Ethan stopped to ask the chief again about their own fire, at which Jacqueline went running like a deer away from the scene. Ethan, his renewed discourse with authority having inoculated him temporarily against a growing feeling now of persecution, guilt, and stark terror, a feeling which was not always to be distinguished from one’s grief, followed thoughtfully. He found her in the ruin of the old house, calm and collected, though greeting him from below ground, and holding up, triumphantly, out of the remains of their cellar, a brand from the burning: it was a bottle of gin.
Chapter 15
Isn’t Life Wonderful
THERE HAD TO BE a bottle of gin, he saw even then, if for a while its significance was largely physical, as they took the God- or devil-sent crock and began to walk half dementedly in the opposite direction from the liquor store—which Ethan, however, had not failed to ascertain from the chief of police would be open at five o’clock for an hour—along the path bordering the shore of Lake Ontario, gazing now and then over the water toward far distant Oakville and within sight of their first home, now long since the fuming province of Mother Gettle. They walked and walked, buying some orange crush and paper cups on the way—living on the land again, they said sardonically—as they did so, almost forgetting the fire, so inconceivable a thing, an innomination did it seem, for whole seconds at a time. Then with blazing hearts they would remember. The coincidence of the empty burning car did not help. It kept suggesting to Jacqueline, who’d been the last to leave the house, that she might have left a light on by mistake and the fire had been the result of a short circuit. But it was no use speculating. The Quebec stoves had all been out, the oilstove in the basement turned off. Spontaneous combustion was a thousand-to-one chance. There’d been no loose matches lying around to tempt the rodent arsonist. There was little comfort to either of them in the thought of the insurance, not even should they collect it in full (which, it was to turn out, they did: indeed their hopes now on Gabriola were based on the insurance people having had doubt it was an “Act of God”). They’d lost everything they had, excepting the clothes on their backs—and Jacqueline’s loved squirrel coat, the first fur coat she’d possessed in her life (and just the week before had put in cold storage)—the car, and what money they had in the bank. Not one law book of his own and his father’s library was left to Ethan. No single one of Jacqueline’s cherished volumes had survived. Not one piece of wood from their beautiful irreplaceable furniture. And yet, when one thought again of those who, every day, somewhere in the world, lost, and had lost, were losing, so much more! No honest comfort here either. Much less to Ethan, for whom, now, as for a time he’d felt about the first house, it wasn’t the material loss that seemed so unbearable: it wasn’t the spiritual loss: it wasn’t even the grief: it was this sense of damnation, this time literal, the tangible-intangible feeling of punishment. Yes, it was this—no longer like any mere plausible revenge taken by the war—and one’s fuller renewed awareness now of that emerging pattern, a destiny in the whole business, which contained a warning, if not a threat, that no matter their material compensations, what had happened, even though not explicably their fault, might happen again, unless they followed a certain course of action, which course it was as if they shadowly knew, yet their orders were sealed.
But with this awareness came a sort of comfort after all, Ethan thought aloud, for wasn’t it as though, yes, they were being watched (not in that sense, he said, turning round), they were being tried? Perhaps, he added, with a kind of humor unusual to him, being unintentional, it might even come to give her a faith in “something beyond?” Her answer was immediate, savage, and No! “Have you gone stark raving mad?” Later it developed that Jacqueline saw little more “spiritually” in this horrible day than the beginning of Ethan’s real obsession with signs, portents, and coincidences, which from that period forward were so rooted in some ground of primitive logic in his brain that, he sometimes thought, he seldom questioned that the fire had been occasioned by other than a “supernatural” agency.
But somehow “not to go mad” was certainly an immediate problem. All very well too for him to counsel Jacqueline to seek some meaning in the disaster, a belief in some “force beyond” (as if the words “Les dieux existent, c’est le diable” had been written in vain), when he already saw, from the psychological viewpoint, how his eventual sanity might come to depend precisely upon a deconversion from his own secret or semisecret beliefs and obsessions, a deconversion even from any belief in God—either that, or, one day, its staggering and complete reverse! Yes, how much easier for him to endure this would be now, could he only believe there were nothing, if he didn’t have to think of it all as a judgment, how much simpler could he but share Jacqueline’s disarmingly fatalistic belief in blind chance.
