A Circle on the Surface

by Carol Bruneau

  “Why, sure we are. But does your uncle know you’re here? You’d best run along now, before he worries and comes looking for you.”

  11

  Just when Isaac couldn’t seem kinder, he could turn stubborn too, becoming a stickler, a tyrant even, about things like work hours. Begrudgingly, an hour and a half before quitting time, he agreed to let Enman leave for the day. “Can’t have poor Foxy going without water. Leave now and you’ll reach O’Leery in time to fill up at the fire hall and see a show—that’s your aim, isn’t it, killing two birds wit’ one stone? ’Course it will mean a small dock in pay.” Even with Archibald in charge, the bank had never cut its employees any slack. If he had known Una had company he’d have stayed on till six or later, to make up for any slacking off he might be guilty of in the wake of a hangover. He could not remember a thing from their boat ride home and hoped he hadn’t done anything embarrassing.

  Being in Barreiners’ good graces was important, all the more so now that he was staying. Part of these social graces was weighing pity for the Twomey girl against the urge some people felt to shun her. People’s feelings shifted, of course, and you needed to keep them in view, acting accordingly. Even having Hannah out of sight and out of mind, Enman had hardly forgotten this. He had always dreaded having her land on Ma’s doorstep.

  The inch or two left in the bottle was barely sufficient: a calming, farewell sip was all. But now it was gone, this was it, he would stick to his guns and never take another drop. He put the empty back into the cabinet and there it would stay. Una could monitor it and see for herself. No need to belabour the point with her or anybody, he had decided. Enough, he had had enough and was resolved, the time had come, to quit for good, turn over another new leaf. The last thing either of them needed was her eyeing every cup of tea, every glass of water he took—that is, as soon as they had some—as if it might be doctored. With the darkness of the February sinking, his wounding, Ma’s illness, and the fuss about his old job all behind him, he had no more need of the stuff.

  Having the Twomey girl about was not something he had bargained for. But at least Una had a diversion, he consoled himself, though Hannah’s presence in Ma’s kitchen was not exactly restful.

  His hand shook, certainly not from that smidge of rum, as he put on the Dvořák. He turned the volume loud enough to blot out their voices without disturbing the lesson; God forbid they would drag it out. When the largo finished, he replaced the needle at the beginning to savour it again, while bracing for the scherzo.

  Just as he hoped, the scherzo sounded explosive enough—hallelujah!—to send their guest on her way. Hannah’s leaving did not seem so much of a blessing when Una came to the doorway, arms folded. Her blouse seemed buttoned wrong, as if she’d been caught in the midst of dressing. Had she always been so touchy? How had he not noticed before?

  “So?” Her voice was expectant, almost bossy. A little jarring after their morning’s eventual tenderness, this expectancy was new, too. It made him feel prickly with the need to muster a force to match it.

  Any effect the rum might have had was fainter than a ghostly one. Still it was strong enough to put words in his mouth whose petulant tone surprised him. “No more beating around the bush. What I’ll say is for your own good.” He rested his gaze on Una’s top button, avoiding her eyes. “You do not want to mess with Twomey. With Ma barely gone, we don’t need the complication of another needy person just yet. I know what you’re thinking: well, sure Hannah’s a sweet thing. You’re right. Easy for teachers like Kit, say. Leaving the work behind her in the classroom, not like you. And not going through what we have, with a sick person, I mean.”

  “How dare you—?” She opened her mouth to say more, closed it.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t”—he stuffed down that rummy ghost, its wispy remnants, his longing for more of its pleasant puffing-up—“entertain the Twomey one in our house.” Even as he said it he winced inwardly. It wasn’t really what he meant, as if a nastiness that wasn’t really his had taken over his tongue. “You know, of course, that she’s a relative.”

  Her silence was as sharp as the silence that follows the crunch of a boot through frozen snow.

  “My half-sister. Didn’t Ma tell you? I figured she must’ve, all those hours you two talked. Surely it came up, about the old man.”

