Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Doris was tired of being above reproach.

  It was not that she had outrageous plans. Not specifically. She did not expect occasions for transgression to flourish in the path of an elderly widow. It was simply that nothing in her life had ever allowed for the errant and indiscreet, and she had a hankering to put herself in the way of temptation. After all, she thought, would St Augustine’s life, or Thomas Merton’s, have meant anything at all without a counterpoint of piquant profligacy?

  She did not, however, want to cause needless distress. Gillian and Geraldine had sufficient to worry about, and she had always put the family first – something deplored often enough by her daughters. Gillian had even given a paper at a conference on this subject; it was subtitled: “Can our fathers be forgiven?” and had discussed the slow debilitation of years of exemplary wifely support of an otherworldly scholar.

  Now that this gentlest and most self-absorbed of pedants had been buried from the university chapel with full academic honours, it was true that Doris felt in some sense free; that she woke each morning to an aura of strangeness, to a part-frightening part-delicious sense of new beginnings. But her freedom seemed to her something at once overwhelmingly sad, quavering with promise, and infinitely private.

  She did not, certainly, want to discuss it. She found her daughters’ litany to past waste oppressive. Such dicta, she saw, sharpened their sense of purpose and made their own quite different brands of unhappiness worthwhile. She felt almost guilty for tampering with sacrosanct traditions, but the more she tried to settle into the role for which they were convinced she was (alas) destined, the more she toyed with startling subversions and new energies.

  So finally she said fretfully: “After a lifetime of kowtowing to your father’s needs, do I have to be bullied by my children and grandchildren?”

  She knew that this was hitting below the belt. Jabbing them in the soft underbelly of their principles.

  Gillian, a psychology professor at a major university, said bravely: “Certainly no one has more of a right to … to be a little eccentric for once. To self-indulge. It’s just that …”

  “If anything happens to you,” Geraldine said lugubriously, “we’ll never forgive ourselves.”

  Geraldine saw terrible things every day in Legal Aid. This did not make for optimism. Doris, who felt contrite because she hadn’t disliked her life nearly as much as she felt she should have for her daughters’ sake, had tried to join Geraldine’s office as a volunteer. She had hoped it would cure her of congenital tranquillity and optimism. But Geraldine wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Mama,” she said. “You’ve paid your dues. I don’t even want you to know about some of what goes on.”

  But Doris was sick and tired of knowing about everything second-hand from books and newspapers and daughters, and when she finally stood on the deck of the cargo boat and waved to them all on the wharf, she had a deep inner certainty that an insurance settlement had never been put to better use.

  Everyone came to the wharf. Gillian and Geraldine, and the four grandchildren, and the five former sons-in-law. Actually, only two of them had been sons-in-law, strictly and legally speaking, but in their various seasons Doris had regarded them all as such. She blew kisses and tossed coloured streamers and generally behaved (as one teenage granddaughter remarked to another) in an embarrassing manner. As the boat pulled away and the first of the streamers dipped soggily into the water, she called down to them: “I’m tough as nails, you know.”

  And her daughters laughed nervously, with tears in their eyes.

  Doris sat at the captain’s table. One of the pleasures of travelling by cargo boat was the intimacy possible between crew and passengers, of whom there were only four when the Lord Dalhousie left the St Lawrence estuary, its belly full of Saskatchewan grain. Doris waited expectantly for salty tales of philandering in foreign ports, but the officers were disappointingly discreet.

  “My little boy,” the captain said, “my second one, the twelve- year-old, he’s doing computers at school already. Astonishing.” He shook his head, not so much in pride, Doris thought, as in bewilderment. “While I was home this time, he showed me a note from his teacher. It said he was ready to be individualised if we’d sign the consent slip. I called the teacher. He said electronic communications is where it’s at, and there’s no question my son can lock into the fast track if he’s individualised now.”

  Everyone pondered this cryptic future in silence.

  “At twelve years of age,” the captain said wonderingly.

  “I hope you had the sense to say no.” Wendell, a passenger, was on assignment for a book. The Organics of Life, commissioned by a New York publisher. “There’s a lot of evidence coming in on the dangers. Not just eye strain and migraines from the video screen. Radiation risks too. I’m serious. They did tests on the programmers for a major corporation. Punching keys eight hours a day, watching that flickering monitor. I’m telling you, people think the exposure is negligible but it’s a lie. A cover-up. I should know, my father’s in Digital. You think he wants to broadcast the dangers? Hah. Those tests would make your hair curl. Eczema, dermatitis, hair loss, way above average infertility, all the early signs. Soon even mid-ocean won’t be safe.”

  “Do you have children, Mrs Mortimer?” the captain asked.

  “Two daughters,” Doris said.

  “How did they – you know – turn out?”

  “Well, one became a lawyer, and the other became a college professor.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” The captain sighed. “I suppose it all works out.” He nodded at her vaguely and smiled, as though she had offered cautious promises and consolation. “It’s a bit like planting squash and getting – I don’t know – getting melons, isn’t it? Of course I’m away for such long stretches. Still” – he raked his fingers through his hair – “I’d planned to take him canoeing. Wilderness trekking, you know? Sort of thing boys are supposed to … but he’s enrolled in computer camp for the summer.”

