The figurines do not convey any particular sense of the aunt’s character. You would not imagine any connection between her and these elegant clay children unless you saw them, as Joan did, sitting on a gate-legged oak table in her aunt’s living room, just behind a cut-glass humbug dish. They had been a gift and she’d taken them and incorporated them into her life. That’s what people like her did with gifts. She would not have thought to ask if she could perhaps exchange them for something a little more to her liking. It’s possible that they had not been purchased for her at all but were esteemed family possessions. It’s possible that they had been a gift another time, valued and held in good keeping, and then given again.
Joan has no idea what her aunt recalled when she looked at the figurines. Perhaps her patient had died independently, taking care to keep the biggest part of the task for himself, resisting the need to make demands when no one with a good heart could refuse him. Perhaps there were children who brought her tea after her nap and asked if they could touch her hair. It’s equally possible that she disliked the family. The room they’d assigned to her might have been cold, the blankets rough, the children precociously rude. Although Joan could be angry if she believed her aunt was badly treated, there was no hint one way or the other.
When Joan was young, she saw her Aunt Lottie once a week, every week of every year, when her family picked her up for church on Sunday and delivered her gratefully home again. And she was there with them for Christmas, just off to the side, out of the way in her chair by the buffet, smiling quickly at passing children, running her fingers whenever she could through a thick head of hair, and largely ignoring the kitchen work. She behaved like a guest, a skill Joan has always admired.
Often on Sunday mornings Joan was sent from the back seat of the car to her aunt’s front door to tell her they’d arrived, and sometimes she would be told to sit in the living room for a minute while her aunt searched for mislaid summer gloves or a book she’d promised one of her friends at church, history usually. Joan was always invited to help herself to a humbug and she always did, pulling one sticky piece from the others, replacing the cut-glass lid gingerly, aware of noise and the possibility of shattered glass. Above the figurines, hung high on the wall, high enough to prompt Joan to lift her head to read it, the Serenity Prayer was offered in a framed petit point sampler. The sampler had been a going-away gift from a woman friend on the occasion of the aunt’s leaving Ontario to move out West with her husband and son, when she was young. Perhaps hoping to ensure an easy understanding of the prayer’s power, the friend who had worked the needle had purposefully enlarged each letter of the five main words: GOD, GRACE, SERENITY, COURAGE, WISDOM. Sitting beside the figurines, sucking on a humbug, Joan generously granted an appropriateness to the prayer, because her aunt was old, because she had been weakened.
Her aunt had been widowed early, and Joan doesn’t know how she lived or who took care of her financially, although someone must have. There were no pension plans available then, no big insurance policies on the lives of men who might die young. The husband, John, had had a farm in Ontario, which he’d sold off when they made their move to the West, some time in the late twenties. There was a son, Billy, and Joan thinks she remembers pictures of him, at five or six, wearing short wool pants and good dark shoes, bright looking, with the prairie behind him as a backdrop. But maybe she’s never seen his picture. Perhaps she’s confused him with other boys in short wool pants and good shoes who were placed against a backdrop of crops for their pictures. Billy drowned in the West, in a slough, although Joan knows nothing about the circumstances. She doesn’t know if he was wild and headstrong, forever beyond the reach of his mother’s protective hands, or dreamy and clumsy, given to wandering off and forgetting to come back for his midday meal. She does know they returned to Ontario almost immediately after his drowning. Joan’s father once told her, riding in a car somewhere with his felt hat between them on the seat, that he’d always had a good deal of respect for John, for his determination to go out West and break new ground. He said there wasn’t land enough for third sons at home, that what looked like choice wasn’t always choice. He said when they came back to Ontario, they came pretty much empty-handed and that arrangements had to be made to get them resettled. Joan’s father often conjured up these scattered segments of history, composing as much for himself as for anyone else his own interpretation of distant events, pulling details forward to give the past a present shape. It was like a hobby.
So John did farm again, on somebody’s land. He lived for a while after they went back to Ontario, before Lottie became middle-aged and then old, searching for mislaid summer gloves while the church bells rang all over town and Joan sat in a straightbacked chair eating her humbugs, glancing up occasionally at the Serenity Prayer, touching, more than once, her figurines.
Lottie brought the figurines West, she packed them and brought them with her on the train. The idea was to leave for good, to make a new home. And she took them back to Ontario with her when it was over, although there is not much evidence of movement, Joan can find only two insignificant chips.
Joan was out West herself by the time her aunt was elderly. She went home to Ontario only occasionally, and during one of these visits her father obliquely insisted that she accompany him to the seniors’ home where the aunt lived. Joan didn’t know who had moved her, or how it played out, although her sister-in-law was a volunteer there. Her father, a man of convention and regularity, continued to make it a habit to see Aunt Lottie every Sunday, as he had through all the other years. She was well into her seventies and her mind was wild with Alzheimer’s, but her body had stayed fairly sound. Joan was twenty-two, full of herself and stupid enough to think her aunt might be interested in her travels. As she walked with her father up the sidewalk toward the wide double doors, he counselled her just to smile and not to take her aunt up on anything she might say.
