Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Happiness would dominate, and material comfort — he would weave both in. The priest, smitten when Felicity’s lamplight fell on that face, would have a brother in Immigration who would wave official wands. Experts would offer favourable testimony. Although unspeakable things had been done to the woman (the doctor would undoubtedly reveal this), she had been blameless throughout, virginal in spirit; she would recover. Wise men from the upper reaches of government would offer gifts that would include a work permit. Certainly she would not be deported. New language would come to her, French and English both, and at nursing school she would win gold medals. A doctor, bewitched, would worship from far and then near, showering her with many Catholic children and a gabled house with backyard barbecue and wall-to-wall plush, the deepest velvet kind, top of the line in the Sears catalogue. There would be a silk dress for every rip in her shapeless black tent. Her son would become a Supreme Court judge or possibly Prime Minister, one of her daughters would become a nun, and the rest would marry well. On the living-room mantel of her later years there would be a row of framed portraits — the granddaughters in First Communion dresses that took the breath away, so fragile with lace and purity. And when, after a full rich life, La Magdalena died, the flowers would come in truckloads, a whole city in the cortège, tributes to immigrant success in the True North strong and free, requiem masses in Latin and French and English, her grandchildren rising up to call her memory blessed.

  Gus saw that the life he had given her was a good one and he was pleased with himself. He rested after his labours. It was absorbing work, though strangely tiring. A virtuous lassitude swamped him, an earned drowsiness — like the pleasure of a beer in the shade after the lawn is mowed. Or like watching the Sunday afternoon game when all the ladder work and cleaning is done, the storm windows snugly in place for the winter, his bruised fingers a badge of merit that even Therese would honour.

  It was also possible that Felicity’s wine had something to do with his state of ineffable peace.

  And so he coasted along, grateful that La Magdalena’s life had gone so well. On high beam his lights picked out the phosphorescent letters of the Au Revoir sign. Vous partez … it reminded him, and he flashed past it into English-speaking territory. Bye-bye, Marthe, he called over his shoulder to the sister-in-law who would speak to him in English even more rarely than he would accompany Therese and the girls on visits to the Montreal relatives. Au revoir to all that, the Quebec border dwindled in his rearview mirror. This was the country he loved, this was the ribbon of highway that reeled him back every time, God knew why, to Winston-on-the-lake, Winston-at-the-edge-of-the-world.

  Where? fellow salesmen would ask, convention-jovial, in the lavish hotel lounges of New York. And why? they would demand, though not all of them plied such great cities as their teasing suggested. Some indeed came from even smaller and obscurely named townlets in remote upstate reaches, but they knew that everywhere south of the border was Significant Geography. Confident at the hub of the world, they would marvel at Canadians, affectionately incredulous, mocking: Do you insure against death by snow-job, then? How’s business among the Eskimos? Heard the one about the moose who got snow-goosed? You couldn’t help liking Americans, they were so guilelessly predictable.

  Gus laughed into the jaws of the wind. It was screaming off the Great Lakes at such a pace that his Chevy bounced along like an early experiment of the Wright Brothers. And the granite outcrops, snouting out from their veneer of coarse soil and tormented pines, laughed with him, a long laugh that stretched all the way north through empty rock meadows to Hudson Bay. He sang an old army song at the top of his lungs:

  Gee, mom, I want to go

  Back to Ontari-o

  Gee, mom, I want to go

  Ho-o-ome.

  Mostly he did not quite believe he had not grown out of this rock. He had a secret version of his history that he always looked at after a few drinks: once a seed fell like a pine cone and lodged in a pocket of snow. And the green shoot of Augustine Kelly came forth, blossoming into a Sunday altar boy and a weekday terror at school, until it came to pass that he bumped into his fourteenth year and his teachers and spiritual mentors had had enough. To work, they said, it will straighten you out, since school is achieving nothing. He got a job washing dishes at Joe’s Grill.

  Currents passed through him in those years, his sap gave off blue sparks, his stamens crackled, the pistils of clover and young girls and lonely widows gave off a scorching smell that singed him as he passed. His father died of whiskey, leaving nothing but debts.