  “I intend to show,” Wendell announced, “that a simple but physically demanding life is the answer.”

  “The answer for what?” Doris asked.

  “For happiness. For vigour and potency to the very end. For example, look at what you’re all drinking. Madness! If you had any idea what coffee and alcohol, either one of them … how toxic for the system …” He shared his extensive knowledge of herbal teas which cleanse the body without harmful side-effects, rose hip especially, of which he had brought along a six-month supply. They would all notice the benefits within days. “I mean, look at you,” he said to Doris. “Just like my mother. All pallor and soft flesh.”

  “I think Mrs Mortimer is a very attractive lady,” the captain said gallantly.

  Wendell huddled into himself, sulking. “I’m only trying to be helpful. People don’t care what they do to their bodies.”

  Doris saw that, like her daughters, he was pricked constantly by the burden of a proselytising truth. He was so young. All his muscles and nerves were knotted, the guy wires of crusading righteousness. She thought of massaging the back of his neck with her fingers, the way she used to do when her girls were in high school – if they’d just lost a game, say; or if they hadn’t done as well as expected in an exam.

  Instead she raised her coffee mug to the captain by way of thanks for his support. She also agreed to do yoga on deck with Wendell every morning. She found it difficult to shed the habit of instinctive peace-making.

  “You should be more assertive,” the twins asserted. Or rather, Pam said this, and Pat said: “Pam’s right, you know, Doris. You shouldn’t let Wendell push you around.”

  The twins were supposed to be spending the year apart. Their parents, their teachers, and sundry therapists all insisted it was necessary. So Pam had been sent to college in New York and Pat had been packed off to Vermont. But now, as they joked, they were eloping. T
hey had sent a ship’s cable to their parents as soon as North America dipped safely below the horizon.

  “Just so they won’t panic,” Pam said.

  “And partly,” Pat admitted, “to make them sorry for what they did.”

  “You have to follow your own star, Doris,” Pam said. “You shouldn’t take up yoga just to please Wendell.”

  “But I’m happy,” Doris said, “for the chance to experience something quite new and different.”

  * * *

  By the time they reached the Azores, Doris had mastered two or three elementary yogic contortions and had decided that the lotus position was as inaccessible as her own youth. This Wendell hotly denied.

  “It’s all in your mindset,” he told her. “You’re rigid through and through, you’re the essence of rigidity. If you think limits, there’ll be limits.”

  “You know, Wendell,” Doris said mildly, as they watched the on-loading of citrus fruits, “I have been your age, but you haven’t been mine.”

  “Just like my mother,” he fumed. “A closed mind. You know it all, don’t you? Can’t tell you anything.”

  At Lisbon a cable awaited the twins. We love you, it said. Come home and we’ll work something out.

  “Hah!” Pam sniffed. “I’ll bet. I can just see that therapist leaning over their shoulders and dictating.”

  “I don’t think they’ve suffered enough yet,” Pat agreed.

  They sent a reply: Hitch-hiking across Europe. Will communicate from time to time. Don’t worry, everything fine.

  “And stop letting Wendell bully you,” they said to Doris in farewell. “He’s such a wimp.”

  They set out for the Pyrenees with backpacks, while the Lord Dalhousie off-loaded the Azorean oranges and half of its Canadian grain, and took on a cargo of wine and iron ore.

  Doris admired the sheen of sweat on bare muscles. She wondered which of the dock workers beat their wives and which ones took home flowers on occasional impulse. She amused herself by speculating on the ones who might have ended up in Geraldine’s Legal Aid office, and the ones who might have passed through Gillian’s classes – if she and her family had lived in Portugal. But then of course the girls would have had different names and a different sort of education and different expectations. They wouldn’t have been able to get divorces and perhaps wouldn’t have wanted to.

  She watched some old women moving along the docks as they sold fish from wicker baskets, and thought: And I would have been wearing black for the remainder of my life.

  * * *

  In Morocco, declining Wendell’s offer of himself as chaperon, she went ashore and wandered through the bazaar alone.

  “You’ll be sorry,” Wendell warned. “But of course, you can’t let go the reins for a moment, can you? Don’t blame me if something happens.”

  Doris felt that she would rather like something to happen.

  In the bazaar, she was the only woman who was not moving inside a private and portable tent. It’s like a loose shroud, she thought. Perhaps they are buried in it, a garment for all purposes. She could feel male eyes like a film of sweat on her skin. It was strange to be a sexual object at the age of sixty-five. Perhaps it was the way she was dressed – in white linen pants and a long-sleeved white cotton blouse. The outfit had not seemed at all provocative when she packed it.

  Smells assaulted her. Camel dung, exotic flowers, rotting vegetables, incense. She felt a quirky elation, and smiled into the startled faces of men. They did not respond. She might have been from the moon, a thought that pleased her. With a sandalled toe, she doodled yes in the virgin soil of new experience.

  She stopped at an orange-seller’s booth. Five, please, she indicated with her fingers, and offered a handful of coins. The merchant took all of her money without comment or expression – by which she knew she had offered more than was necessary – and handed her the oranges. A dilemma. She had expected to receive them in some sort of bag, and the extent of her pampered middle-class Western ignorance embarrassed her. She felt obscurely guilty.

