in their own will-power.
“Max, I explained to her that I simply can’t leave my kids with some hired goon that could be anything – how can you tell? – a glue-sniffer, a religious nut, somebody with nits or the clap –”
“Boy, what a pessimist. Look, what if I tell you I know somebody could do the job, the worst you could say about her is she wears arch-supports.”
“I’d still say –”
“Let me finish. Our cleaning lady’s been sick all winter and her daughter’s been coming over instead. Might be forty, big laugh, keeps everything so clean it squeaks. Looks around for curtains to wash, slip-covers … has half an hour to spare, she doesn’t just go home, she knocks you out a great lemon pie. You drop a dime, she follows you all over the house to give it back. Brought up three of her own; one’s a student at York. I took the trouble and got to know Hilda, because I’m like you, I don’t trust just anybody in my house where I have people and things that matter to me. Now this is my suggestion. Or if you like to put it another way, this is what I want from you. Let Hilda come here while you take a holiday with your mother.”
He hesitated a moment and then went on more quickly, “And after that, Anne, if Hilda’s willing and you trust her, why don’t you keep her on and go back to college for your doctor’s degree? If Ross can’t afford it, I can. It’s a crime, and you know it, with that head of yours, not to be using it. With a Ph.D. you could get some high-class academic job, or a post at the Museum maybe, and get the hell out of this kitchen.”
I looked at him grimly. He gave me a broad, ingenuous smile intended to disarm.
“So you want to rescue me, too. Take me away from all this. Arrange my future for my own good. Improve my mental health.”
Long before I ran out of breath, his smile had disappeared.
“Now, doll, don’t be sarcastic. It’s not nice.”
But I was so angry now I felt slightly drunk. “Max, will you do me a favour and get this straight. I like being at home with my children. I’m not a victim or a martyr. I’m a natural, normal woman. There is nothing being wasted here. Do you really think what happens in kitchens and bedrooms isn’t important? I tell you, half of what goes on in labs and offices and classrooms is trivial by comparison. This is where it’s all at, not out there. Anyhow, that’s how I see it. For the next five years at least, these kids are going to need me here, and here is where I’m going to be. Full time. After that, sure, I might get a part-time job, or go back to graduate school. For God’s sake, I’m barely twenty-four. So will you get it through your head, I’m not some poor victim in chains. Even if I were, I’d stay in them. My kids are not going to wander the streets with a door-key round their necks. They are not going to be entertained by the neighbourhood flasher while I’m somewhere else being liberated.”
I concluded this tirade with the greatest firmness and dignity, and then burst into loud, childish sobbing. Max got up from his chair and held me, rocking me to and fro in silence. “There now, my poor baby,” he said.
“You don’t know what it was like for me,” I blubbered, incoherent with the self-pity that had been festering silently for too many years. “With Billie – that life – it took away my childhood. You just don’t know.”
He pushed a clean handkerchief into my hand and turned away to pour more steaming tea into our cups.
“No,” he said. “You’re wrong. I know a lot about what it must have been like for you. Not that I’m blaming Billie. She couldn’t do any different, being what she is. But that’s why – well, it was one of the big things in my life that I could send you to university, give you the chance you needed to be somebody really special. For me, right from the first, you were no kidding some kind of princess I found in the cinders. It meant a lot to me, with no kids of my own, to sort of rescue you.”
“Did it, Max?”
The bitter edge to my voice startled him. He tried to smile, but didn’t make a very good job of it. “Well, it takes a guy born over a tailor’s shop in Cabbagetown to appreciate a chance like that. I mean, to be a sort of Jewish Pygmalion.”
But the truth was sour in my mouth. It was an act of egoism, then, all his goodness to me; not really love? I pushed the rocker into motion. It creaked with my double weight. My burning eyes closed. At the sink Max rinsed the teacups very quietly, as if it were important not to disturb anyone or anything.
The fetus kicked and twisted so restlessly I had to sit up. Max was putting on his jacket, twitching down his shirt-cuffs.
“Well, dear, time I took off. You go on up to bed – you need rest, the shape you’re in. Only be damn sure you put the chain up on that front door first.” He tried to make these banalities sound normal, in his calm, practical, parent’s voice, but it didn’t quite work.
“Yes, Max.”
“And tomorrow I’ll give you a ring and we’ll maybe talk about Hilda. I’m not pressing you, mind. Talk it over with Ross, why don’t you. I suppose he’s in touch. See what he thinks about it. Plus other things.”
