October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  Jacqueline asked almost shyly, sitting up crossing her arms over her knees, “Do you love Tommy more than me?”

  Chapter 16

  Lake of Fire

  ETHAN WAS THROWING STONES into the lake. Burning lake of fire…Suddenly he remembered having once had a grotesque nightmare in which Jacqueline and he had been sitting by this lake, and he’d started throwing stones. The only important difference was that in the dream, about half a narrowing cable’s length away from the shore and stretching to the horizon, the whole of Lake Ontario had been on fire, and in this inferno drowning and blazing forms gesticulated, though for some reason it didn’t occur to either of them to do anything to help. In the background of the day, in this dream too, lay some nameless personal disaster which had just taken place, but despite this, Jacqueline and he were having this perfectly irrelevant discussion on the lake bank, each word of which seemed to possess the most singular and priceless importance. This discussion had been rendered both more pointless yet at the same time more “important” by the fact that, though in imminent peril themselves from the advancing flames, it was not in their minds to retreat an inch or, for in the dream they were apparently too proud, to ask help themselves, though it also appeared that on the bank behind, shadowy human hands were held out only too ready to give aid to them, who were not yet beyond it. Then he’d got up like this and started throwing stones into the lake, and the cruellest part of the dream was that he’d felt compelled at first to throw them at those poor helpless and gesticulating people. Something or other had dissuaded him from this grisly occupation and Jacqueline had directed the attention of his marksmanship instead to some old tin cans and bottles floating past in the ever narrowing windrow of the lake inshore as yet untouched by the flames. Unprecedentedly the nightmare had had a happy ending, some act of renunciation or self-sacrifice having been made by either Jacqueline or himself or both—he couldn’t recollect what—just in time to reverse their doom, but in the dream, absurdly, everything in the end too seemed to depend on his hitting like this, with a stone, an old tin can…

  “What a hell of a question,” he said. “Do you love him more than me?” Or had it been, in the dream, a bottle?

  Jacqueline had half lain back again, then said abruptly: “Frankly—” And she fell back once more. “No. But do you know, I’ve come to the conclusion he doesn’t love me. Just doesn’t love me. Besides I’ve come to the conclusion I’m a rotten mother to him…I’ve been a rotten mother during the last year. I’ve been a lot of things the last year I haven’t told you about.”

  “Loud laughter. Is that your tactful way of telling me you’ve been unfaithful to me?”

  “Good Christ no…It’s hereditary. I just wasn’t cut out to be a mother, I guess.”

  “What are you getting at, Jacqueline? You’re a marvelous mother…And Tommy loves you dearly.”

  “…Not only that but I’m afraid I became a bit of a souse. Nipping away in secret on lonely private drunks.”

  “Fire cannon and blow up ship! How did you manage that on your rations?”

  “Well, they eased up some months ago as you’ve discovered. And I polished off half your ship-store you left in the cellar.”

  “Ha! I thought someone had been siphoning off the cargo a little. Well, that’s good! We don’t have to bother about losing that.”

  “Jesus, you don’t know what it is to be here alone in Niagara all winter, I even missed old James saying: ‘Now Marse Ethan’s just like folks, but ah gets a floodin’ at the heart when ah thinks of his father.’—And the goddam snow piling up outside—not like it was on a farm if you understand me, where you felt things growing around you, but just somehow piling up on top of you, nipping away in secret beneath it. Oh yes, the Prince of Wales too. Don’t think I didn’t go to the Prince of Wales! Three beers at a time and vodka too and shaslik. Grigorivitch was an angel. But then when I’d come out and see the street standing so lonely outside, and those railway lines and the snowdrifts at the end of it and the old stable with the coaches and our Chinese laundryman who got murdered by the way—did I tell you?—still saying ‘No tickee no washee’ in those days—but those dead sad trees and then the snow blowing up in a terrible kind of flurry and whirlpool in the distance across the crossroads—Oh Jesus, then starting to worry myself to death about you again—”

  “But all that time I was as safe as”—it had slipped out and she hadn’t noticed—“as houses.”

  “—and the doctor coming in his sleigh with the sleigh bells going, or on skis. Bringing his bass fiddle and Mr. McClintock too.”

  “That was nice.”

  “Was it?”

  “That was last Christmas. Oh, Tommy and I had a grim Christmas, I can tell you. He just isn’t meant to be an only child.”

  “Please don’t torment yourself like that. What are you trying to tell me, Jacqueline. There. Got it. Got that bloody old tin can.”