  Una gaped at him. Then, suddenly, it was as if he had not said anything shocking. “First off, we’ve been friends forever, Kit and I. Kit has never been anything but kind—”

  A hollowness replaced his craving for a drink, and any trace of bravado. “For Pete’s sake. This isn’t to do with Kit. It’s awkward, the Twomey girl coming around. I don’t really want her here, simple as that.” There was a buzzing in his ears, the same as when his father used to cuff them. He folded his arms too, glimpsing himself in the little hall mirror. His jaw was tight.

  A silly prig is what he felt like, no less pompous than the new manager at the bank. As if having been in the city made anyone more open-minded, upright. Whether he was open-minded or not, Una knew where to stick the knife once she caught him. She protested that Hannah wouldn’t hurt a fly. “What are you so scared of? You’re no better than those dreadful boys.”

  Whatever it was in him that had stood up to her gave way. “Calm down, this is silly. It’s not worth getting agitated.” Nothing was, when you really wanted peace. He touched her shoulder, let his hand cap its boniness. At least she didn’t shrug it off. “It’s not fear. It’s her uncle I don’t like, you know that, and you know how people say things.” He wanted to reel her closer, but she eyed him with a cool bemusement.

  “No shite there, Sherlock.”

  Did she speak to Kit that way? Suddenly he felt like a prude.

  She resisted only slightly when he drew her to him.

  “There’s a bit more to it than you might want to know. In case the genes run in the family.”

  She rolled her eyes, though not meanly. He thought of Twomey, who would have traded a healthy child for a quarter ouncer, and of his father’s fondness for the bottle. Cleary, at least, had been nowhere near that bad.

  “See, I feel a bit beholden, I mean guilty, about poor old Hannah. She’s had a hard run of things. Everyone knows it.”

  “Tell that to Mrs. Finck.” Una’s smirk, that crooked smile of hers, did it signal her letting up?

  If so, it was best seized upon without delay. Otherwise their sparring would wear him to a pulp.

  “The Magnet’s got that musical playing, dunno for how much longer. Might be worth seeing. Since we have to drive up there anyway. Truce?”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake. Fine.”

  In the kitchen—it was like being inside a monstrous buttercup, the yellow the walls cast over everything—she put together a picnic while he went below and fiddled with the pump. At least its motor hadn’t burnt itself out, drawing on nothing. He hurried up the cellar steps to help her with the food.

  “If we had water, I’d boil up some hen fruit to have with the armoured heifer.” It was her goofy lingo for hardboiled eggs and Spam, lingo they had fallen into early in Ma’s illness, to make the situation seem more fun than it was. Una hadn’t spoken this way since spring. It seemed vaguely embarrassing now, even a bit desperate.

  As he fished gherkin pickles from the jar, he glimpsed the ocean through the kitchen window. Such a steadying sight it was, viewed from dry land, despite its treachery. “Just think of it. Over there,”—on its opposite side, he meant—“those Nazi birds might string a person up for being a Hannah, or worse, even.”

  “You think?” An uppity note had crept back into her voice, which he chose to ignore.

  Before she could turn prickly again he hurried out to the car with the jerry cans and Ma’s basket packed with food. Thank God for Beulah. If they left now they could stop halfway to eat, fill the cans at the fire hall, and make the nine o’clock show. If y
ou didn’t mind driving in pitch dark, the cross-country road wasn’t a bad route back, except that bubblegum and electrical tape pretty much held Beulah together. He thought of George lifting the hood when she was new, showing off the shiny engine and its pristine spark plugs. A decrepit car needed a lot more than shine to make it run properly. Sometimes, though, she’ll start without the key, he liked to joke.

  This evening they were in luck: the engine turned over first crack. Passing the Goodrows’, Una checked her lipstick in the rear-view. It was as if their quarrelling had not happened. Maybe people weren’t so different from cars, it struck him, at least in certain matters of mechanics. You could know someone intimately but have no more clue about their inner musings than about an oil leak, until the engine seized. And brains, how about brains? As Una had pondered when they first met, what makes one mind impenetrable to new ideas, another spongelike? He had supposed she was referring to students, or her people, whom she otherwise never mentioned.

  Luckily Inkpens’ finances and household plumbing were not so mysterious. If worse came to worst, the fire hall had a pumper truck that might come out and fill the well.