  At the wake his mother moved between the lilies and spoke to Father Dougherty. “Augustine’s going the way of his father already,” she grieved. And Father Dougherty spoke to the faithful, murmuring here and there of obligations. A conference was held and Gus rose in the world. On condition that he attend Mass every Sunday he could graduate to washing dishes, and eventually to waiting tables, in one of the grand old hotels on the lake.

  Gus turned off the 401 so that he could drive in along the lakeshore. He loved this view of Winston. Now, as thirty years ago, it lay below him tricked out in night lights: the lake pinching itself into the St Lawrence River, the causeway, the limestone domes and spires, the old fort. He crossed the causeway and coasted by the hotel where he had waited tables for so many years. He remembered the summer when the pert young French-Canadian waitress joined the staff so that she could practise her English. The walks along the lakeshore with Therese. Memories, memories.

  Ah, the elegant dinners in the fine old hotels of Winston.

  Inhale. And they were still in the air: the emanations of damask and starch, the roast beef, the port wine, his fascination and nostalgia and alienation, the same old blend, the smell of unbreachable distances. Even now the Gus Kellys of the world only entered this section of town to scrape plates and clear tables. It was still, in its way, a fort.

  Not that it mattered particularly.

  Augustine Kelly had no aspirations to move in on history. A cramped place. No room for barbecues or swimming pools or stands of pine. Or even for driveways, with people owning only one side of a wall.

  He drove on.

  Out of the eighteenth-century enclave. Past the three-tiered nineteenth-century brick (dripping with a lace of pigeon leavings; eaves trough jostling eaves trough, wooden porches slumping softly with rot). Past the shopping centre where the long strip of upper-case energy began: Hamburgers to Go! Jock’s for Used Cars — Will not be Undersold! Furniture City! Be Cool — Add a Pool! Beyond the flashing lights. Beyond the neat new houses with their L-shaped living rooms. Beyond roads that were curbed, to where the fences petered out. To where the edges of the town turned fuzzy on the map or ribboned out along highways. To where the properties heaved themselves nonchalantly around vague surveyors’ markers, pleated themselves between one winterlock and the next thaw, and went slipping wetly away like lovers compliant under rampant pines. To where three centuries of settlers’ events, brief flecks of commentary, were barely noticeable in the expansive statement of prehistory.

  His lights picked out Therese’s car in the drive, its rust holes cruelly visible, the bodywork a cascade of metal lace. By Christmas, or thereabouts, he would wave his wand and lo the Volkswagen, ugly duckling, would be a swan of a Corvette. To Therese with love. He would tie an enormous red ribbon around the entire car. And the keys? In her Christmas pudding, perhaps, the happy chink of her spoon discovering them …

  He cut the engine so as not to wake the girls. Doused his lights. Therese would be waiting in their warm bed. In the kitchen he bumped into something and leaned on it for a while. It was very late, he was very tired, it was difficult to stay upright. There was a strange, sharply sweet smell, and vague stirrings of sound. Night creatures. For some reason he did not want to turn on the light. This innocence he was bringing Therese, this return that was free of any other woman’s mist, and these new sips of power and a different future — they were delicate growths. He was reluctan
t to subject them to harshness. The hundred-watt bulb, in his experience, was not a great sustainer of newly germinated hope.

  It was very penetrating, the smell, very puzzling.

  Therese would be wearing the soft blue nightgown he had given her for her birthday. Blue for come unto me. The colour of welcome, of dew, of lips moistly parted. When he took her in his arms … He steadied himself against the wall for a moment and concentrated. What had the speaker at the conference called it? Self-scripting, that was it. He wrote the coming scene: when he took her in his arms …

  He stepped on something soft and violent. Cat. There was the sound of a maddened bull-violin in full rut. Claws in his ankle.

  He bit his lips on the cry of pain, but could feel something escaping, his euphoria hissing out through the bloodied pinpricks in his leg like air from a punctured tyre. He clasped his hands together, squeezing till the knuckles glowed whitish in the dark. Trying to hold the hopefulness in.

