by Unknown
Charlotte did not die. At least she did not die in the hospital.
When I came in rather late, the next afternoon, her bed was empty and freshly made up. The nurse who had talked to me before was trying to take the temperature of the woman tied in the chair. She laughed at the look on my face.
"Oh, no!" she said. "Not that. She checked out of here this morning. Her husband came and got her. We were transfer-The Albanian Virgin
ring her to a long-term place out in Saanich, and he was supposed to be taking her there. He said he had the taxi outside.
Then we get this phone call that they never showed up! They were in great spirits when they left. He brought her a pile of money, and she was throwing it up in the air. I don't know—
maybe it was only dollar bills. But we haven't a clue where they've got to."
I walked around to the apartment building on Pandora Street. I thought they might simply have gone home. They might have lost the instructions about how to get to the nursing home and not wanted to ask. They might have decided to stay together in their apartment no matter what. They might have turned on the gas.
At first I could not find the building and thought that I must be in the wrong block. But I remembered the corner store and some of the houses. The building had been changed
—that was what had happened. The stucco had been painted pink; large, new windows and French doors had been put in; little balconies with wrought-iron railings had been attached.
The fancy balconies had been painted white, the whole place had the air of an ice-cream parlor. No doubt it had been ren-ovated inside as well, and the rents increased, so that people like Charlotte and Gjurdhi could have no hope of living there.
I checked the names by the door, and of course theirs were gone. They must have moved out some time ago.
The change in the apartment building seemed to have some message for me. It was about vanishing. I knew that Charlotte and Gjurdhi had not actually vanished—they were somewhere, living or dead. But for me they had vanished. And because of this fact—not really because of any loss of them—I was tipped into dismay more menacing than any of the little eddies of regret that had caught me in the past year. I had lost my bearings. I had to get back to the store so my clerk could go home, but I felt as if I could as easily walk another way, 12J
just any way at all. My connection was in danger—that was all. Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, then, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I let myself slip, then, into imagining a life with Nelson. If I had done so accurately, this is how it would have gone.
He comes to Victoria. But he does not like the idea of working in the store, serving the public. He gets a job teaching at a boys' school, a posh place where his look of lower-class toughness, his bruising manners, soon make him a favorite.
We move from the apartment at the Dardanelles to a roomy bungalow a few blocks from the sea. We marry.
But this is the beginning of a period of estrangement. I become pregnant. Nelson falls in love with the mother of a student. I fall in love with an intern I meet in the hospital during labor.
We get over all this—Nelson and I do. We have another child. We acquire friends, furniture, rituals. We go to too many parties at certain seasons of the year, and talk regularly about starting a new life, somewhere far away, where we don't know anybody.
We become distant, close—distant, close—over and over again.
As I entered the store, I was aware of a man standing near the door, half looking in the window, half looking up the street, then looking at me. He was a short man dressed in a trenchcoat and a fedora. I had the impression of someone disguised. Jokingly disguised. He moved toward me and bumped my shoulder, and I cried out as if I had received the shock of my life, and indeed it was true that I had. For this really was Nelson, come to claim me. Or at least to accost me, and see what would happen.
The Albanian Virgin
We have been very happy.
I have often felt completely alone.
There is always in this life something to discover.
The days and the years have gone by in some sort of blur.
On the whole, I am satisfied.
When Lottar was leaving the Bishop's courtyard, she was wrapped in a long cloak they had given her, perhaps to conceal her ragged clothing, or to contain her smell. The Consul's servant spoke to her in English, telling her where they were going. She could understand him but could not reply. It was not quite dark. She could still see the pale shapes of roses and oranges in the Bishop's garden.
The Bishop's man was holding the gate open.
She had never seen the Bishop at all. And she had not seen the Franciscan since he had followed the Bishop's man into the house. She called out for him now, as she was leaving. She had no name to call, so she called, "Xoti! Xoti! Xoti," which means "leader" or "master" in the language of the Ghegs. But no answer came, and the Consul's servant swung his lantern impatiently, showing her the way to go. Its light fell by accident on the Franciscan standing half concealed by a tree. It was a little orange tree he stood behind. His face, pale as the oranges were in that light, looked out of the branches, all its swarthiness drained away. It was a wan face hanging in the tree, its melancholy expression quite impersonal and unde-manding, like the expression you might see on the face of a devout but proud apostle in a church window. Then it was gone, taking the breath out of her body, as she knew too late.
She called him and called him, and when the boat came into the harbor at Trieste he was waiting on the dock.
Open Secrets
•
It was on a Saturday morning
Just as lovely as it could be
Seven girls and their Leader Miss Johnstone Went camping from the C. G.I. T.
"And they almost didn't even go," Frances said. "Because of the downpour Saturday morning. They were waiting half an hour in the United Church basement and she says, Oh, it'll stop—my hikes are never rained out! And now I bet she wishes it had've been. Then it would 've been a whole other story."