  “I guess it’s true what my father said. Some people could be born anyway into any family at all, and it wouldn’t make any difference. That’s not quite what I mean either…Their fathers and their mothers wouldn’t be their fathers and mothers. Or their brothers and sisters and their mothers and their cousins and their uncles and their aunts, I mean. Maybe some people’s destinies are meant to be without children. And you have children just the same, even if you can’t. Tell me, did you feel Tommy was glad to see you when you got back?”

  “Not very, now you mention it. About the second question he asked me was could he spend the weekend with Pat Heatherington

  …Look, there’s a flicker up on the locust tree.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “Not much. It’s just a phase.”

  “Not a phase. He gets attached to things, other things, anything not around his home. Oh, and we haven’t got a home now, have we? Funny to think of that…You know what? He’s not old enough to understand about my mother, I mean. But when he does, he’ll turn against me.”

  “Oh Jacqueline, what nonsense! He’ll love you more!”

  “Attached to his school, horrors on the radio, other little boys, but he didn’t give a damn about our own house. You saw that. The little fiend went trotting back to school pleased as Punch about it. And don’t say he isn’t old enough to understand that. Do you know what?” Jacqueline sat up again. “Tommy nags me about not having a little sister.”

  “Can’t the fellow wait? To hell with Tommy, for the moment!”

  “To hell with him, eh?” Jacqueline was suddenly watching him fiercely, like a captive albatross. “What! Would you like him to grow up feeling as you did about your father?”

  “Look here, Jacqueline, I’d do anything for Tommy. He’s my son, our son. But it’s just like it was in the nursing home that night, when they told me he’d been born.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said to hell with the child, I want to know how my wife is.”

  “And—”

  Ethan came over and sat down beside her again. “You’re more beautiful than ever.”

  “Darling…you remember…You once said there were buts in your life—I don’t mean that, but that you were too old for me. What if I were to say I’d got too old for you?”

  “Oh stuff and nonsense, Jacky. Better calm down—have another drink?”

  “Oh well, why not?” Then, once again, she said:

  “Isn’t life wonderful!”

  This time she had spoken bitterly, wearily, cynically, he thought, and now, putting her hands on his shoulders, she gave him one of her old, long, searching looks, but as if meaning through it at this moment to convey the fire were his fault, and as though too, which was abruptly frightening, she really were much older and wiser than he, and looking at him like this, saw into some deep part of his being, finding there things he had not admitted to himself.

  Or no: what was worse, though the fire blazed anew between them, or was ashes in the heart, it wasn’t the fire that was at issue; it hadn’t been T
ommy or anything else; it wasn’t the house: it was life, their life, their marriage aborted in its rebirth so miserably by the fire, and now found wanting, or in the balance.

  Mysteriously, he felt, she seemed to be telling him she had been deceived by him: that what she’d taken as merely a certain immaturity, childishness, irresponsibility in him—what in part was this—she had been prepared for, had been prepared to love, and had loved; but not to discover that these qualities cloaked a man who had become, of all people, like her father—when she had always wanted to fall in love with someone as unlike her father as possible—a man almost without worldly ambition in the usual sense, who, seeing life’s very meaning as an ordeal, perhaps feeling man’s purpose on earth at all simply a matter of going through the hoop, had already accepted the fire as some necessary expiation; had married her indeed as a companion to share his loneliness in some labyrinthine path of just such atonements he must tread, whereas she (had she?) had been attracted to him, on the contrary, and with a quite different pilgrimage in mind, not only by what she mistook for those “endearing” weaknesses, but by what also seemed most superficial in him, by the poseur, the actor, who had won her with his likeableness, his good looks, humor, his air of success, his success itself, and everyday sense of adventure: if she’d felt attracted to him by their real spiritual affinities, it was only because she felt that by the fusion of these she must be drawn in the opposite direction from the kind of destiny she was, through her heredity, secretly terrified of, and against which in secret she rebelled so furiously.

  But now she saw him as that very kind of man to whom great accidents happen—if fusion it was also combustion!—as a man who almost relished this, who, if he proposed to take her there at all, proposed to take her to heaven by way of hell, and like it: whereas again, she seemed to be asking, she—what did she want? had she wanted? No doubt the impossible!

  Yet what, in any event, she hadn’t really been prepared for, her look seemed to be saying, as now she held him at arm’s length, was for anything as serious as this, for this man who perhaps did turn out, after all, as he’d sometimes intimated he felt himself to be—actually damned, who, quite without meaning to, would inflict that kind of damnation on herself; who perhaps actually was under a curse, or even mad (oh, Ethan could imagine her thinking, that dreadful old story about Peter Cordwainer he’d told her now long since, so many times she had grown bored with it, that had been to her, or had to be to her, just as he feared, all “less than a grey hair in God’s eyebrow”—now was he going to persecute them with this again?), no, she hadn’t been prepared for anything like this, no matter that gaiety, wittiness, kindness were all attributes of goodness to be sure, and goodness and kindness, she might concede were, together with courage, all that was respected at bottom—a mystical imbalance in itself, as her father might say—by this “cursed” man.