  He rolled up his sleeves one by one, and as they left the village he slung his arm over the seat so his fingers just brushed his wife’s arm. As they cut inland on the dirt track, the sun cast a weighty glow over the barrens, splashing rocks, spruce, and alders with a deep rose. In spite of the cheery light, everything looked withered.

  You could hope for rain but hope only went so far, just as keeping something under your hat forever would not make it disappear.

  Through the corner of his eye he watched Una toying with a lipstick. “I can’t believe Ma didn’t tell you. She had no use for the old man after that. Ma once made cookies for Father Heaney to take to her. Father Heaney likely ate them himself.” His voice stayed as even as if dictating the odometer’s faulty reading. “My half-sister. The whole village knew, too. Though all his life the old man denied it.”

  Corkscrewing her lipstick as high as it would go, Una corkscrewed it down again, then let the tube loll in her lap. “You people.” She eyed him as if he were small as a woodbug. Shouldn’t you be a bit bigger? her look said. Her voice was withering. “That’s a bit of a snide joke about the priest. It’s not very funny.”

  He dodged a pothole, not too successfully. Beulah’s tires were beyond bald—near “roont,” Clint said—and with the shortages, had little chance anytime soon of being replaced. With gas so expensive, its rationing so tight, if she hadn’t been George’s car he’d have parked her somewhere permanently in town.

  “But, Enman—how do you know for sure, if your father said she wasn’t—”

  “Everyone knows. It’s no secret. He made Ma’s life miserable. He was that type that never grows up. Not a ladies’ man, exactly, though ladies came with the territory, I guess.”

  “Being the life of the party.” Una sighed loudly. “He looked nice in his picture.” The sole picture, she meant, that Ma had saved. Enman had been surprised to find it one day propped on Ma’s dresser, coming upstairs to check on things while Una prepared Ma’s tray. He had been tempted to bury it too, though not, of course, with her.

  Granted, his father had always made it to work, ensuring there was food on the table. Snarly as her illness had made her occasionally, Ma remained honest about things, as transparent as dew to the end: “Don’t worry, I’ve got nothing that will sneak up and bite you.”

  “Nice is as nice does. And when Cleary worked for Isaac, he could’ve fixed an engine in his sleep. Ma bore the brunt of his lapses. She could never trust him. She stuck by him, though.”

  “Ah.” Una tucked the lipstick into her purse, rubbed where it had marked her skirt.

  “Teaching, you must’ve known of families’ troubles. Cleary, if you can believe it, had a thing for Iris Finck. While just a young fella. Iris was just as crusty and cantankerous then, Isaac says. Imagine holding out a flame for her, how demented is that?”

  “I guess you were waiting for the right century to fill me in. All the stuff your ma never mentioned about him, let alone Hannah.”

  A fresh rattle had cropped up under the left fender. He wiped his brow on his sleeve. At least she couldn’t accuse him of not listening to Ma. “Well. It’s not in the genes. Hannah’s problem, I mean. I’m pretty sure. As sure as you can be. If that’s a worry.”

  “You’ve made your point. You don’t want her in the house.”

  “Gad, is it my fault Cleary had it on with Twomey’s sister?”

  Walling the track on both sides, alders ticked the doors and rocker panels. The noise from the fender was no doubt a stick caught somewhere.

  “As if I’d make it up! A dalliance.” The prissy word escaped before he could find a better one. Better, though, than “screwing around” or “stepping out.”

  “Look, I’m not blaming Hannah!”

  “Blaming her? I should hope not.” Una gazed at the ruts ahead. Her face was pink with the dying sun.

  “Ma didn’t deserve such nonsense.”

  “Few women do.” Una’s eyes had a cool, skittish look. “Don’t know about you, En, but I’m famished.”

  The woods were so dense and the track was so narrow there was nowhere to pull over, let alone get out and spread a blanket, so they sat in the car to eat, the windows rolled up because the mosquitoes were fierce. The meat paste sandwiches were warm and a little soggy but the pickles perked things up, even lightened their mood—enough that Una suggested a back-seat cuddle.