It did stop raining, they did go, and it got so hot partway out that Miss Johnstone let them stop at a farmhouse, and the woman brought out Coca-Colas and the man let them take the garden hose and spray themselves cool. They were grabbing Open Secrets
the hose from each other and doing tricks, and Frances said that Mary Kaye said Heather Bell had been the worst one, the boldest, getting hold of the hose and shooting water on the rest of them in all the bad places.
"They will try to make out she was some poor innocent, but the facts are dead different," Frances said. "It could have been all an arrangement, that she arranged to meet somebody.
I mean some man."
Maureen said, "I think that's pretty farfetched."
"Well, I don't believe she drowned," Frances said. "That I don't believe."
The Falls on the Peregrine River were nothing like the waterfalls you see pictures of. They were just water falling over limestone shelves, none of them more than six or seven feet high. There was a breathing spot where you could stand behind the hard-falling curtain of water, and all around in the limestone there were pools, smooth-rimmed and not much bigger than bathtubs, where the water lay trapped and warm.
You would have to be very determined to drown in there. But they had looked there—the other girls had run around calling Heather's name and peering into all the pools, and they had even stuck their heads into the dry space behind the curtain of noisy water. They had skipped around on the bare rock and yelled and got themselves soaked, finally, plunging in and out through the curtain. Till Miss Johnstone shouted and made them come back.
There was Betsy and Eva Trowell
And Lucille Chambers as well
There was Ginny Bos and Mary Kaye Trevelyan And Robin Sands a
nd poor Heather Bell.
"Seven was all she could get," Frances said. "And every one of them, there was a reason. Robin Sands, doctor's daughter.
131
Lucille Chambers, minister's daughter. They can't get out of it.
The Trowells—country. Glad to get in on anything. Ginny Bos, the double-jointed monkey—she's along for the swimming and the horsing around. Mary Kaye living next door to Miss Johnstone. Enough said. And Heather Bell new in town. And her mother away on the weekend herself—yes, she was taking the opportunity. Getting off on an expedition of her own."
It was about twenty-four hours since Heather Bell had disappeared, on the annual hike of the C.G.I.T.—which stood for Canadian Girls in Training—out to the Falls on the Peregrine River. Mary Johnstone, who was now in her early sixties, had been leading this hike for years, since before the war. There used to be at least a couple of dozen girls heading out the County Road on a Saturday morning in June. They would all be wearing navy-blue shorts and white blouses and red kerchiefs round their necks. Maureen had been one of them, twenty or so years ago.
Miss Johnstone always started them off singing the same thing.
For the Beauty of the Earth,
For the Beauty of the Skies,
For the Love that from our Birth
Over and around us lies—
And you could hear a hum of different words going along, cautiously but determinedly, under the hymn words.
For the sight of Miss Johnstone's bum, Waddling down the County Road.
We are the morons singing this song—
Doesn't she look just like a toad?
Open Secrets
Did anybody else Maureen's age remember these words now? The ones who had stayed in town were mothers—they had girls old enough to go on the hike, and older. They would get into the proper motherly kind of fit about rude language.
Having children changed you. It gave you the necessary stake in being grown-up, so that certain parts of you—old parts—
could be altogether eliminated and abandoned. Jobs, marriage didn't quite do it—just made you act as if you'd forgotten things.
Maureen had no children.
Maureen was sitting with Frances Wall, having coffee and cigarettes at the breakfast table that had been wedged into the old pantry, under the high, glass-fronted cupboards. This was Maureen's house in Carstairs, in 1965. She had been living in the house for eight years, but she still felt as if she got around it on fairly narrow tracks, from one spot where she felt at home to another. She had fixed up this corner so there was a place to eat other than the dining-room table, and she had put new chintz in the sunroom. It took a long time to work her husband around to changes. The front rooms were full of valuable, heavy furniture, made of oak and walnut, and the curtains were of green-and-mulberry brocade, as in a rich-looking hotel—you could not begin to alter anything there.
Frances worked for Maureen in the house, but she was not like a servant. They were cousins, though Frances was nearly a generation older. She had worked in this house long before Maureen came into it—she had worked for the first wife.
Sometimes she called Maureen "Missus." It was a joke, half friendly and half not. How much did you give for those chops, Missus? Oh, they must have seen you coming! And she would tell Maureen she was getting broad in the beam and her hair did not suit her piled and sprayed like an upside-down 133
mixing bowl. This though Frances herself was a dumpling sort of woman with gray hair like brambles all over her head, and a plain, impudent face. Maureen did not think of herself as timid—she had a stately look—and she was certainly not in-competent, having run her husband's law office before she
"graduated" (as both she and he would say) to running his house. She sometimes thought she should try for more respect from Frances—but she needed somebody around the house to have spats and jokes with. She could not be a gossip, because of her husband's position, and she didn't think it was her nature, anyway, but she let Frances get away with plenty of mean remarks, and wild, uncharitable, confident speculations.
(For example, what Frances was saying about Heather Bell's mother, and what she said about Mary Johnstone and the hike in general. Frances thought she was an authority on that, because Mary Kaye Trevelyan was her granddaughter.) Mary Johnstone was a woman you were hardly supposed to mention in Carstairs without attaching the word "wonderful."
