* * *
The next day, Stirling went out without telling anybody where he was going, and neither Mom nor Dad called after him to explain himself. Mom didn’t talk much. I could see from her face that she was bursting with recent events and I knew all I had to do was chip away, chip away, and soon I’d have the whole story. All morning, I kept saying things like, “Stirling didn’t look too happy when he went out,” and “Dad is sure quiet downstairs,” my voice calm and detached, as if I didn’t really care.
What I finally got out of her was this: Every time Stirling went over to Bonita’s to cut the grass, she went upstairs to her room, which overlooked the backyard. She took off her clothes and stood at the window bare naked until Stirling looked up and noticed her. After this happened a few times, Stirling got the idea that Bonita wanted him up there with her, so he slipped into the house through the back door. Mom didn’t know the exact circumstances of Mrs. Connor’s discovery of Stirling and Bonita: whether she found them after returning from the liquor store in a taxi and, seeing the lawn mower idle in the yard, traced Stirling to Bonita’s room; or whether she heard something suspicious from upstairs while she was watching television and decided to investigate.
The longer I thought about it the easier it was for me to picture Stirling out in the August sun, bare-chested, pushing the mower around the lawn in smaller and smaller squares, at some point looking up, perhaps when he made a pivot, thinking the first time he noticed Bonita in the window that he had sunstroke, wiping the sweat out of his eyes and looking again. It did not stretch my imagination to think of Bonita standing in the window, her body, white as a slug, pressed against the screen, her breasts like small, firm, ripening apples, maybe her triangle showing too, above the windowsill, a thin and catlike smile on her face, and her mother downstairs with the television going full blast.
The day after the beating I didn’t want to speak to Dad. I felt so ashamed of what he’d done to Stirling. And he might have been thinking himself that he’d gone too far because he went out before lunch in the car and Mom and I had to eat alone. During dessert, I said to her, “Dad hides his whisky bottle in the coal bin. He said you’d never look there.”
Luckily, Dad never knew I told because that afternoon the coal man came. It was the first of September. Mom went down and opened the cellar window so that the man could fit the chute in. She put cloths over the heating vents upstairs, so that when the coal came thundering into the basement and a cloud of oily black dust boiled up and settled like ink over everything, including Dad’s drawings, it did not ascend into the rooms upstairs.
After Mom let out the whole story about Stirling and Bonita, she looked relieved and guilty and she said to me, as though it was my fault she’d told, “I’m just telling you because I want you to realize what happens to girls like Bonita. You stay away from her.”
* * *
But even if I’d wanted to stay friends with Bonita, I couldn’t have because that fall at school she started to run with a wild gang that was loud and rebellious. They shouted in the halls and shoved each other and skipped classes in the middle of the day to go downtown and sit in the Metropolitan store smoking and drinking coffee. I wondered what Mr. Connor thought of that. Soon we heard that Bonita had gotten herself pregnant.
That fall, a change came over Stirling too. He went outside after supper to join the other boys on the street, grouped under a lamppost, laughing and smoking and avoiding homework, until long after the leaf rakers had gone inside and darkness had fallen.
Mom worried about Stirling out there. “Tell him to come in, Farrel,” she said, but Dad told her, “Stirling’s going to do what he’s going to do. We can’t stop him,” and Mom sat in the kitchen and drew circles on the table.
It was as though the beating Stirling got from Dad was an initiation, a rite of passage, a coming-of-age, setting him free from Dad’s power. I envied Stirling his newfound liberty, his deliverance from something I did not yet understand. I could not help but feel that the important events of the summer had somehow passed me over. I sensed that the grass-cutting, innocent as it seemed, had only been Stirling biding his time until something happened, some door opened and set him loose. Bonita, with her fruity breasts and enticing hips, with her body luminous and dreamy beyond the screen window, seemed to have been that door. I wondered if she had ever considered me a friend or if I’d been nothing more than a tool in her hands, an agent for her grand plot, a way of getting to Stirling. How gullibly I’d played along, sympathetic to her as she lay in bed on those hot afternoons with one of her headaches manufactured in order to get rid of me so she could display herself to Stirling.
