“He must have been having a nervous breakdown, or something,” said Nell. “To be so – so unprofessional.” And malevolent, she felt like adding. It was Tig’s opinion that Dr. Hobbs had been doing secret drug experiments for the CIA, an idea that had seemed far-fetched, at the time.
“Well, he’s fucked up my life,” said Lizzie grimly. “I’ve lost a big chunk of it. What an asshole!”
“Not that much,” said Nell soothingly. She meant the big chunk of life.
“Fine for you to say,” said Lizzie. “You weren’t there.”
It was decided that Lizzie would stay on at the farm until some plan could be formulated. For one thing, she didn’t have any money. It was too late for her to go back to school this year, as she’d intended doing before the catastrophe of Dr. Hobbs.
She was seeing her new doctor once a week. The subject was family issues. She went for long walks around the farm, and dug vigorous holes in the garden. She wasn’t saying much to Tig and Nell, though she made friends with Gladys. She didn’t ride her, but she would run around in the barnyard with her, the cows moving aside to let them past, the sheep following behind. Her lassitude of the summer had been replaced by a ferocious energy.
Nell, who was now swelling visibly, watched through the window, a little envious: she wouldn’t be able to gallop around like that for a while. Then she went back to kneading the bread, letting herself settle into the soft curves, the soothing warmth, the peaceful rhythm. She thought they were all out of danger now; she thought Lizzie was.
Then, one crisp October night, Lizzie attached the vacuum cleaner hose to the exhaust pipe of the car, ran it in through the window, and turned on the motor.
Tig heard the motor running and went outside. By the time he got to her, he said, Lizzie had turned the motor off and was just sitting there. He said this was a good sign. He’d had to wake Nell up to tell her this. How could she have been asleep at such a time?
After getting herself under control, Nell came downstairs in her nightgown, with an old sweater of Tig’s thrown on top of it. She felt cold all over. Her teeth were chattering.
By then Lizzie and Tig were sitting at the kitchen table having hot chocolate. “Why did you do that?” Nell said to Lizzie, once she could speak. She was trembling with fright, and with what she would much later come to discover had been rage.
“I don’t want to discuss it,” said Lizzie.
“No. I mean, why did you do that, to me?”
“You’d cope with it,” said Lizzie. “You cope with everything.”
It wasn’t the same night that Gladys ran away, but Nell remembers it as the same night. She can’t seem to separate the two events. She remembers Howl barking, though it’s unlikely he would have done anything so appropriate. She also remembers a full moon – a chilly, white, autumnal moon – another atmospheric detail she herself may well have supplied. But a full moon would have been fitting, because animals are more active then.
It was the cows who’d set the tragedy in motion, on one of their periodic jailbreaks. They’d got the fence down again and had taken off for the nearest herd of other cows. Gladys, on the other hand, had made for the paved highway two miles away. She must have been bored with her little kingdom, she must have been tired of ruling over the sheep. Also, Nell hadn’t been paying enough attention to her. She’d wanted an adventure.
She was hit by a car and killed. The driver had been drinking, and was going fast. It must have been a shock to him to have flown over the top of the hill and seen a white horse standing right in front of him, lit up by the moonlight. He himself was only shaken, but his car was a mess.
Nell felt terrible about Gladys. She felt guilty and sad. But she didn’t want to indulge these feelings because they would cause upsetting chemicals to circulate through her bloodstream, and that might affect the baby. She listened to a lot of Mozart string quartets in an attempt to stay cheerful.
The next fall she planted a patch of daffodils at the front of the property, in memory of Gladys. The daffodils came up every year, and grew well, and spread.
They are still there. Nell knows that, because she drove past the farm a few years ago just to see it again. When was that, exactly? Shortly after Lizzie got married, and went in for home cooking, and gave up sorrow. Whenever it was, it was in the spring, and there were the daffodils, hundreds of them by now.
The farmhouse itself had lost its ramshackle appearance. It looked serene and welcoming, and somewhat suburban. Laundry no longer flapped between the apple trees. The rusting farm machinery had gone. The siding on the house had been freshly painted, a fashionable colour of pioneer blue. On either side of the front door was a planter with a shrub in it – rhododendrons, thought Nell. Whoever was living there now preferred things tidier.
The Entities
Lillie was a real-estate agent, though she was hardly the image of one. There was nothing sharp-edged or chic or brisk about her, and she was twenty years older than the oldest real-estate agent that she herself had met. Her car – a white car, a Ford sedan, always impeccably clean – was not a recent model. She drove it cautiously, peering over the top of the steering wheel like someone in a tank turret.
She was getting plump, and her feet were beginning to hurt; she wheezed a little going up and down stairs. Despite these hindrances, she went up and down the stairs of every house she showed. “Feh,” she’d say, sidestepping down to the basement. “Don’t look, it’s just their laundry. The furnace – you can get new. You’ll redo the wiring, we’ll get a couple thousand off the price minimum, at least it’s dry.” She’d clamber up the stairs to the attic, pausing to breathe, and to inspect the cracks in the plaster. “You’ll put in a skylight, you’ll knock out the walls, listen, it’ll be a space. Don’t look in there, it’s junk. The wallpaper – it’s only wallpaper, you know what I mean?”