  It was difficult to carry five oranges without a container. Only two would fit in her handbag. She made a gesture of wry self- deprecation and handed three oranges back to the merchant. She smiled, as one human being to another, acknowledging the foibles of the species.

  He turned his head away and spat forcefully on the ground between two of his wicker baskets. Her eyes widened in surprise and for a few seconds she remained motionless, staring at him. He spat again, this time close to her feet, and raised his right arm to cover his eyes. Warding off an evil presence.

  She turned and walked on, under the shade of tamarind trees.

  Stares. It was like a brushing of cobwebs, a sensation of being touched, molested, by something physically insubstantial yet malevolent. The whole world was staring. Young men, slimhipped, the age of her eldest grandson – and of Wendell – stood in groups and pointed. How odd to be watched so intently by such green and blooming youths. She tried to savour the experience, to roll its irony around in her mind, to inhale its bouquet. But it was not the kind of staring that made one feel desirable.

  She stopped and looked defiantly at a whispering group. Directly into their eyes. She would shame them, she would appeal to basic decency. But they did not lower their eyes or give any sign of being disconcerted. Some of them laughed lewdly. Was it possible that an old woman could be deemed to have loose morals because her face was unveiled?

  I suppose they would be scandalised, she thought, to know that I am a mother and a grandmother.

  It was late in the afternoon – when her feet were aching, her eyes felt scratched with grit, and red dust clung to her like a fine shawl – that she saw Wendell in an alleyway between market stalls. He was engaged in some negotiation with a boy who might have been sixteen or seventeen. The boy’s dark curls and face were so beautiful that in any other country Doris would have assumed he was a girl. Fascinated by the androgynous perfection, she stood watching and admiring, and it was several minutes before she realised the nature of the business transaction taking place. Too late. As she turned to go, Wendell sensed a presence and saw her.

  She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness, of innocence of intention. Just an unlucky accident, she telegraphed silently. And in any case, it makes no difference to me. Who am I to make judgments?

  She understood, nevertheless, that he had legitimate grounds for hating her at that moment.

  She could feel a blush of sorrow on her cheeks. Wendell gave her a look of pure savagery and stormed off between the ragged awnings. And the Arab boy, his deal in ruins, spat in her direction. If I had agreed to Wendell’s company? she wondered. She walked slowly back to the wharf, her feet dragging.

  Always the same cargoes, she thought wearily, sitting on a crate near a bevy of small fishing boats and peeling one of her oranges. Port after port, the same baggage.

  “Well?” Wendell demanded bitterly, materialising behind her. “Satisfied? Not just a food crank, but a pervert too. Who can blame my mother for giving up on me?”

  “These oranges are delicious,” she said, offering one. “Better than anything we get at home. Just taste.”

  “Hah. The ostrich strategy. My mother uses it all the time. Hide your head in the sand and the problem will go away. Pretend I’m out with girls and I’ll turn out straight in the end.”

  “Oh Wendell. We all manage as best we can. You, me, your mother. Why don’t you sit down here and watch the fishermen with me?”

  He scowled, but sat down on the dock and leaned against her crate. “I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Of course not. There’s no need.”

  Without being aware of it, she began to knead the muscles in the back of his neck, thinking of Gillian and Geraldine. Whenever they came to her mind these days, they came first as fresh-faced little girls. She had to think them up
through time to assemble their faces as they looked now, in the present.

  “It started in high school,” Wendell began.

  Capetown, Daar Es Salaam, Mauritius. She had seen diamonds, gold, cotton, bananas, ferried into the hold and out again. And sailors, she had discovered, really did have a woman in every port. Several women, in fact. Although not, it seemed, the captain, who sent postcards and presents from each stop to wife and children, and especially to the son he had lost in the maze of high technology. Until somewhere – was it Capetown? – when that red sports car drove onto the wharf as the anchors were raised. A young woman got out and waved madly. She had long blonde hair; she had a little boy in her arms. Both were neatly – even expensively – dressed; and such exotic accessories: smiles and tears and smudged mascara, and a fluttering sea-blue scarf as long as the wind.

  Doris glanced along the deck. The sailors were tossing boisterously suggestive jokes to the usual ship followers, but no one was returning the wave of the blonde woman with the child.

  Surreptitiously, Doris studied the captain. He gazed at the spires of the city beyond the wharf, preoccupied; except, she observed, that the index finger of his right hand, which lay innocently on the railing, was raising and lowering itself in a rhythm that might be construed as a coded message of farewell.

  Doris looked at the young woman on the wharf and back at the captain. His gaze did not shift from the spires in the middle distance. The woman waved on, undaunted. The captain’s finger rose and fell.

  “I think,” Doris said finally, “that you should wave back to her properly. Who’s going to mind?”

  The captain flinched. His eyes implied that she had committed a gross impropriety. Nevertheless, a few seconds later, sheepishly, he did wave to the girl on the dock. A laughing sobbing sound floated up to them, and the girl held her little boy high up in her arms as though to receive a benediction.