My mouth opened and I closed it again. No, it was not possible to risk any more discussion with Max. Already too many delicate checks and balances between us had been threatened. There were heavy pouches under his eyes; I could see that in his way, he too was adjusting his defences, recovering balance. But the role each of us had for so long played for the ot
her was irrevocably changed, and we both knew it.
“Give my love to Billie,” I said.
“Right.”
“And take care.”
“Sure.”
At the door he turned. “And cheer up, doll,” he added. “Things could always be worse. You heard the one about the optimist fell off the top of a skyscraper? Some horrified guy in an office saw him falling past the window and gave a yell, but the optimist only smiled and yelled back, ‘Okay so far!’ ”
I forced a smile. He patted my cheek and we parted, pretending that nothing of any significance had changed. What else, after all, could we do?
The door of Max’s Lincoln chunked shut. His snow tires crunched over ice and faded off down the street. I wandered into the dark sitting-room and lay down on the sofa instead of going up to bed. It was only nine-thirty, after all. I was tired, but all my systems were electrically supercharged. As I lay there restlessly scratching my belly, I wondered whether Max would ever write me another letter. Would we ever be able to play that game again? Probably not.
At this point it seemed appropriate to give myself a severe talking- to along the following lines. Anne Graham, you will now, I mean immediately, stop snivelling just because you’ve discovered your father is a human being. Face it, all these years you’ve tried to cast him as a sort of hybrid of God and lover, exactly as you saw him at fifteen. Jocasta came to a bad end, right? So grow up, will you? Even if it hurts.
This lecture had a somewhat calming effect, but my nerves were still inclined to twitch. Far too much tea and philosophy. There was something grim and final about turning the dry eye of experience on myself and all my illusions, past and present. When the phone shrilled, I heaved myself over to it with alacrity. Any change in the old stream of consciousness would be welcome.
“Anne baby? How are you doing? It’s Tim here. Not too late to call, I hope.”
“Hi, Tim” I said without enthusiasm. I’d never much liked Ross’s other partner. He had a husky adolescent voice and a crass, ebullient manner to match; but he was the toughest, the most mature, and much the meanest of the three. I’d often thought that Ross and Randy would sooner or later regret sharing the practice with him.
“Well, what’s new with you, kid?” he demanded heartily.
“Oh, nothing very much. And you?”
“Just groovin’ along. You know how it is.” There was a slight, uncomfortable pause.
“Jean and the kids okay?” I ventured.
“Sure, great. Just fine. They’re at a movie.”
“That’s nice.” I took a deep breath to ride out another strong contraction. Then I thought, All right; let’s have it. “Everything all right at the office?”
“Ah, well now.” He cleared his throat and then made a subdued, gulping sound that meant he had a drink beside him. The trouble was that liquor didn’t change Tim, it only made him more intensely himself.
“Ah well, what?”
“Now Anne baby, don’t get hostile. You’ve got to admit this isn’t exactly one of your easy situations we’ve got here. I’m just trying to do my best for all of us.”
“Just tell me what it is, Tim.” Mentally I doodled a sketch of his wide, fleshy face. He had little or no neck, and his eyes were a formidably pale blue – the eyes of a winner. Just the same, there was a look of acute anxiety in them sometimes, perhaps because his father was a millionaire.
“Well, of course you realize with Ross and Larine in the same office … I mean this kind of thing just doesn’t work, right? For a while they were very discreet and undercover about it – come to that, Ross still is – but the trouble is Larine’s been wagging her ass around here lately, making waves, bitching at the other two girls – you know the kind of thing. It’s raising hell, anyhow. So much so I actually had to say something about it to Ross the other day. If it goes on, she’ll have to get out of the office, that’s all. Of course, he hit the roof when I told him that, but Randy agrees, and now he hardly speaks to either of us. So things are now pretty tense, I don’t mind telling you.”
“I’ll bet you don’t,” I thought nastily. A few years ago at a New Year’s party (at that point I was between pregnancies and looking all right) Tim had made a pass at me in the hall of somebody’s apartment just outside the bathroom. Feeling generous on some rather ghastly mulled wine, I’d given him a light kiss, and out of sheer friendliness let him feel my buttocks. That few seconds would have been perfectly innocent, even good for both of us, except that just then his tall wife Jean came out of the bathroom.