  “Like teenagers?” And how would you propose getting the angle right? he almost teased, the venture unlikely to produce more than a stiff neck. “Later, my darling, all right? Don’t want to miss the show.” It was grand, Enman thought, that Girl Crazy’s run at the Magnet saved them the drive downtown to see it, not to mention facing mobbed streets, surly crowds. He was happy to be out on a date, though he guessed the movie might be one he could take or leave.

  “The musical with Broadway flair and a western air,” she repeated the radio ad dully.

  Enman put his hand on her knee, and hummed “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart.” His hand bounced off at every rut. The woods stretched forever. Soon the sky’s deepening purple closed in, broken by the flash of a deer’s tail in the bobbing headlights, the reddish blurr of a fox. The stars almost outnumbered the mosquitoes flecking the windshield. He patted her hand. “When the rest of us expire, they’ll take over the Earth.”

  The appearance of a couple of shacks indicated that they had reached O’Leery’s outskirts. In the yard outside one place a kid swung on a tire. This could be Timbuktu, said Una’s expression, though compared to Barrein, O’Leery was a metropolis, with a full-service garage, a hotel behind a tidy picket fence.

  Just down the hill from these was the Magnet, with its diamond-shaped marquee in near-darkness. Half the lights were burnt out and the stars’ names missing letters. Una sucked her teeth. Its lack of glitter was a bit dispiriting after the drive. “But what would the ARP do if the Magnet went Hollywood on us?” he quipped.

  There was still plenty of time to loop around to the new fire hall, which only existed because O’Leery’s branch of the ARP was headquartered here. It was the one thing the place had gained as a result of the war, as far as he could see. He wheeled in next to the pumper truck. The air smelled of cars and chip fat. A fellow in overalls filled the jerry cans and helped load them into the trunk. Beulah’s back end sagged under the weight, the cargo of fresh water well worth the journey.

  “That’ll tide us over. See? Nothing to worry about, dear.” Though he didn’t dare say so, he would have been just as happy to forego the movie.

  Pulling out and then braking for the Magnet, he heard it again—not from the fender this time, but under the hood. A chattering sound, not likely the result of a stray stick but nothing some electrical tape couldn’t fix—quite possib
ly, it was just his imagination. It was difficult to listen properly as Una chatted about Isla Inkpen’s new granddaughter, as if the subject of Hannah had gone to seed and blown away, which suited him.

  Women. Sweet as Easter chicks one minute, owly as nuns the next. A fellow at the bank had been right about that. Maybe it was no accident Enman had stayed a bachelor so long. He put Beulah into first, let the clutch breathe out, ears cocked. Maybe he was too intent on listening to truly register anything being out of the ordinary.

  If there was a problem—was the steering heavy, was she pulling to one side?—Una’s cussing drowned it out. “Look at this, you said it ran till Friday! How come there’s no lineup? If this was the Oxford, they’d be lined up down the block.”

  Of course there wasn’t a lineup. “Another plus of not being in town.” They could have their pick of seats, instead of wrestling over one.

  “Hard to think of a night being ‘special’ if you’re the only ones out.”

  He babied the parking brake. A belt was about to go, or a bearing? Whatever it was, it gave him a thirst.

  Despite her complaints, Una jumped out. He resisted the urge to peek under the hood, followed her down the boardwalk, past the faded posters in the window to the box office. “Well, yeah the show’s on.” The gal in the wicket gave Una an annoyed look. He paid for the tickets, handed Una hers. Her pretty fingernails grazed his wrist gently and he caught a delicate whiff of her perfume, masked in the car by the smell of food. The traits of a city-bred, city-fied wife, traits he had to admit he admired.

  Having Una had spoiled him for women in Barrein, all of whom were taken anyway.

  He could have done without her sarcasm, though, when she nudged him. “Well, knock me over with a feather, En, they have popcorn.”

  When he went to buy her some, Una shook her head. Watching her figure, no doubt. Timmy Flood, the manager, stood in the lobby taking tickets. Enman nodded to him and Flood grinned. Enman had given him a loan once, a favour that Flood wanted to acknowledge by providing complimentary passes.