It’s unlikely that Joan could have found her on her own, although they had her properly dressed, her two rings still on her fingers, her lips a pale, respectable pink. They had placed her in a wheelchair, tied her upright with soft thick bands of bleached white cloth, although that’s the visitor talking, they would not have been soft from her perspective. She didn’t know them, they did not live in the world her mind recognized. Only once or twice did she call Joan’s father by his own name.
She was beyond self-discipline and rude, to Joan’s father, to the other patients, to the nurses and doctors who stopped to touch her shoulder and speak to them. She used language that Joan imagined to be new to her, mumbling saucy remarks in response to any attention she received. She was boastful. She talked of running a hospital single-handedly, surrounded by lazy idiots who would not take their responsibilities seriously. Joan’s father forged on, spoke to her courteously, steered her when he could. He addressed her as he would have had her mind been sound, nodding during the brief moments when she seemed to be in control, ignoring the bitter tangents as he might have ignored harmless forks of lightning. When he told her that Joan lived in the West now, she strained forward in her chair and responded with a sharp hatred for the prairie, said it was so blessed big you couldn’t find anything, couldn’t be heard above the filthy wind. “Damn the godforsaken prairie,” she said, squinting, looking to Joan for complicity.
Joan’s father had said they would stay an hour and they did. They drank the coffee offered by a volunteer and they each took a generous piece of fruit bread from a silver tray. Joan’s sister-in-law was busy elsewhere, but she came over once and stood behind the wheelchair, wrapped her arms around Lottie’s shoulders and kissed her hair. This gesture prompted a shy grin to break across the closed, puzzled face.
When the hour was over and they were in the car, Joan asked her father had she really run a hospital somewhere and he said yes she had, a small one, they were all small then, and many of them were run by women not unlike her. He said she’d been a strong and capable and responsible young woman, words
which Joan took as comment on her own activities, as well as context for the dated obscenities they’d heard. She laughed and said good for her. She repeated one of the milder phrases her aunt had used with such panache. She said, “Maybe she’s been a lady too long.” She said, “Good for you, Aunt Lottie.” Her father tried to laugh, reluctant to push Joan farther away than she’d already gone, but then he turned his face from her, as he had not once turned from his aunt. “No,” he said. “It has not been good for her. It has rarely been good for her.”
Joan did not go back to Ontario for her aunt’s funeral; it’s not possible to make the trip for every death. Lottie was rarely in her thoughts. She had her own small children. Their needs and the necessities which bounced off the walls of the house kept her, as they say, busy.
And then Joan’s mother died. She went East and stayed for a while, claiming her share of the grief, taking her part of the work made necessary by death. As is the custom, people congregated at her parents’ house, coming in without knocking, carrying practical casseroles wrapped in newspaper and stillwarm baking, leaving sometimes in the middle of a sentence if a chair was needed. Someone, a young neighbour Joan didn’t know, raked the lawn. There was talk, in contrived, ordinary language, of the distribution of her mother’s belongings, which her father allowed and encouraged; nearly everyone connected to her mother, and she had many friends, valued something. Joan refused to take part in these discussions. She sat in all the rooms, she walked from room to room, she picked up the things her mother had accumulated and put them down again where she had placed them. When she saw the figurines in her mother’s living room, she saw nothing.
Not very long after her mother’s death, Joan’s father shipped a sturdy cardboard box West to her. The box was full of the things her mother had named hers, the naming done on a small piece of masking tape stuck to the bottom of each item, the name Joan clear in her mother’s weakened script. The first thing out was a feathery crystal dinner bell which, as her father indicated in an enclosed note, had been a wedding gift from good friends who used to travel with them to Florida, friends long since gone. There was a Royal Doulton grandmother and a few pieces of silver, a pickle cruet, and a magnificent lace tablecloth which Joan remembered fingering nervously as a child sitting at the dinner table. At the bottom of the box, because of their weight, and enclosed separately in their own bubble wrap, were the figurines. They’d come West a second time. As the executor of a woman whose mind no longer gave witness to her history or her character or her accomplishments, Joan’s father had apparently arranged that these clay children come like a gift from his aunt to them, first to Joan’s mother, and now to her.
His note listing the contents of the box told Joan that she had asked for the figurines the last time she saw her aunt. Did she remember?
Joan did not remember asking and she thought it was pretty nervy if she had. She wondered if her father might have imagined this request, or if he had simply decided that something which should have been true, was true. Not content with wanting her to have the figurines, he wanted her to want them.
She repacked the box from Ontario, carried it upstairs and pushed it to the back of the spare room closet. She has accumulated more than enough on her own over the years, selecting things carefully, placing them deliberately, her taste becoming more and more selective, more and more trustworthy. Uncomfortable with disarray and pleased with her pragmatism, she’d long ago sold the wedding gifts that no longer suited her at a neighbourhood garage sale, remembering the giver briefly as she washed and priced each item.