  Light assaulted him and he flung his arms up, resisting it.

  “Ah, mon Dieu,” Therese said. Quietly. Tiredly. With resignation. “You’re drunk again.”

  Something slipped out between his fingers, brushing him, he could feel the soft tickle of it, hear the air sigh. The white dove of his innocence. Gone.

  Across the floor, exposed to the light, gleaming slickly, trailed a short grey rope, a knot, pungently perfumed. A pretzel of cat vomit. Or perhaps — oh surely not? — his own.

  “I’ve got flowers for you,” he said thickly. “In the florist’s.”

  His words swam gamely against some obstruction in his mouth. His tongue was tossed like a lost canoe paddle. Rocks loomed. He had to let her know: I’ll get them first thing in the morning. As soon as the shops open.

  Therese smiled her sad smile.

  Spreadeagled on the bed he could see himself in her eyes: the cross that she bore.

  Sleep claimed him. He paddled its dark river lazily hazily and came to a dream. A loverly cream of a dream. He recognized it. He knew a dream when he saw one. It reached out its finger of light.

  After that it was easy: just a shipping of his paddle, a waiting, a momentum of the current. He was borne on a stream to the heart of the cream of a dream, where choirs sang and an altar lamp burned. And where she lay golden on straw, the woman of all desire. Her face pierced him, so untouchably beautiful. His fingers wept.

  “You may stroke my cheek,” she said.

  When his fingertips touched, blue fire leaped from his body. All his senses stood on tiptoe. The rents in her black dress sang like mouths: Come to me, come to me, come. Her skin was white as marble, violet-veined. When he spread his body over hers there was a smell of burning. A spasm shook him: desire as conflagration.

  What have you done? sang the choirboys, their pure eyes wide with shock.

  And from the antiphonal echoes: What have you done, have you done? It was spreading like flames, an entire congregation singing it, watching him from every niche of the cave, from the side chapels, from the far reaches of the city, the massed spectators demanding: What have you done?

  His hands were black with soot, there was blood on the straw. A stain oozed from his pores, foul-smelling. He looked with horror at his cloven feet.

  And then the cock crew three times, a shrill jangling.

  He leaped awake, sweating whiskey.

  “Hush,” Therese said. “It’s not six yet. Go back to sleep. I’ll answer it.”

  11

  How would it sound?

  “I found a woman half frozen under a side of beef.” Felicity rehearsed variations, and then she thought that she would have a cup of coffee in L’Ascension’s one and only café. After the coffee she would walk the two blocks to St Sauveur and ring the rectory doorbell. It was not so terribly late. She supposed that priests must be used to being summoned at all sorts of odd hours.

  She had once attended Mass at St Sauveur’s. She counted back. Fifteen years ago, her first July at the cottage. And the church visit — not a common event for Seymour — was because of Jean-Marc, who was with them for the summer. Jean-Marc had just arrived the evening before, the reunion was still fresh and untarnished, and Seymour was stirred by an image of himself as a benign family man.

  Not that the morning had gone well.

  “Maman says you’re Protestant,” Jean-Marc announced. He was speaking to Felicity though not looking at her. “You shouldn’t be coming.”

  He was ten years old, and Felicity was eighteen. She did not blame him for hating her.

  “Jean-Marc!” his father said. “That is quite enough.”

  It is possible that between the Gloria and the Agnus Dei, both of which he murmured so angelically, Jean-Marc considered various means of doing away with Felicity. It is certainly probable that Seymour, who did not bother with the responses at all, was taking advantage of the prayers to study profiles. Felicity, as so often happened, was in another time and place, with her father.

  “Here is one view of God,” he had said, as they stood in the missionary chapel from whose pulpit he preached on Sunday mornings. (This of course was before word of “irregularities” reached the Missionary Society.) It was a simple and austere building, whitewashed mud over bamboo, and bare of ornament except for the plain wooden cross on the Communion table. “One perspective. And perhaps not the best one for this part of the world.” They went outside to where the light came at them like a tiger, and a vermilion gash of flowers spilled violently over a wall. “If you see what I mean,” he said.