Late in the afternoons when I was coming home from school, I sometimes saw Mr. Connor in his driveway, getting out of his car in one of his quality suits, a tragic and meticulous man. He would raise his hat and say, “Good afternoon, Marie. You are looking well. Fine October day,” but I noticed a sadness and fixity in his smile, and when he turned and walked to the house his step was slower and less buoyant than before. I believed that he must have known, back on that day when Bonita threw the sunglasses across the yard, that the incidents of the summer and fall were going to unfold the way they did but he was helpless to stop them. It amazed me that such a tall, broad-shouldered man could be so powerless.
Sometimes in my dreams the image of Stirling’s back, with its pattern of raised welts and blisters, flew up in my mind. And Dad too may have been haunted by the memory of the beating he gave Stirling. He didn’t go back into the basement for a long time. He picked up a job again at the garage, working as a mechanic. He went back to calling Mom June, instead of speaking to her through me, as he’d done all summer.
One day, I was coming home from school and caught a glimpse of Bonita sitting on her back porch. Cautiously I walked down the driveway to the backyard.
“Bonita?” I said.
She jumped and turned around quickly, her expression not angry, as I’d feared it might be, but relieved.
“Oh, hello, Marie.”
I went and sat beside her on the porch.
“I don’t have any cookies to offer you,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
She wore a loose cotton dress and a thin cardigan sweater, inadequate protection against the October wind. At our backs, the door stood open, Mrs. Connor’s television entertainment drifting out to us through the screen. Bonita’s hand rested on her stomach and I noticed there was an unnatural rise there. I hadn’t seen her at school for a few weeks.
“You heard about my baby?”
“Yes.”
“The whole town knows. Well, I don’t care. What does it matter?”
“Will you stay here?”
“My father wants me to.”
“That’s nice of him, I guess.”
“It’s the least he can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is his baby I got in my belly,” she said. She saw the astonishment on my face. “Whose did you think it was? Stirling’s?”
“I didn’t know. No, I never thought it was Stirling’s. I thought maybe one of your new friends.”
“I should be so lucky,” she said, and laughed bitterly.
Soon after this she ran away.
I wondered where she’d gone and if any of us would, like Bonita, break free of the conventionality of the street. Certainly Mr. and Mrs. Connor would not, nor would my father. And what about me? In revealing where my father’s whisky bottle was hidden, I feared I’d shown my true colours, allied myself with my mother, who sat downstairs in the kitchen, trapped within the endless circles she drew on the table.
Autumn was drawing to a close. In the evenings I sometimes stood in my flannelette nightgown and looked out my window at the knot of boys standing in a cone of blue light. I listened to their explosive laughter and watched the red bonfires smouldering at the curbs, up and down the street.
THE VIEW FROM HERE
I
AT
NINE O’CLOCK in the morning, Dilys carries a sheaf of invoices down to Honora.
“Victor wondered if you could sort these for him,” she says.
Honora is sitting at the hotel reception desk reading the newspaper. It’s her job to answer the telephone, to check people in and out, to handle inquiries and small housekeeping problems raised by guests. However, these days the telephone does not ring very often, there is little traffic in the rooms or on the stairs, for it is the end of October, it is, in fact, Halloween. The tourist season has pretty well wound down, though there will be a flurry of activity at Christmas-time, people escaping from the city, from Toronto mainly, to pass the holiday season here where there is no commercialism, where the climate is temperate, and where they can walk through the simple streets and down to the lake on Christmas Day to look at the cold charcoal water and the strange spectacle of the beach coated with a thin layer of snow, like almond icing on a fruitcake. Already the hotel is booked solid from December 24 to New Year’s.
This morning it is grey and blustery, Honora’s favourite kind of day, when business is slow and she can sit with her mug of coffee in the little reception booth tucked under the stairs halfway down the dim, narrow hallway from the front door. She looks at magazines borrowed from the parlour, writes letters or makes personal telephone calls. Sometimes, as from a physical distance, she pictures herself sitting in the soft yellow wash of light from the little Tiffany lamp on the counter, inhabiting a warm, protected island at the heart of the dark, silent hotel.