In short, despite the assuaging gin, neither of them had yet arrived at a very realistic attitude. Not half so realistic as that of The McCandless who, the next day, having been advised of their calamity, telegraphed, together with a hundred dollars (to the complete obfuscation of the telegraph office—which was in the back room of the pyrene-brandishing grocer—where Ethan imagined them instantly rendering a copy to the Mounted Police for decoding, as some important secret document in the current Communist spy activities), from Medicine Hat:
GREATEST COMMISERATION ON YOUR LOSS BUT CONSIDER SOCALLED DISASTER CAN BE BEST POSSIBLE THING FOR YOU BOTH STOP I TOLD YOU LONG AGO WHAT PERILS CAN LURK AT THAT GATE OF UNCHANGE UNQUOTE STOP RELIEVED YOURSELVES TOMMY ALL SAFE BUT SOMETIMES SOUL NEEDS ATOMIC EXPLOSIONS WATCH OUT CAN I HELP FURTHER STOP SUGGEST YOU MOVE WEST AM LECTURING MEDICINE HAT FOR MONTH YOU CAN STAY MY HOTEL MOOSE JAW WATCH OUT SUGGEST YOU TRY CONSIDER THE WHOLE THING LESS THAN GREY HAIR IN GODS EYEBROW STOP EITHER REBUILD OR NOT BUT CONTINUE THE WORK SO MOTE IT BE—LOVE—ANGUS
It wasn’t until at least their fifth snort of gin that any comfort of the more obvious kind appeared. For, yes, wasn’t there a certain grace about it all? What if they’d been in the house and one of them had lost the other? What if they’d lost Tommy? been hideously disfigured or crippled? Been all burned to death? And they ceased to mourn for a time, finding a weird shared comradeship in the disaster, not forgetting to be thankful either for the item spared, and, seated on a bank beneath a peach orchard in bloom where they’d picked sumac long autumns ago, they suddenly discovered a providence in the fact that their car had broken down for the second time, and made wild plans for the future, and, in a morbidly hilarious way, were almost exultant: the phoenix clapping imaginary wings after all as they planned to rebuild on the same site—though they knew it was impossible—rebuild the Barkerville Arms!—and even through “channels” impossible to get enough material to build a two-room shack—but they would rebuild, somehow—plans increasingly vague because they were also so fatigued, and Ethan himself so tight finally that he made a sudden extreme answer to the situation; first having undressed behind a Judas tree on which he hung his clothes, he had a swim.
—Brrrr! oh God, purify me, forgive this man, forgive me for Peter Cordwainer, let our lives be better after this awful day! The most awful of my life. Of my life but one. (What day was it by the way, apart from Monday? Try not to remember it: bad enough to remember they’d move to Niagara the first week of October. He didn’t want to find out today was Cordwainer’s birthday or something either. He vaguely remembered it, or thought he did, as sometime in May. He didn’t want to remember the date of his death either…Still, he could always shift it a little; it might have been after midnight on the eighth; which would take the curse off the seventh. And off the eighth, if on the seventh. And October was far away, so what was he worrying about?) Swimming in his peculiar histrionic way, in the loved hateful shallow lake cold as the devil; first a smashing, fast, and more than competent crawl: then, slower, like the Waukegan juniper crawling on its belly; Juniperus prostrata, Juniperus horizontalis; the ginbush, which (according to Mr. Clarence Elliot, the famous botanist) had been cast, for its tempting flavor, like the
serpent out of Eden, crawling all the way to America with the Pilgrim Fathers maybe, and finally winding up at the Great Lakes, where it was condemned, as those who oversampled its seductions in gin, never to stand up again, or not for long; the only liquor with a divine curse on it, so why not supernormal powers? so what more natural than that a bottle of gin should have survived their fire? Why seek further explanation? And now faster again: imagining suddenly a hundred people watching him from the shore: not because he was naked but because he always did imagine it, even when as now there was no one but Jacqueline: but taking a desperate joy in the swim because after all it was his homecoming. WAR HERO’S RETURN TO FIRE-RAVAGED HOME. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED. My house has burned down. Then difficulty with breathing; then ducking like a child, holding his nose (my house has burned down): no mean task since the lake here was only four feet deep: now swimming a powerful important breast stroke taught him by his father in the opposite direction by mistake (do you see me, Jacqueline, even though our house has burned down?). Then turning, falling easily without scissoring his legs into a sort of deceitful South African trudgeon, but hoping the spectators would still think it a crawl, and also how brave he was, saying, “This is guts in a man whose house has just burned down.” Oh Lord: and now thinking he was swimming toward shore when he was swimming in the wrong direction again, toward Oakville. Back home to Mother Gettle’s Kettle-Simmered Soup, M’mm, Good! My house has burned down. And sudden cat’s-paws on the surface too, the lake sulfur-tasting. Or was this imagination? “The lightning is peeling the poles and biting the wires, Captain Llewelyn.” The house struck by lightning, in the dead of night, stealthily, nobody seeing it happen, the chief of police perhaps right. Our house has burned down. “The police are not watching now, I hope, and anyhow they will see I am doing something healthy.” Ha, ha, the lake getting suddenly rough, and mirages too—or deliriums—in the distance: Neptune driving a fishing boat with tridents two feet above the horizon in the sun-haze. And now high tearing waves moving fast inshore; like being caught in a heavy sea in the main street of a town, the lake-bottom hard as concrete. You can only progress by walking backward then jumping forward through the waves or letting them meet you head-on. Danger: don’t let them see you’re afraid. (How many people’s lives have I saved? My house has burned down.) Give concentrated exhibition—goddam stupid infantile exhibition, but somehow significant, somehow necessary, “the spectators expect it of you”—of wheeling and splashing to demonstrate you know what you are about. (Our house! Our house!) To hell with it; show Jacqueline: swim in! How hateful this sulfur-tasting water: coming in in style now, a grand dramatic ending, the smashing crawl again, the crescendo and climax, and final, meaningful, artistically timed free-wheeling. “And so I say you shall not hang this innocent boy!” But was Jacqueline watching? She was not. She was sitting, under a tree on the bank, looking sidelong at the ground with a wan smile. She is worried about Tommy. She seems to have other things on her mind besides the fire; the same beneath the surface ever since I got back. She can’t go swimming today of course. Anyhow far too early in the year. (Perhaps he should take her on another honeymoon: a bicycle tour, like his father and mother went on big-wheeled boneshakers.) Twenty-eight days on a lunar cycle: thirteen months in a year, like the interminably slow periodicity of the cycles of these lake tides. Ah, the pathetic cross women had to bear! And now the fire on top of everything else. Their wistfulness too, their self-sacrifice, their complicated long-range little plans, and dreams involving a thousand tendernesses: how many of hers must have been concentrated about the house, now all brought to dust and ashes.
And himself: sputtering and snorting and stamping all importantly, the indefatigable, fallible, male engine, which no matter how many times it breaks down, having been thoroughly submerged in water always behaves in this extraordinary fashion: Our one!—house two!—has three!—burned four!—down five! Just the same he felt a kind of defiant heroism in doing his exercises at such a time, irritating though the sight must be. But Jacqueline had not moved an inch from her former position.
He dried himself on a handkerchief and dressed save for his shirt, which he draped over his shoulder, liking to feel the sun and breeze on his skin (it was Juniperus horizontalis’ sardonic tribute to life, sober it would have been intolerable today); he came over to Jacqueline and kissed her tenderly on the hair. Still she did not move.
She was wearing a cerise-colored spring suit of which she’d said, joyfully spinning round on her heels the first time she’d put it on, so that the skirt flew out all around her: “Oh Ethan, I feel like a cyclamen in this, with flyaway petals!” Surely it was a color connotative of everything that was exciting, warm, gay, yet innocent and springlike, one associated with fire.
“Jacqueline.”
“I love you very dearly.”
“I love you,” she said distantly, still looking at the grass.
