And he had talked to Ruth Chapman, really talked to her, confided in her. They had only talked about the lake, but he felt as though he had told her about his whole life, that she understood, that this place was beautiful, yes, but it was also a trap. She had called him an artist, had talked about Toronto, as though she knew, she knew that he had to get out, as though she wanted him to get out.
And she had kissed him. Just on the cheek, almost the way his mother had kissed him when he was younger, but not quite. He didn’t know what it meant. Did she mean it as a real kiss? He shuddered. Whatever else Ruth Chapman was, she was older than his mother. But it wasn’t that kind of a kiss anyway. More, playful. More … to make him feel she understood, she cared. He wanted to be back over there, wanted to be with them on the dock. He didn’t belong at the Landing. He belonged over there.
Monday afternoon, the Segwun — as big as the Cherokee but not as elegant — pulled up to the Pine Island dock, and Ruth Chapman’s guests returned to Toronto. When he arrived at the cottage the next day, she was still in bed, but there was a note reminding him to sand and varnish the kitchen cabinets, so he set to work. It was after one before she appeared.
“Good afternoon.”
“Afternoon.”
“I hope you enjoyed yourself Saturday night.”
“Oh, yeah. I had too much beer, though.”
“Yes. Sorry about that.” And she went out to the veranda with a book.
It was like that for the next week, and it confused him. She wasn’t unpleasant or anything. She just seemed to ignore him, as though he wasn’t there. She stayed in her room more often, or went out for long rides in the boat, or read. But there was no music and little conversation. And when he had finished with the cabinets, later that week, she told him that, really, there wasn’t much to do around the place, but she would send word if she needed him.
“Okay. Well, I’ll see you, then.” He shuffled his feet.
“I’m sure you will.” She offered a formal smile, and that was that.
Was it the kiss? He’d been drunk, and she might have been drunker than normal, and though it had seemed strange, it hadn’t bothered him. But maybe it had bothered her. He wanted to say something, tried to think of a way to bring it up, to say it was okay. But how could he? She didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
And now she didn’t even seem to want him around. It tore at him. He had gotten used to her, hearing her talk about music and books and New York and everything that nobody talked about at the Landing. He had gotten used to looking in on her life, almost as though it was his life, too, or could be, one day. His mother was right: things happen, or they don’t. And if they don’t, then you’re stuck, you don’t go anywhere. He thought he had made a good impression, thought he had made her interested in him, in his future. What had gone wrong?
Worst of all, he was back to life with Henry, to the short, sharp orders, the drudgery of work. No music. Just silent resentments.
“When you’re done that, your mother wants you to weed the garden … When you’re done that, you can feed the hens … When you’re done that, you can give me a hand with the Hitchcocks’ boat.”
Working on that boat — cleaning and polishing the leather, carefully waxing and polishing the fine mahogany, helping tune the massive engine — brought him to close quarters with Henry for the first time in weeks. They worked badly together, as they always did, bumping into each other, getting in each other’s way. Henry lost his temper a lot, and Ben said “Sorry” a lot and wondered sometimes whether Henry was deliberately trying to provoke him.
But Ben’s mind was on other things, things he had only half wished before but that now seemed almost reachable. Working away, raking this and scraping that, the dreams would come. There were violin teachers in Toronto, Ruth Chapman had told him, good ones, who could teach him to play properly. The lessons would be expensive, but maybe if he got a job and lived really cheaply he’d be able to afford them. Maybe he’d even be able to afford a new violin, one that wasn’t falling apart, that didn’t play the notes raw. He’d be sixteen in February, old enough to live on his own. Maybe he should just get out of here while there was still time.
And then the doubts would come. There were a lot of men out of work. What kind of job could he do that others couldn’t do better? And who says that any teacher would offer to give lessons to a kid who played the fiddle and couldn’t play much more than jigs and reels? And what if Ben couldn’t afford what it cost?