“Don’t bother with the invoices if you don’t have time,” says Dilys. Is there a touch of irony in her voice? wonders Honora. Probably. Honora knows that she doesn’t do enough to make it worthwhile for Dilys to keep her on reception, but she doesn’t offer to do any more. She is fifty and she is not interested in working, she has never been interested in working, but she is even less so now. From time to time Honora talks about moving back to the city because she knows it will throw Dilys into a panic. Five years ago, Dilys called Honora and asked her to come down here from Toronto to help out at the hotel. She had heard about Honora’s divorce, she might even have been happy that it had freed Honora up to come to Franklin Bay. Honora and Dilys are cousins. They grew up together in the same wealthy Toronto district of stone houses, vast properties, topiary shrubs, iron fences. There were dozens of cousins in this neighbourhood, all private-schooled, uniformed, spoiled and petulant, but it was Honora that Dilys decided to latch on to.
“I can’t stand being alone here with Victor,” Dilys confessed when she was persuading Honora to come and work for her. “I love him but he bores me out of my mind. He has no sense of humour, no spark. He’s a mole. I need you,” she told Honora. “We’re like sisters.”
Dilys is with Victor because it is important for her to be married at this point in her life; she requires it in order to feel complete. Years ago, she led a wild life in Toronto with her first husband, who makes documentary films about artists, composers, dancers. She invested a good deal of her inheritance in these ventures and lost money. While Dilys was meeting with the bankers, trying to keep the film company afloat, her husband was conducting exhaustive research into a young ballerina. Dilys discovered them in bed together. After the split-up, Dilys was able to salvage something, she got enough money out to buy this small nineteenth-century hotel. She came here to Franklin Bay, a town of less than a thousand people, for a cure. Nobody who knew her was at all surprised. Dilys is a person of extremes, of dramatic swings of behaviour.
Out on the long two-storey porch, with its spindle banisters and curlicue brackets, the bales of hay and wheat sheaves and grape-vine wreaths blow in the wind. Tomorrow, when Halloween is over, Dilys will have these and the pumpkins she herself carved in intricate lace patterns removed. Soon she will be seen at a desk in one of the cozy lounges at either end of the central hall designing the Christmas decorations, inside and out, for the hotel: there will be big velvet bows, fir garlands, pine-cone wreaths, constellations of white lights everywhere.
While Victor has a good business head and is useful to Dilys for keeping the books balanced, it is she who has the style, the flair for décor, for drama and ambiance, that carries the hotel. The velvet wing chairs in the sitting rooms, the wooden decoys and carved pheasants, the gas fireplaces, rich wooden floors, snow shoes, Currier and Ives prints, gilt mirrors, scenic collectors’ plates, lamps made out of antique water pumps were all her idea. In the guest rooms there are no telephones, the walls are pine or brick, the beds high and soft, with plain white coverlets. There is a simplicity to the place that Honora feels has a calculated, self-conscious quality, meant to appeal to big-city ideas of pure country life. For authenticity, Honora’s own taste runs to seedy motels on deserted highways, broken mattresses, mildewed bathtubs.
Every year the hotel turns a bigger and bigger profit. With the exception of Honora, Dilys gets a lot out of her staff. She is not so much a good manager of people as someone who lashes out and pushes and bullies and shouts until she gets what she wants. Also, she has a talent for public relations. She has persuaded noteworthy people, Shakespearean actors, opera singers, broadcasters, to have their weddings here at the hotel, and got the stories covered by the Toronto papers. The hotel has been written up in all the right magazines. Dilys moved here, thinks Honora, because she wanted her own town. And it must be admitted that the hotel put Franklin Bay on the map. Dilys led the way, then other entrepreneurs followed, opening a coffeehouse, a scattering of bed and breakfasts, an English pub, boutiques selling designer T-shirts, native art, silver jewellery, pewter, English woollens, stained glass. People began to retire here, for the mild climate and the quaint shops on York Street with their picket fences and clapboard siding and Georgian windows.
