The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  I would not sully with divorce

  what matters most—my name, of course.

  The truth is fine for privacy

  but matters less than what They see.

  I must protect the name van Hout—

  I must not let the truth get out.

  Just like the light of long-dead stars,

  it’s but the ghost of what we were.

  WADE

  “What are we going to tell my parents?” I said the night after we met before the fire. We were in the garret, sitting at the little table. “I don’t want to lie to them about us living together as if we’re ashamed of it.”

  “Then we’ll just tell them,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah, well, I know we don’t need their permission, but they’re not like your mom and dad.”

  “My mom and dad are more old-fashioned than you think. But let’s not tell your parents anything about drugs or anorexia, or Anne Frank, for that matter. I guess we tell them everything else.”

  “So we won’t say anything about your sister Bethany being sick? We’ll have to give them some reason why we’re going to South Africa.”

  “We could tell them the truth, or part of it, which is that my parents think this might be the last chance for our whole family to live in the same place for a while. And that you and I don’t want to risk breaking up again. Your parents can see that we’re in love. They’re still in love.”

  “You think so?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “I know they love each other, but I’ve never thought about them being in love.”

  “Well, you can take my word for it, they are.”

  We drove out to Petty Harbour the next afternoon. At the door, Mom greeted Rachel as if they had last seen each other the day before. “Hello, puddin’,” she said. Puddin’ was the ultimate of my mother’s many terms of endearment for females much younger than her—nieces, their daughters, my sisters, a rare friend and, rarer still, one of her sons’ girlfriends.

  When I’d phoned her to tell her we were coming, she’d said: “I knew she was the one, Wade. Remember me saying that she was the one?”

  We gave them our news after dinner, which had once again, for Rachel, consisted of an omelette. Paul wasn’t home and my sisters were hanging out in Cathy’s room. “South Africa. To live?” my mother said, looking shocked.

  “To live for a while,” I said, glancing at my father, who I knew would not object to any plan of mine regardless of what he thought. “Maybe just for, I don’t know, six months?”

  “Maybe not even that,” Rachel said. “It depends on a lot of things.”

  “That means it could be longer, then,” my mother said, but Rachel took hold of one of her hands.

  “It won’t be, Jennie. I promise. I just want to show Wade where I came from. My father is retiring from the university, and he and my mother are moving back home. Two of my sisters live there and the other one will be going with them. My parents would love it if the van Houts were all near each other for a while.”

  My mother smiled as if she sensed it wouldn’t be polite to ask Rachel to explain further. “You’ll be staying with your parents?”

  “No,” I said. “We’d have our own place.”

  My mother gave me a look that was as good as saying, “You’re going to live together even though you’re not married?” No one she was related to or knew had ever done that.

  “Rachel’s parents will be there,” my father said, as if the fact that a professor and his wife would allow their daughter to set up house with her boyfriend meant that such behaviour was not looked upon as scandalous in South Africa.

  Before Rachel could say anything more, we were interrupted by someone pounding on the front door. “Merciful God,” my mother said, rising in a panic from her chair. Rachel sighed and dropped her head into her hands. “I bet they rented a car,” she said. Before my mother could begin to make her way to the door, we heard it open.

  It was them, her parents, who had stopped to ask for directions to the house from our neighbours up the road. Hans and Myra were in the hallway by the time the four of us got there.

  “For you,” Hans said, handing a white cardboard box with “Jackson” written on it to my mother. “It’s a blueberry pie.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” my mother said, mystified, as she took it from him.

  “Hans van Hout,” Hans said, extending his hand to Dad. He firmly shook my father’s hand and looked him in the eye as if to say, “Good to meet a man who disapproves of his son bedding my daughter out of wedlock as much as I do.”

  As I completed the introductions, Myra seemed sincerely apologetic for having barged in by surprise, but also faintly amused, as if she wanted my parents to know that she had long ago resigned herself to being a partner to such stunts as the one her husband had just pulled.

  “Come in, come in,” my mother said. “I’ll put on some tea to go with the pie.”

  “Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Jennie,” Myra said. “The pie is a present. Rachel so often has our car these days, we decided we might as well rent one to go for a drive. We often come out this way. It’s so lovely. Your home is lovely too, but we can only stay a minute. Believe me, Hans can’t stay in one place longer than a minute anyway.”

  My parents nodded solemnly as if this made perfect sense.