She had had polio and nearly died of it, at the age of thirteen or fourteen. She was left with short legs, a short, thick body, crooked shoulders, and a slightly twisted neck, which kept her big head a little tilted to one side. She had studied bookkeep-ing, she had got herself a job in the office at Douds Factory, and she had devoted her spare time to girls, often saying that she had never met a bad one, just some who were confused.
Whenever Maureen met Mary Johnstone on the street or in a store, her heart sank. First came that searching smile, the eyes raking yours, the declared delight in any weather—wind or hail or sun or rain, each had something to recommend it—
then the laughing question. So what have you been up to, Mrs.
Stephens!1 Mary Johnstone always made a point of saying
"Mrs. Stephens," but she said it as if it was a play title and she was thinking all the time, It's only Maureen Coulter. (Coulters Open Secrets
were just like the Trowells that Frances had remarked on—
country. No more, no less.) What interesting things have you been doing lately, Mrs. Stephens?
Maureen felt then as if she was being put on the spot and could do nothing about it, as if a challenge was being issued, and it had something to do with her lucky marriage and her tall healthy body, whose only misfortune was a hidden one—
her tubes had been tied to make her infertile—and her rosy skin and auburn hair, and the clothes she spent a lot of money and time on. As if she must owe Mary Johnstone something, a never specified compensation. Or as if Mary Johnstone could see more lacking than Maureen herself would face.
Frances didn't care for Mary Johnstone, either, in the pure and simple way she didn't care for anybody who made too much of themselves.
Miss Johnstone had taken them on a half-mile hike before breakfast, as she always did, to climb the Rock—the chunk of limestone that jutted out over the Peregrine River, and was so rare a thing in that part of the country that it was not named anything but the Rock. On Sunday morning you always had to do that hike, dopey as you were from trying to stay awake all night and half sick from smoking smuggled cigarettes. Shivering, too, because the sun wouldn't have reached deep into the woods yet. The path hardly deserved to be called one—you had to climb over rotted tree trunks and wade through ferns and what Miss Johnstone pointed out as Mayapples and wild geraniums, and wild ginger. She would pull it up and nibble it, hardly brushing off the dirt. Look what nature provides us.
I forgot my sweater, Heather said when they were halfway up. Can I go back and get it?
In the old days Miss Johnstone would probably have said no. Get a move on and you'll warm up without it, she would 135
have said. She must have felt uneasy this time, because of the waning popularity of her hikes, which she blamed on television, working mothers, laxity in the home. She said yes.
Yes, but hurry. Hurry and catch up.
Which Heather Bell never did do. At the Rock they looked at the view (Maureen recalled looking around for French safes—did they still call them that?—among the beer bottles and candy wrappers), and Heather had not caught up. On the way back they didn't meet her. She wasn't in the big tent, or in the little tent, where Miss Johnstone had slept, or between the tents. She wasn't in any of the shelters or love nests among the cedars surrounding the campground. Miss Johnstone cut that searching short.
"Pancakes," she called. "Pancakes and coffee! See if the smell of pancakes and coffee won't smoke Miss Mischief out of hiding."
They had to sit and eat—after Miss Johnstone had said grace, thanking God for everything
in the woods and at home—and as they ate, Miss Johnstone called out, "Yum -my
"Doesn't the fresh air give us an appetite?" she said at the top of her voice. "Aren't these the best pancakes you ever did eat? Heather better hurry up or there won't be one left.
Heather? Are you listening? Not one left!"
As soon as they were finished, Robin Sands asked if they could go now, could they go and look for Heather?
"Dishes first, my lady," Miss Johnstone said. "Even if you never do pick up a dishrag around home."
Robin nearly burst out crying. Nobody ever spoke to her like that.
After they had cleaned up, Miss Johnstone let them go, and that was when they went back to the Falls. But she brought them back soon enough and made them sit in a semicircle, wet as they were, and she herself sat cross-legged in front of them and called out that anybody listening was welcome to come Open Secrets
and join them. "Anybody hiding round here and trying to play tricks is welcome! Come out now and no questions asked!
Otherwise we will just have to get along without you!"
Then she launched into her talk, her Sunday-morning-of-the-hike sermon, without any qualms or worries. She kept going and going, asking a question every now and then, to make sure they were listening. The sun dried their shorts and Heather Bell did not come back. She did not appear out of the trees and still Miss Johnstone did not stop talking. She didn't let go of them until Mr. Trowell drove into the camp in his truck, bringing the ice cream for lunch.
She didn't give them permission then, but they broke loose anyway. They jumped up and ran for the truck. They all started telling him at once. Jupiter, the Trowell's dog, jumped over the tailgate, and Eva Trowell threw her arms about him and started to wail as if he had been the one lost.
Miss Johnstone got to her feet and came over and called out to Mr. Trowell above the girls' clamoring.
"One's taken it into her head to go missing!"
Now the search parties were out. Douds was closed, so that every man who wanted to go could go. Dogs had been added.