  But above all, once more, was marriage to this kind of man any life for a woman? could it have been resumed? come to anything anyway? was it not now at an end? Oh, she’d had all too much time to reflect about these things in his absence, and he had no way of knowing how she had changed, and if he suspected she had, he probably hadn’t wanted to find out how or why. True it was all pretty complicated, she had to admit. Her life first with her father had been so hard and then, in rebellion from him, so self-sufficient before Ethan met her, that perhaps her womanliness craved dependence on Ethan even while wanting to free herself from its tyranny; but she had little life of her own any more, she’d found that out too particularly while he was away, and in any case now if it was a matter purely of their resumed companionship, she hadn’t wanted anything that threatened to be so tragic, so merely a companionship in disaster, especially when, all over again, she thought of those circumstances of her own birth. For not only was there that fear of repeating the cycle of her mother, of going insane herself, there was that whole pathetic business of being a foundling too, a bloody bastard picked up on a doorstep (no matter that bastards romantically seemed somehow nobler than other people), the divided loyalties so much the more passionate in every wild direction, love and hatred of home, longing for and hatred of respectability—all those corollary expressions of her existence that, self-dramatized, were “danger signs,” all of which too, once more, made losing the Barkerville far more shattering for her. Yet perhaps just the same she was blaming him, while upon a wholly other plane having a prevision of the future, of which this day could seem the heartless and destructive symbol, for having starved (it grotesquely didn’t look much like it at the moment but, in fact, he saw, it was probably so: their societal life had come to consist, largely, as it had begun, in their own society, whether at movies or over drinks at home; and had been as bridgepartyless, horseraceless, danceless, as it was unrelated to any other lighter human activity, long before one could blame this on the war), starved the purely frivolous side of her nature, that part of her which could not help wanting to see life, as she’d put it once, as a kind of pleasure cruise (if not exactly like one on the old S.S. Noronic, moronically blowing its siren now, to attract its complement of all of seven passengers, alongside at Niagara-on-the-Lake’s dock, preparing to make its first translacustrine trip of the season), whereas she might, disenchanted, have gained the impression that he tended to see life, Schopenhauer-wise, more like a stretch in a penitentiary: a penitentiary mostly officered by brutes, criminals and stool pigeons it was one’s primary object to outwit with as much grace as possible, and in which it was one’s highest privilege sometimes to be able to laugh: “This week is beginning well,” as the condemned prisoner observed, on Monday morning, upon being led to the scaffold. Yes, that he really had turned out a creature of hate, rather than of love, that the Heathcliff faction in his soul was real and abiding and implanted in his character—was not the most dishonest and plausible riling he had ever done to pretend to lay all the blame for this at the door of his own childhood?—a character that hadn’t been essentially mollified, for all the “goodness and kindness,” by their marriage…

  Ethan couldn’t believe that at bottom she had wanted anything “obvious” from “life” for the lack of which she was blaming him—why should she?—again the war had scarcely given them a chance at the “obvious,” if a better chance than most—or that, as if overnight, she now found she “conformed.” Certainly he’d never seen that the birth of a child had changed her much in this respect, and all the less could he see it happening if Tommy really was proving a distress to her, which he didn’t for one moment seriously believe. He’d known her complain of the lack of that “social life,” but put to the test it nearly always turned out she despised it almost as virulently as her mother had: doubtless she’d lacked friends here, but that was her fault as much as his. (There had been no lack of friendliness.) They’d made very few friends to begin with, and the reasons for this had seemed as complicated to others as they were—unless they started reflecting on the matter—simple to themselves. Given every opportunity, she was not a “joiner” or a stitcher of socks or shrouds, a social busybody contributing to that noble cause shadowed forth in the image which always reminded him of the whole overstuffed stupid world doing eternally what it was told by its gruesome parents and groaning and straining forevermore on a pot: the war effort. But what in heaven’s name did they need with friends or a social life if the only true common ground they met on was the magnificent dangerous though scarcely gregarious one of romantic love? And if it were the only ground, what then?

  —And yet, to have returned to her like this, only for them both to be greeted so immediately with this conflagration, as of themselves, did not this seem in some sort too to cancel all knowledge of one another? to raise the question, had they ever known one another at all? time to become “adjusted” or no, was it not rather as if they’d become—or was this just the shock of the fire again and alcohol’s mutual alienation?—all of a sudden like the hero and heroine of separate films, playing in separate but adjoining cinemas? It could
seem like that to her, or that his action of returning had somehow begotten this doom.