Dilys leans over the counter. Everything about her appearance—the aubergine lipstick, the heavy biscuit face powder, the rhinestone frames of her glasses, the burgundy hair—everything is calculated to shock. She thinks of herself as a work of art, but the effect is not beautiful, it is bizarre, it borders on—well, on the Halloweenish. She is short and heavy and waddles a little when she walks. She has bad feet and must wear low shoes. In the thrust of her bosom, the circumference of her biceps, the span of her hands, the way she stands with her feet firmly planted apart like a heavyweight boxer, there is something solid, something threatening. Dilys is no pushover. She is a force to be reckoned with.
“Victor and I were down on the pier last night,” she says meaningfully.
“Were you?” says Honora without interest.
“We passed your friend’s boat.”
“Oh?”
“The boat was rocking like crazy, Honora,” says Dilys with mild disbelief, a touch breathless. “It was so obvious. People knew what was going on. Those curtains he has aren’t entirely opaque. We could see shapes. We could see figures moving. We might have even heard some moaning.”
“We’re two consenting adults. We were doing it on private property.”
“But, Honora! On the pier!”
“Nobody’s forcing people to stop and look. Or to listen either.”
Dilys sighs resignedly, perhaps a little listlessly. “What’s it like with a younger man?” she asks, her face sagging with thinly disguised envy.
“It’s kinky. It’s like incest. Forbidden fruit.”
“I thought you usually did it at your place. Why pick the boat?”
“Variety is the spice of life.”
“It must be hard to do it in there. In the boat. With so little room. I suppose there’s a bed of sorts, I suppose you do it on the bed.”
“Never! Too dull, too comfortable.”
“Where, then?”
“Sometimes he puts me up on the kitchen counter. He ties my hands behind me, to the faucet. He ties my ankles to the cupboard door handles. He puts a gag over my mouth. He blindfolds me. He starts with whatever instruments are within reach, smooth, fat wooden handles, empty beer bottles, a turkey baster, penetrating,
teasing me until I’m nearly crazy.” Honora is embellishing now because she knows Dilys wants it, needs it. “And the rocking, the rocking of the boat. It drives you mad. Things build quickly, with the motion. It’s like riding a roller coaster with nothing on. It’s like sitting naked on a magnificent, slowly galloping steed. Dilys, you just don’t know.”
Dilys presses her lips together for control, pulls on her trench coat, picks up her purse and keys. This morning she is making a trip up the lake to Goderich, where she is having a revised brochure printed up, with next summer’s rates and new menus for the hotel dining room.
“Victor is feeling punky today,” she confides in Honora. “He’s more depressed than usual. He needs some sort of pick-me-up. Slip up and comfort him for a minute if you get the chance.”
“I don’t know if I’ll have time. I have these invoices to sort.”
“Oh, forget the invoices. It’s bound to be slow at the desk today. Take a moment or two. I’ll be gone all morning.”
Honora knows what Dilys is talking about. Isn’t Dilys always thrusting Honora and Victor together? Doesn’t she put them in positions where there are opportunities for mischief, for compromise? She is always testing Honora. She is testing Victor. Placing them in such tableaux must give her a feeling of power. At the same time, she does not believe Honora would ever take advantage of such moments. She relies on Honora’s loyalty, on her friendship.
Victor’s office is on the second floor of the hotel. Sometimes his door is locked in the daytime. Dilys and Honora believe Victor masturbates up there. Dilys doesn’t care what he does to himself. That’s his business, she says. She finds Victor’s sexual needs childish and pathetic. She has told him she won’t have sex with him any more. Honora knows all of this because Dilys tells her everything. She talks about Victor as though he were a child and she a mother confiding her problems to another mother. She talks about him with much the same reckless candour and wounded pride with which Honora talks about her daughter, Rachel, who has recently followed Honora to Franklin Bay. Honora and Dilys have told each other too much in their lifetimes, so much that they could never afford to terminate their friendship. It would be dangerous, incriminating. There is a great deal at stake.
Object of Your Love Page 16