And then the guilt would come. Henry couldn’t afford to hire help, and he couldn’t handle everything on his own. Henry needed Ben, and Ben knew it, and they both resented it. And more than Henry, there was his mother. He’d be leaving her alone — worse, he’d be leaving her alone with Henry. To move out, to leave her at the Landing, what would there be for her?
It’s my life, he’d say to himself, furiously pitching hay at the startled cows, I can live it any way I want. Except he knew it wasn’t his life. His life belonged to others, everyone’s life did. He was needed here, wanted, even, though he’d never get Henry to admit it. That was the claim the Landing had on him. That, as his mother would have said, was all there was to it.
He wanted to talk to Ruth Chapman, let her see his dilemma. Maybe she had a way out. Maybe she could help him. But she didn’t seem interested in him anymore. And that was the worst thing of all. There were chores he could do over there, work she could find for him if she really wanted to. Why wouldn’t she? Why was she ignoring him?
It was almost two weeks before he saw Ruth Chapman again, and when he realized her boat was headed for the Landing rather than her cottage, he practically ran down to the dock so he could be waiting for her by the time she pulled up.
“Hi.” He even made a point of smiling.
“Hello,” she smiled back. “How are you keeping?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Is your uncle around, by chance?”
His uncle? What did she want with Henry?
“Yeah, he’s up at the house.”
In fact, Henry was coming down from the house to the dock.
“Afternoon.”
“Good afternoon. And how have you been keeping?”
“Well enough, I suppose.”
“That’s good to hear. I was wondering how busy you and Ben are right now.”
“Busy enough.”
“Well, I’m having another party.” Ben’s heart leapt. She would want him to help out. Maybe he’d get to play the fiddle again.
“It’s a large party,” she went on. “Thirty guests, at least. And I’m worried about the steps leading up to the cottage from the dock. We need to make them a bit more … predictable, if you know what I mean.”
“I guess so.”
The steps were really just slabs of rock embedded at more or less regular intervals in the slope leading up to the cottage. It was easy enough to trip on them, especially going down, if you weren’t watching or you’d had too much gin.
“How long do you think it would take the two of you to build a proper stone staircase?’
“That depends. We’d have to order the stones and get our hands on a cement mixer —”
“Already done and waiting for you in Bracebridge.”
“Then maybe a couple of weeks. It’s a big job.”
“Then you’d better get started right away. The party is Labor Day Saturday,” which was just over two weeks away. “Can I count on the two of you, six dollars a day?”
Ben gave Henry a quick look. The summer was winding down, and jobs were getting fewer. And six dollars a day! They’d have done it for half that.
Henry obviously agreed, though he’d be damned if he’d show it. “I guess we could manage it.”
“That’s splendid. So you can start tomorrow?”
“I suppose so.”
“That’s
it, then. Good to see you again, Ben.”
And she slipped the idling motor into reverse, and backed away.
The next day they set to work early, digging out the old steps, pulling up grass and rocks and smoothing the slope and then pounding the ground flat with shovels. Then it was into Bracebridge with the scow hitched to the launch to pick up the granite slabs and cement and a cement mixer and crushed stones for drainage from O’Neill’s. It took Ben three trips and a long day to ferry everything to the island, where Henry was already at work spreading the crushed stone. Then came day after day of work: smoothing the stones with a hammer and chisel, mixing the cement, fitting the risers and skirtboards that held the steps in place, fitting the stones and troweling in the cement around them, then starting all over again. It was a hard, sweaty job, and the late-August mosquitoes were as plentiful as the late-August heat was unusual. By now, the first cool waves of approaching autumn should have started to sharpen the night air. But not this year. This summer didn’t seem to want to end.
He was working with Henry, and that was never comfortable. At first it was the same old “Watch yourself” and “Sorry.” But after a couple of days Ben started to get the hang of it, and there was something about working with the stone — shaping and fitting the pieces together and anchoring them with cement — that he started to enjoy. Watching the staircase progress, step by step, was somehow deeply satisfying, something you could see, appreciate, something that would last.
And Henry was a natural as a stonemason. He could chip away at a stone and fit it beside another as though they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that he held in his head. Ben couldn’t help admiring the skill in Henry’s hands, his sharp eye, his steady judgment about which piece should go where.