She’d say, “The way some peoples live – like pigs! These are not nice peoples. But you’ll make it new – a different house, you wouldn’t recognize it!” She believed this – that with a little effort and a lot of faith a pig pen could be transformed into something wonderful, or at least something habitable. Something a lot better than it had been before.
She specialized in smaller houses on neglected streets, downtown – old Victorian row houses or dark, narrow semi-detached brick boxes, owned by Portuguese families who’d stuck wrought-iron porch railings onto them, and before that by Russians or Hungarians, and before that by who knows? These neighbourhoods were stopovers – people lived in them right after they got off the boat, before they made good and moved on. That was the way it had been once. Now, young couples were seeking out such places – such cheap places. Artistic people were seeking them out.
Such people – Lillie said pipples – such people needed someone to take them by the hand, help them buy at a decent price, because they weren’t practical, they didn’t know from furnaces, the sellers would take advantage. Lillie would haggle the price down even though it made her own commission smaller, because what was money? When the deal was signed she’d present the young artists with a celebration gift, a bowl filled with cookies she’d made herself – hard, beige, European cookies – and then she would follow the transformation of the house as the artistic youngsters set to work. These people had such energy, they had their own ideas; it was a joy to watch them ripping off the dour wallpaper and doing away with the mildew and the lingering smells and stains of the past and then building something else – a studio, they would always need such a thing, if there was a garage they’d use that – and then painting the walls, not the colours she herself would have chosen, often a little startling, but she liked surprises of a certain kind. Good surprises. “You never know,” she’d say. Such a pleasure.
Not that she herself would have taken on a house like that. Such houses were too cramped, too dim, too old. She had a modern house, farther north, with big light-filled windows and a collection of pastel-tinted china figurines, and a wide driveway.
/> Lillie had come to the real-estate business late in life. Long ago she’d been a young girl, and then she’d married, a fine man, and then she’d had a baby; all of that was in another time, on the other side of the ocean. But after that came the Nazis, and she’d been put into a camp and her husband had been put into a different one, and the baby was lost and never found again. But Lillie had made it through, not like most, and miraculously she’d located her husband after the war was over, he’d made it through as well, it was a blessing; and after that they’d had two more babies, and then they’d moved to Canada, to Toronto, where a person did not have to be reminded. Such a name for a city, Toronto – it had an Italian sound, though it wasn’t an Italian word at all, and the winters could be long; but a person could get used to it, and Lillie had.
The babies grew up, they were fine children, you couldn’t ask for better, they spoiled her, and then the husband died. Lillie didn’t speak of him, but she kept his suits in the closet; she couldn’t bear to give them away. Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing. Similarly she did not speak of the camp she’d been put into, nor of the lost baby. Why speak? What difference would it make? Who’d want to hear? Anyway she’d been luckier than most. She’d been so lucky.
She encouraged her young couples, and listened to their problems, and cheered them up and told them who to call when they got downcast about clogged drains or dry rot or carpenter ants, and protected them from faulty wiring. She took an interest in their children, if any, and their divorces, if any. She kept in touch. When it was time for them to sell and buy something else – move up the ladder, get maybe a bigger studio – she was always the person they consulted.
She wouldn’t go to the house-warming parties, though. She couldn’t manage parties. They made her feel sad. She’d send her bowl of cookies, with a nice note on flowered notepaper. They deserved such a house, she would write. They were good people. They should enjoy it. She was happy for them. She wished them well.
When Nell and Tig were planning to move in from the country, they inherited Lillie from a friend. Lillie got passed around from one youngish couple to the next. “She won’t try to sell you anything you can’t afford,” was the word. “You can tell her exactly what you want. She’ll get the idea.”
At their first meeting, Nell found herself running off at the mouth to Lillie. It was Lillie’s pleasant face, her air of reassurance. Much as they’d loved the farm, Nell said, generalizing slightly, they really needed to move, it was time, they’d been there too long, things had changed, the old families had gone, all the people they knew. Here Lillie nodded. Not only that, but there’d been too many break-ins, a house almost across the road – a retired schoolteacher – had been totally cleaned out by two men with a moving van. You couldn’t feel safe.
“These are not nice peoples,” said Lillie.
“They watch your house,” said Nell. “They know when you’re away.” And anyway, Nell and Tig had a nearly school-age child who’d have to spend two hours on a bus every day, and anyway the house was dark somehow, the locals said it was haunted, not that Nell personally had ever seen anything but there was a feeling, and anyway it was cold in winter, it was a hundred and fifty years old, it had never been properly insulated, snow piled up on the driveway.
“This you don’t need,” said Lillie. She had a man shovel her driveway. It was always kept clear. You needed to live in a city to have a man who shovelled.
And Tig hadn’t been as well as he might have been, said Nell. It was the lack of insulation, he got coughs, it had all become too much for Nell, she couldn’t cope. “The cows escape,” she said. “They want to be with other cows. Then if Tig isn’t there, it’s only me.”