She harpooned him on a look so punitive that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see his balls drop off right on the spot. Tim was a heavyset man, slow on his feet, but he instantly vanished into the crowd as if dematerialized. She picked her way past me as if I were some unusually nasty insect, and the party roared on. I remember enjoying it very much until we were gathered at the door to say goodnight, everybody kissing everybody. Then, under Jean’s frigid eye, Tim actually shook hands with me, and I had to turn away to hide a hysterical grin. Never did any husband in the history of marriage look so abysmally guilty. If we’d been caught naked in some exotic variation of the act in the middle of Yonge Street, he could not have looked more sheepish. He was the kind of man who deep down thought fornication was a worse crime than murder. At the same time, he thought of adultery as “scoring.” It was hard to think kindly about Tim, even when he wasn’t there.
Anyhow, ever since that party, Tim had disliked me in a subverted sort of way that masked itself under jovial friendliness, even a kind of sly, sexual invitation. Not a pleasant combination at all.
“Well, Tim, I don’t know what I can do about it. Damn all, I’m afraid. As you know, he doesn’t live here any more. In fact, I haven’t even heard from him lately.”
“Yeah. Well, Randy and I are pretty worried.”
“I appreciate that. But –”
“If the bitch would only get out.”
What absurd combination of feelings made me jump to Larine’s defence I don’t know; but I found myself doing it.
“Look, Tim, is there any real need to get your knickers in a twist about it? This is the first straight job she’s ever had. She just can’t handle the other side of it, that’s all. Can’t you talk to her, I mean without getting nasty and scaring her? She’s been scared and threatened all her life, after all.”
“Come on, I’m not a social worker, you know, or a shrink either. But I have talked to her. Had her into my office, like a Dutch uncle. Result? Zilch. Her attitude’s been worse than ever. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past the bitch to tell Ross I made a play for her. Which would be a fucking lie, of course. But that’s maybe why he’s freezing me out.”
A vivid mental picture of Tim talking to Larine like a Dutch uncle formed in my mind. His hand was no doubt metaphorically on her buttocks the whole time. I smothered the laugh that was tickling me.
“No, they’re certainly not playing the game, either of them,” I said mildly. The innuendo luckily escaped him. Tim was suspicious of intelligent women and afraid of them when they had a sense of humour. Antagonizing him now would be silly, even dangerous, and I knew it.
“In fact,” Tim was saying heavily, “the whole situation’s got to the point where we’re all finding it hard to carry on. Randy’s tried, and so have I, but we can’t seem to get through to Ross at all. He’s like a guy on some other planet. Christ, is it so great between him and Larine that he can’t tune in on anything else? When we started out together, the three of us, he used to be the keenest of us all. I just don’t get it.”
Reluctantly I had to concede that Tim had a point there. I shifted my weight wearily. “Tim, I wish I knew what to say. Or do.”
“Because,” he went on, “– well, I hate to say this, but – it could come to this, that Larine will have to get out, or Ross will.”
“Ah,” I thought. “Here’s your real message at last.” Gentle Randy would of course stand pretty well wherever T
im pushed him, so I understood with perfect clarity this was not just a hint; it was a threat.
“Have you put this ultimatum to Ross?” I asked.
“Well, no – not –”
“Why not, then? Are you asking me to do it?”
“No, no, of course not. I’m only suggesting that when you see him, you could …”
“Could what?”
“Well, like use your influence –”
“My what? Look, if I had any influence left with Ross, you wouldn’t be making this call, right?” (One of the worst things about talking to Tim was that you couldn’t help picking up his style.)
“Anne baby, you have all my sympathy. You know that.” An unctuous leer began to creep into his voice. “This whole thing makes me feel rotten mostly because it’s such a raw deal for you. And you’re such a sweet kid.”
When I made no reply, being preoccupied with another and sharper contraction, he assumed I was too moved for words. “Look, baby,” he went on, “what say we meet somewhere for a drink tomorrow and talk this over properly. The phone’s no good. A drink or two, a bite to eat, what do you say? We really need to get together. I mean, apart from everything, I haven’t seen you for ages.”
“Sure we could get together. You mean with Randy? Or maybe Jean?” Bitchy of me, but a backache of this intensity was enough to rot any woman’s better nature. There was a huffy silence at the other end. I added, by way of apology, “Because any conference like that will have to wait till I come out of hospital. My new baby’s due the end of next week.”
“Oh. Yeah, of course. I mean, I forgot about that. Well, Anne, great talking to you. Just, when you see Ross, you could like pass it along, eh, how things are … how Randy and I feel. He’ll listen to you.”
“I doubt that. However.”
Unable to think of any answer to that, he gave his bray of a laugh. “Ah-ha-ha-ha. Anyhow, baby, be hearing from you. Take care, now. Ciao. And all the best.”
The Marriage Bed Page 19