  But Ethan saw he was mistaken. Jacqueline was grasping his hands very tightly and she was biting her lips. Yet there was a curious light in her expression, an infinite pleading. She had not spoken cynically at all but sadly. And knowing he had half-suspected all along what she was going to say, his heart filled with pity and grief for her.

  “Ethan…Ethan, listen. I’m not sure,” Jacqueline gripped his hands more tightly. Rain began falling softly in the lake, describing its peaceful intersected circles. It was a lluvita, a handful of rain, and the tiny spring shower stopped as softly as it had begun. “I hadn’t wanted to tell you, you know, since you’d just come home, and all…I have to see the doctor again, but I don’t think—listen, I have to get this over with. I don’t think I can have any more children.”

  Chapter 17

  A House Where a Man Has Hanged Himself

  —AND HOW THE WIND blew and the birds sang, and the sun shone, that day on the way home—on the way home?—the goddam golden robins all waking up again in the wind and sunshine and starting singing after their siesta, as if they too knew that the liquor store toward which Jacky and he were hastening, to get there before it shut, opened at five o’clock, the empty gin bottle now bobbing in the lake with an absurd motion, and an absurder message in it scrawled by Jacqueline, “Good luck to whoever finds me” (Ethan found it himself a fortnight later); the golden robin that was the Baltimore oriole and knot expert, and master builder, at its complex work of nesting, whistling in its rich contralto; they had seen the two orioles making their nest together earlier in the afternoon, the Llewelyns themselves the watchers on the threshold, watching them weaving happily their wonderful nest of fibres and plant down and hairs and string (rebuild, we shall rebuild), the female thrusting a fibre into the nest and then, this was the wonderful part, reaching over to the inside and pulling the string through with her little beak, tugging with all her might to make everything all “a’taunto,” solid and tight, he hadn’t fully appreciated this either till they’d got to Eridanus, but that was what the birds had been doing (their bus went rushing over a bridge crossing a swift river with the sign: This is the River Amor-de-Cosmos. Drink Grape-up!—and “I shall build a house myself, or with Jacqueline’s aid, even if I need a book for that too,” Ethan thought, while the same Mounted Police car they’d seen before choired past in the opposite direction:—no), she would make no mistake, that little bird, and so to make certain she would thrust in another fibre, or the male would, and that was what they were doing now, having resumed the work after the siesta, repeating exactly the same process, though now they had nearly finished, so that looking at their work, this small while later, Jacqueline and Ethan could see how their little home was all so knotted and felted and quilted together that though it was tossing wildly in the lake breeze (that bore to them with a scent of grasses, over the deserted golf links down the thirteenth fairway, the charred creosote smell of their own burned house), it looked as if it would last for years, and they imagined it tossing there for years, braving all the tempests of the storm country, seeing beyond too, through the trees on the right by the twelfth green, the boarded-up house of the matricide, one of Ethan’s former clients, dead by his own hand before he was arrested or brought to trial; the daffodils and dandelions growing together in the overgrown garden—where someone was standing, after all, some faint Maria Chapdelaine motionless there—a man who claimed to have seen a polar bear kill a walrus in one blow by banging it on the head with a block of ice, an action that seemed unfortunately to have impressed him too much; his house forlorn as Cézanne’s painting “Maison de Pendu” seen the day before yesterday in the art gallery at Ixion (which was on the fifth floor of the Department of Mines and Resources): a house where a man has housed himself: a house where a man has hanged himself; and now the windy whistling empty golf links themselves with their blowing spiny spring grasses and sand dunes and stricken stunted thorn bushes like Wuthering Heights: “I lingered round them, under that benign sky, watched the moths fluttering among the harebells”—the course! but ah, what further hazards lurked before them there, what roughs and bunkers and traps and dog-legged approaches, and dongas and treacherous blind (and nineteenth) holes, and final, it was to be hoped too, bright fairways; and the ecstasies of bobolinks twittering and bobolinking in the blue, bobbing on the links, or bringing rushes of rollicking song downwind, like imagined tintinnabulating harebells, like tinkling bluebells, darting over the “moat” of the old fort—the bastion now the out-of-bounds at the short fourth: “Ein Festerburg ist unser Gott,” Ethan said (observing at this moment that the old Noronic—“Bask in the warm breezes of sunny Lake Ontario on the boat deck of Canada’s favorite pleasure boat”—was halfway to Toronto) and where, among what appeared cunning contracallations, they found an antique long-lost golf ball of forgotten make named the “Zodiak Zone”; the blithe bobolink, friend of hay and clover: the merry bobolink that was also called (ex post facto knowledge too) skunk blackbird, le goglu, Dolichonyx oryzivorus; the bobolink that said clink.