Lillie nodded, she understood: a young and busy mother like Nell could not be expected to deal with escaping cows. “You shouldn’t worry,” she said, “we’ll find perfect,” and Nell felt immediately better. Lillie would take care of things.
The housing market was hot right then but Lillie did her best, and Nell and Tig ended up in a fairly good row house near the art gallery, on the edge of Chinatown. The house was already renovated, so it was all right, better than all right under the circumstances, the circumstances being financial: this house was something they could manage. It was quite nice really, except that the cockroaches came in from the houses on either side. Nell put cucumber peels and Borax along the baseboards: there was no point in fumigating, because apart from the toxicity the cockroaches would just seep back in once the effects had worn off.
After a couple of years of that house, Lillie decided it was time for Nell and Tig to move again. “You need bigger,” she told them, and she was right. She sold their house for a good price and shifted them farther north. The orange shag carpeting left over from the 1970s was only carpet, she said, when showing them the house. They shouldn’t look at the plate racks everywhere, those could go, and never mind the light fixtures. There were three fireplaces, a fireplace was not junk, and the walls were solid, the house had spacious that lots of peoples would kill for, and some of the woodwork was original, such details counted for a lot.
Nell and Tig were pleased: now they’d have a back garden, and a basement that was finished – well, half-finished, and the mouldy indoor-outdoor glued to the cement floor could come off – and windows all around: in the row house, the windows were confined to the front and the back. On the day the deal closed, Lillie gave them a blue and orange bowl full of her own cookies.
When Nell found she had a problem – an unusual problem, she felt – Lillie was the only person she could talk to about it. It was a problem with houses, but it was also a problem with human nature. It wasn’t a thing she could discuss with Tig – he got too anxious, and some of the human nature in question was his. But Lillie must have seen a lot of cellars and attics and human nature in her day. She must know that houses were powerful, that people could get stirred up about them, that they could bring out feelings you wouldn’t expect. Nothing Nell could tell her would shock or dismay her: she’d seen it all – surely – before. Or something like it. Or worse.
Nell asked Lillie over to tea. Tea was about the only thing in the form of eats and drinks that Lillie could be persuaded to share: she would never come to dinner. Nell served up some of Lillie’s severe cookies – they kept almost indefinitely – to show that she appreciated them; which she did, though not as cookies, exactly.
Nell and Lillie had their tea in Nell’s recently acquired kitchen. “Such a view,” said Lillie, gazing out over the back garden.
Nell agreed. For both of them it was a view of the future: there was nothing in the garden at present except some wispy grass, a corrugated tin shed, and a number of holes in the ground. The people before – they of the plate racks and shag carpets – had had a dog. But Nell planned great things – daffodils, anyway – when she could get around to it. One of her New Age friends who did feng shui and sageing had gone over the garden, and the house as well, with a view to orientation and psychic entities, and had pronounced the place benign, especially the garden, so Nell had no doubt that things could be made to flourish there.
“I thought maybe some daffodils,” said Nell.
“Daffodils are good,” said Lillie.
“To begin with,” said Nell.
Lillie dipped her cookie into her tea. Aha, thought Nell, that’s what you’re supposed to do with them. “So,” said Lillie, glancing at Nell obliquely, raising her eyebrows. That meant: You didn’t ask me here to look at a field.
“Oona wants a house,” Nell said.
“Lots of peoples want a house,” said Lillie placidly.
“But this is Oona.”
“So?” said Lillie. She knew who Oona was: she was Tig’s first wife. First wives, second wives – an old story.
“She wants me to buy the house, so she can live in it.”
“Not out loud,” said Nell. “Not to me. But I know.”
Lillie took another cookie and dipped it into her tea, and settled herself to listen.
The fact was that Oona was falling apart, said Nell. When they’d first met, Oona had been a force. Not only had she been attractive – in a voluptuous way, Nell thought to herself, with disapproval – but she’d had a strong will and strong opinions and the determination to get what she wanted. Or that had been what most people were allowed to see. True, she’d fall into depressions, but during those times she went to bed, so people didn’t see this side of Oona. They saw only the bright, steady, somewhat mocking face she turned outward. She was known for her efficiency, for being up to challenges, for getting things done. She worked as a manager. She was employed by small concerns – small magazines, small theatre companies – small, failing magazines and theatre companies – and she rearranged their systems and whipped them into shape.
When Tig had moved out, their wider circle had been surprised. Everything had seemed so calm. It was well known that the two of them had had an understanding, and that Oona in particular had gone through a series of male companions, but the situation itself had appeared stable. The rage – valid on both sides, Nell added fairly, because it always takes two, doesn’t it? – that rage had been buried; but like so many buried things it had refused to stay under the ground forever.
After the breakup, Oona spread a message of contentment. She was the one who’d asked Tig to leave: it seemed better that way. The children were fine; they would spend weekends and vacations with Tig, in the country. She herself had needed more freedom from constriction, more space, more time to herself. More scope. That was the word from Oona, for the first year.
Moral Disorder Page 16