It was strange that Henry didn’t seem to enjoy the work any more than he enjoyed any other work. For him, building a set of steps was the same as fixing an engine or slaughtering a pig. It was all work.
That’s when Ben began to realize. Henry wasn’t angry at Ben; he was angry at the Landing, or the cottagers, or the bank. He was angry at everything, because everything was against him. Maybe, if Ben had shared that anger, the two of them would have gotten along better. But Ben wasn’t angry at the whole world. Not yet. Ben suspected that Henry didn’t like living at the Landing any more than he did, resented the isolation, resented being poor. And Henry didn’t love the lake, didn’t swim in it — couldn’t, because of his bad leg — and he didn’t have a fiddle or something else that would allow him to get his mind off things. Henry’s mind was always on things. Just like Ben’s was now.
Ruth Chapman was keeping to herself. Once a day, or maybe twice, she’d come down, look at what they were doing, congratulate them on their progress, and then retreat to the cottage. She didn’t seem to want to talk to Ben. Well, how could she, with Henry around? But he had the feeling she wouldn’t have wanted to talk anyway. She just wasn’t talking to him anymore. It made his stomach ache, along with his back.
While they worked, things arrived, and people, mostly on the Cherokee, which was doing the daily Lake Muskoka run. Workers navigated boxes and crates around the still-unfinished steps, casting resentful glances at Henry and Ben for making their task so much harder. One day they wrestled a table up the slope — a long flat slab of dark wood and three trestles to rest it on, and dozens of collapsible wooden chairs. If the weather was nice — and it would be a disaster if it wasn’t — the guests would eat on the patch of cleared land in front of the veranda. A formal dinner beneath the Muskoka pines, lit by lanterns — candles in tinted glass hanging from hooks. Ruth Chapman asked Ben and Henry to drill the hooks into the trees so the lanterns would light the stairs and the clearing. It was going to look really pretty.
Another day there were cases of wine, red and white, and more Scotch and more gin, and many cases of food — cheese and flour and sugar and chocolate and other ingredients for fancy things with French names. A third day featured silver trays, porcelain bowls and tureens, more china and silver and crystal and linen. On the Thursday before the party, with the steps mostly built and the concrete mostly set, it was more food: three large roasts of prime beef packed in ice, a bushel basket of new potatoes, another of fresh-picked peas, and apples and oranges and grapes, imported from who-knows-where, and lettuce and olive oil in glass jars and vinegar and seasonings and … Ben lost track of it all as he helped cart it from the steamer to the house. Friday it was people from town who came to clean and wash and scrub. Ben was a bit offended that she didn’t trust him to do it, but Ruth Chapman wanted the house spic and span from attic to root cellar. She let him pitch in, though, because the staircase was finally done, a lovely set of granite steps, brownish pink, ascending from the dock to a small landing, then turning left and rising to the clearing in front of the cottage. He was proud that he had helped build them, because they would last for decades. It was one of the few things he and Henry had done together that Ben had almost enjoyed, however much his back resented it.
He was standing there, admiring their handiwork, when the flowers arrived, dozens of bouquets — roses and gladiolas and carnations in elaborate arrangements — that had been shipped straight from Toronto. The house was humming, with Ruth Chapman firmly in command, ordering this here and that there, inspecting everything, making lists and sending the lists back to town on the steamer.
But she hadn’t said that she wanted Ben there on Saturday. Maybe she didn’t realize that she hadn’t told him. Maybe she just assumed he knew. He’d been waiting all week, with growing confusion. This was going to be a party unlike anything anyone up here had seen before. There were now thirty-four confirmed guests. Almost all of them would be staying at the Muskoka Beach Inn, a resort at the south end of the lake. The Cherokee had been chartered to ferry the guests from the inn to the cottage and back. A few of the guests were cottagers themselves, from the islands on Millionaires’ Row, up the lake.