“Jacky, you never mind, we’ll make out, we’ll give it all some meaning, things will be far better,” he heard his words—not an adolescent youth indeed could have sounded more naïve—words he meant deeply, but as though emerging less from his soul than his suddenly tingling, and half-falsely, renewed physical self, this abrupt sense of well in the midst of evil-being. “You’ll see, darling, we’ll turn it into something fine—we’ll build a new and better life, we’ll—” Stooping he turned her face, puckered with grief, toward him.
But even as she passively submitted to this, she seemed to resist it, the touch of her lips was cold, and, as Ethan gently relinquished her, Jacqueline let her head swing flaccidly back to its former position, like an automaton or a rag doll’s. It was as though she didn’t want him to see this grief, to intrude on it, or to see her face at all, suddenly grey, tragic and haggard as an old woman’s. Ethan felt his heart breaking for her. Even though the house had been his birthplace how much more she had lost than he! What pathetic spiritual covenant she must have felt suddenly broken, what inner place of sacrament defiled? And, inexpressibly perhaps to herself, for what it had symbolized to her waywardly of solid hearthstone (and sheet anchor), how much more she must be suffering!
“Yes,” she said in the same absent tone, then: “Isn’t life wonderful?”
Ethan was silent. He lighted a cigarette.
“Do you remember what you said to me that night, Ethan? After the Griffith movie?”
Jacqueline’s voice was now so distant she sounded drugged. Ethan had only heard her voice sound like this once before, just after Tommy was born, but then her face had been radiant. He dropped to one knee on the grass beside her.
“Yes.”
“Would you say it again now?”
“Yes.”
“What’s more to the point, do you remember what you said?” Ethan smiled. He was growing chilly and drew on his shirt and sweater. God, where was his cigarette? Had he thrown it away? He had: there it was smoking, down by the shore, by a stone, and he had entirely forgotten the action.
“No…No…I don’t remember,” Jacqueline was saying not even bitterly, pulling up grass by the roots, and her beautiful fingers, delicate mementos of the week’s passionate caresses, were tensed and nervous.
“That hurts me. You said if we were driven out of our home into a forest with everything gang agley——”
“Into a forest. Go on.” Jacqueline gave a faint smile herself. “I bet you don’t remember.”
“—and our plans turned round in mid-air and thrown away in an old boot, and—would I—oh Jesus. I can’t go on, on my heart’s darling!” Ethan knelt and buried his face in her lap silently.
“Stop it, Ethan. Just don’t do it. Don’t suffer. I can’t bear it. Just don’t do it, my lamb, my poor lamb,” Jacqueline, as if utterly transformed at this moment by some reflex of motherly and selfless compassion, was saying in a consoling and half-authoritative tone, rocking him like a child. “Just don’t do it.”
“No. And we haven’t forgotten our sack of potatoes either, have we?” Etha
n stood up. “Ah well; have another snort of gin.”
“Yes, please.” Jacqueline extended her paper cup. “Why not?”
“And I am looking at you like that,” said Ethan, “saying ‘Isn’t Life—?’ even though we haven’t got a moon, if you understand the anomaly.”
“What shall we do?”
“Go on. Whatever we decide or you wish. Go elsewhere. But first I’m damned sure you need a rest, a change.”
Jacqueline choked on her drink. The portentous ridiculousness, which he immediately recognized, of Ethan’s remark sent her into sharp hysterical giggles. “A change?” She finished her drink, which seemed to have revived her, and added, her eyes over the top of the paper cup almost genuinely amused, “At the Prince of Wales?”
“We have to get in balance…We don’t need to spend all our time in the Ladies and Escorts…Old Grigorivitch is one of the best cooks in Canada…We’d go crazy in someone else’s house…We haven’t even time to get adjusted.”
This last, which on the sexual plane at least seemed the opposite of the truth, as well as Ethan’s implication that their misfortunes were going to give them a heightened appetite for borscht, provided, once more, for their spirits, the balm of the ridiculous.
“But what you say is too true.” Jacqueline, leaning right back, drinking from her paper cup, gave a short cry. “We have to get in balance.”
“I can’t go west or anywhere else without settling a lot of things in Toronto first. To be practical. The insurance—all of that’ll have to be settled. Besides we can’t very well disrupt Tommy’s education from here on a moment’s notice.”
October Ferry to Gabriola Page 10