  “And this is a different perspective, another glimpse,” he explained in the temple, a place of tumult that was a wonder to her, a vast monument to sun and shadow. In the central sun-white courtyard a circus parade turned and turned: elephants, flower sellers, the chanters of the thousand names, the gongs, all the colours of sound. And in the surrounding caverns the long penumbral notes of space, the suggestion of a nothingness more potent than matter.

  “But of course,” her father had said, stroking her hair, “you can’t catch God in any of these nets.”

  “Who liveth and reigneth,” said the priest of St Sauveur in provincial French. “World without end. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Felicity said, and the candles quavered. She heard the sharp intake of breath, the raised eyebrows of the Boston aunts. Really, Felicity! they said. Papists! Another net, another glimpse, Felicity told them, and they pursed their lips. They had rescued her from her past and from her father, not that he could often be mentioned. Sometimes she heard them whispering a litany among themselves; “renegade,” she heard, and “tragic waste”. We do wish, they told Felicity once, that your father hadn’t been so enthusiastic, that he’d settled down into respectable religion.

  “Maman says you’re young enough to be my sister, Jean-Marc muttered viciously after the Mass, while his father was talking to the priest.

  “That’s true,” she said quietly. “Your father and my father were friends. A long time ago.”

  “Your father’s dead. Maman said.”

  The priest came over and put his hand on Jean-Marc’s head. Felicity studied the hand. It was old and weathered, a hand that had mended fences and chipped ice from outdoor pumps and chopped firewood, that had baptized and married and buried. Seymour should draw it, she thought. She waited for its blessing.

  The priest murmured something in Jean-Marc’s ear, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Felicity waited. The priest nodded to her, not quite meeting her eyes, and moved away.

  “Goodbye, Father,” carolled Jean-Marc, triumphantly possessive.

  “Goodbye, Father,” Felicity, wistful, echoed.

  Felicity stirred her coffee. Would the same priest come to the door? Would he recognize her? She would like to please him. (I’ve brought you someone, Father, one of your own.) He might put his hand on her head in benediction.

  But perhaps he would not trust her. Shewas “weekend people”, flitting in and out. She was English-speaking. Perhaps she should discuss it with Jea
n-Marc first. She went to the phone booth and dialled his number. She counted six rings. Then a seventh, just in case. Out. Well of course, on a Friday night.

  Her coffee was nearly cold now. She swallowed it quickly, grimacing. She ordered another and thought: Of course I am procrastinating. She had newspaper clippings in the file Jean-Marc considered morbid, she knew what could happen. The eyes of La Magdalena floated in her coffee like black moons. Like soft discs waiting for crows.

  But a cause, Felicity pleaded with them, is like a boa constrictor. It can take in a whole life at one gulp, the way it took my father’s life.

  The coffee sucked itself into a well around the spoon, La Magdalena flapped her black dress like wings and flew away. I’m sorry, Felicity said; the priest is the best I can manage.

  She paid for her coffee and walked out into the night. Past the bakery where tomorrow’s bread was giving off its warm yeasty fragrance. Past the general store. She averted her face from the butcher’s shop. (There was a sharp smell of blood and fresh guts.) She walked on by several small clapboard houses with window boxes full of geraniums. She trailed her hand along the stone fence of the church of St Sauveur. She came to the rectory, took a deep breath, and rang the bell.

  12

  “I was not altogether surprised,” Father Bolduc told the police, “to find no one at the cottage.”

  The woman, he said (her name was Felicity), must have been in a state of shock, although she had been able to drive with perfect competence and had at first given every impression … but first impressions could be so misleading, and he could smell alcohol. And very soon, even more strongly, he could smell moral torment, which had a very distinctive odour.

  He actually said that to the police. He said it again to me last week, describing that night, and said it without a trace of embarrassment or irony. Such people amaze. I remembered him; he was elderly even when I was a boy; or at least, I had thought of him as elderly back then. A well-meaning old man, but obtuse as only the pure in heart can be.