“And did you hear?” Jane Miller, one of the women who had been hired to help clean the cottage, told him that morning. “The Earl of Bessborough is coming.”
“Who’s the Earl of Bessborough?” Ben asked.
“The governor general!” She looked at him in surprise. Ben had some idea of what a governor general was: a British lord, or some such, who lived in Canada and signed papers in the name of the king.
“The governor general and Lady Bessborough are coming down in the Eatons’ yacht from Port Carling and staying right here overnight,” Jane Miller explained. “Can you imagine having an earl in your spare bedroom?”
“No wonder she wants us to change the sheets,” Ben joked. But now he really, really wanted to be at the party. Maybe she’d want him to play his violin. Maybe the governor general square danced.
It was late Friday afternoon, and he had nothing particular to do. A cook had arrived, a thin man with a thick mustache, and taken over the kitchen. Dinner would be beef Wellington, which was even fancier than stew, apparently. Mostly the cook was getting everything ready for the next day, but he had ordered everyone out of the kitchen, and the cottage was as ship-shape as it was possible for a cottage to get, so Ben had pretty much run out of jobs. Ruth Chapman obviously thought so, too.
“Thank you, Ben, for everything.”
“Sure.” But still she hadn’t said anything about tomorrow. He had to know. Maybe, if he suggested it. It was agony to push himself forward, but he was desperate.
“Um …” he looked down at his feet. “Is there anything that I could do for you, maybe, tomorrow?”
She looked at him a bit vacantly. “Tomorrow?” Then she realized. “Oh, no, no. I have people coming in from Toronto.”
“Oh.” He should have realized. This was a real party, a fancy affair. He had no place there.
“I thought maybe I could play you a square dance.” He tried to grin, to make it sound like he was joking.
She smiled. “That might have
been fun, actually. But we’re going to have to make do with a string quartet. And I don’t think there will be any dancing.”
“Oh … okay. Well … have a good party.”
“Thank you.” She seemed ready to say something else for a second, but then she turned away, and he turned away and went down to the dock and rowed back to the Landing, which now he knew for sure he would never leave.
He prayed for rain, out of spite, but the day was gloriously sunny and warm, and not even humid. He tried to ignore the water taxi — the Mildred, out of Bracebridge, could hold up to forty in a pinch — docking every few hours, though eventually the pull of curiosity dragged him down to the dock, where he invented work for himself and watched the busyness across the way. First it was just the cook, in white, with a tall hat, and two assistants and more boxes. The next trip it was half a dozen men and women, and yet more bunches of flowers. The men wore black suits with white shirts, and the women wore black dresses with white trim. Then came four others, in white tie and tails, carrying musical instruments. The string quartet, which was the worst thing of all. Real musicians, with real violins, playing real music. And he could have been there, listening to it. Just that, nothing else, would have been enough. If she had just let him sit in the kitchen and listen. She must have known how much that would have meant to him.
The dock, the kiss. He’d thought she was telling him that she understood, that she knew what he was going through.
But she’d just had too much to drink.
At four o’clock, the Cherokee arrived at the island with a couple of dozen people, casually elegant, the men in light-colored suits, the women in summer dresses, everyone delightfully amused to be in such a charming, rustic environment. Ruth Chapman was there at the dock to greet them, along with two waiters carrying trays with glasses of what Ben knew was champagne because he had hauled up the cases.
Over the next hour, boats arrived, bearing more guests. Ben couldn’t understand why the boats tied up next to one another, all on one side of the dock, until the reason appeared at five, when the yacht arrived: a small steamer, maybe forty feet long with an ornate wooden cabin lined with windows perched on its deck, gliding sedately to the free side of the dock. A couple emerged, and Ruth Chapman curtsied, which meant the guy must be the governor general. Ben couldn’t make out much from the distance. A middle-aged man in a white suit, a woman in a yellow dress. Who cares? Ben glowered to himself, loitering around the side of the house so Ruth Chapman wouldn’t see him if she looked over. It was no big deal. Who was the governor general anyway? It wasn’t like he was real royalty or anything.
The Landing Page 8