But her father, who with his habits and regularity and his packing of boxes has become death’s familiar, has been joined in his small campaign by Joan’s son, who is oblivious but no less insistent. These two men, very young and very old, have conspired against her, closed in around her middle age, their lives brushing hers if she moves.
Her son took his place this past summer at Waskesiu, when Joan was sitting halfway up the hill searching through the binoculars for her husband and their daughters, who were out on the lake in a rented boat fishing. With an unintended and only slight shift of her hands she found not them but him. He stood on the shore absolutely still, as if posed, hugging one of the paddles from his inflatable raft, his eyes fixed on some puzzling middle distance. He stood long-haired and lanky and sunburned, his arms and legs caked with sand, his face dazed with exhaustion and accomplishment. Perhaps it was only the evening air between them, between his position down on the sand at the edge of the water and hers on the hill under the poplars. Perhaps it was only a quirk in her brain, one image among the millions stored and ready taking a deep breath and jumping the empty space between one brain cell and another.
Joan is not exacdy unhappy about the conspiracy. She has adjusted. In the fall, on a quick trip downtown for towels, she found and bought a honey-coloured oak curio, irresponsibly using the money that should have gone to overdue income tax or a paint job for the roof. Her curio has leaded panes, and, inside, two recessed lights. It’s quite big, it crowds everything else in the dining room, but it holds a lot. The feathery crystal bell is on display, and the Royal Doulton grandmother, and the pickle cruet and the slightly tarnished silver. The figurines sit on their own glass shelf just under the lights, turned one toward the other; pale children stranded in innocence.
And, worse, she has begun to ask certain people if they will leave her things, specific things, named and identified as gifts to her in their wills. She is not nearly brave enough to depend on chance. Just before her brother died of a hard, hard cancer, when they both knew it would be the last time she would be able to ask him anything at all, she asked if she could please have something. And, “Yes,” he’d said, “I want you to have something, just tell me what you’d like.” She picked a small, surprisingly heavy glass box which he’d had for years. She keeps it on a butternut chest in her bedroom. It holds the stones she’s stolen from other continents.
And she’s willing to let her aged father’s lawyer worry about his Bell Canada shares and whatever else there is; she has no doubt it will be fairly distributed according to her father’s directions, which are none of her business. What she wants is his battered Testament. He has used his Testament, for a long time and unapologetically, as a place for private dialogue; the margins are full of thoughts and doubts and possibilities, question marks. Joan expects to find evolution in these thoughts and doubts and possibilities, which she thinks she could track by the diminishing strength of his hand. She expects to find hope and disillusionment and stamina and heartache. She expects to find clues. When she asked for the Testament during a Sunday phone call, he made her listen for a minute to dead air. He said he’d see; he said she wasn’t the only one interested.
And she’s looked around. Late in the night when the house is quiet, she has allowed herself to wonder what she will leave, and who might want to lay a claim. Who, for instance, might want those stones she’s stolen from other continents? Who might want the glass box that holds them? Her books? The jade ring she bought with her first kids-all-in-school paycheque in a narrow hole-in-the-wall estate jewellery store in Vancouver? Her mother’s feathery crystal dinner bell? The coy figurines, which are still, given the distances travelled, almost pristine? The battered, annotated Testament, if it does one day come into her waiting hands?
PATSY FLATER’S BRIEF SEARCH FOR GOD
1: ETERNAL LIFE
Sometimes after the Monday night children’s meeting at the Gospel Hall Patsy walked down to the creek behind the canning factory to check on the pickles. There were three barrels of them huddled on the surface of the frozen creek, they’d been there since the ice got hard enough to hold them. It was some experiment, an idea that two acquaintances of her father’s had come up with. He called them entrepreneurs, although not to their faces. Patsy didn’t know what the pickles were supposed to do over the winter, maybe just make it through until spring, emerging from the barrels hard and crisp and sweet like her mother
’s gherkins, which had been done up properly in sealers and stored in the cold cellar in the basement at home.
On clear nights, if she felt warm, she would sit on the slope of the bank, lean back and stare up through the bare branches of the scrub maples at the dark sky and the stars and the cold winter moon. Sometimes she would lie right down and fan her arms and legs through the crusty snow to make an angel’s imprint.
Other times she walked the dark streets from the Gospel Hall to her house slowly, taking different routes, stopping in her tracks to stare in a window if she saw something rare or unique: a bird loose from a cage, a fight, people embracing. Occasionally she walked with Eleanor. Eleanor was made to go to the children’s meetings by her bootlegger dad, who was able to earn, given the town fathers’ commitment to keeping the town dry, a dependable living off the town sons. Eleanor was bravely blasphemous all the way home, making up absurd Bible verses, getting off lines of derision, giggling, snorting. She said the kids at the meetings were easy pickings, and so were the men up front.
Patsy’s sisters, who were quite a bit older, hadn’t gone to the children’s meetings. It wasn’t compulsory. Her parents neither discouraged nor urged Patsy to go. She just went. She was collecting Testaments.
Casino and Other Stories Page 5