  There followed an excruciatingly awkward interval of silence as we all sat in the living room. Dad adjusted his glasses repeatedly. Mom, who would never smoke in front of company, which was when she craved a cigarette most, rubbed together the thumb and the index finger of the hand she smoked with.

  “So,” Myra began, just as my sisters emerged from Cathy’s room.

  Hans got up and hurried over to greet them. Crouching so that he could wrap his arms beneath Cathy’s backside, he lifted her off the floor, held her aloft and looked up at her through his glasses, grinning until she laughed, at which point he set her down. Then he did the same with Sylvie. Mom was trying so hard to smile I had to look away. Rachel’s face was a blank.

  The girls immediately retreated to Cathy’s room, and Hans returned to his chair, where he began to engage in the smallest of small talk, asking my parents the most mundane things, listening to their answers, his index finger pressed against his cheek as if he was sagely appraising the reply of a student to a difficult question he had posed in class. “So, you used to take Jennie to work unless she was going early, in which case she took the bus.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dad said.

  “Ah, I see,” Hans said, nodding. “And where did you catch the bus, Jennie?”

  “I waited beside the road. There was no bus stop, but if you stood beside the road the driver would stop.”

  “Ah, so he knew, when he saw you, that you wanted him to stop. You didn’t have to raise your hand or anything?”

  “No, sir. He knew because he knew me.”

  “He knew because there was no other reason that you’d be standing beside the road.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rachel, sitting beside me, stared at the floor.

  After half an hour of this, Hans abruptly announced that it was time to leave. Forgoing the usual niceties of leave-taking, he and Myra simply left, Hans barging out as loudly as he had barged in, his wife behind him.

  When they’d gone, Rachel apologized to my parents for them dropping in unannounced and leaving so abruptly, but my mother assured her there was no need.

  There was an awkward silence until my father announced that he was going outside to the trash barrel to burn the cardboard boxes in which a new coffee table had arrived.

  “Let’s all go out,” Rachel said.

  Minutes later, we were standing around the barrel, watching the boxes burn. My father had taken his shirt off—he loved to go shirtless, outdoors, indoors, long pas
t the time of year when his boys thought it was warm enough to do the same, but he never wore shorts or jeans, only slacks. He asked Rachel what the weather was like in South Africa, and when she told him it was almost always warm, he smiled wistfully, as he always did when told about some part of the world he knew that he would never see. “I’ve never been anywhere but here,” he said, “but there’s still plenty of time, I guess. You two—don’t take time for granted. Don’t be fooled. It all goes by so fast. Take care of each other.”

  “We won’t be able to afford to call you very often,” Rachel said.

  “I’ve never called long distance in my life,” Mom said, with a sheepish smile. “I don’t know anyone who lives far enough away for that. No one has ever called us long distance. Besides. South Africa. We couldn’t afford to call you very often.”

  “Well, we’ll send you our number as soon as we get it, anyway,” Rachel said. “And we can always write to each other.”

  Mom nodded and burst out laughing. “I’ve only received half a dozen letters in my life. And that’s about how many I’ve written. I have some aunts who married Americans after the war and moved to the States. Whenever I saw a letter with an American stamp, I knew it was bad news. You must think we’re only half-civilized, Rachel.”

  Rachel shook her head. “We’ll send you postcards,” she said. “We’ll send one every day. That way, you’ll know it’s not bad news.”

  * * *

  —

  As we were driving back to town, Rachel said, “When we were leaving, your mom looked me square in the eye and said, ‘You take care of my boy.’ She didn’t say ‘or else’ but she might as well have. Your dad’s a very sweet man. He loves you.”

  I suddenly felt as if I had already left. My eyes filled with tears.

  “When you followed your mom inside, he told me he hopes that, one day, one of his children will build a house on that vacant lot next door.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes, but then he said: ‘It won’t be Wade, will it?’ I said I didn’t think so, and he said: ‘Wade has always gone his own way. He’s always done what he wanted to do. I wish I had.’ ”

  I reached out and took her hand. “He thinks he should have done more with his life,” I said.

  “Don’t be sad,” she said. “We’ll see them again before we go.”

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  RETURN TO TIME (1984)

  I loved it in the Land of Hout,

  before you knew about Without,

  before you understood that Time

  would undo all things sublime.

  Now that all is ash and ember,

  it seems a torture to remember

  when the van Houts were together,

  my girls agog around my bed,

  reciting with me as I read

  The Ballad of the Clan van Hout,

  oblivious to Claws von Snout.

  All the while, Time, Fate and Fall

  were gathering beyond the wall.

  I wish we could go back to when

  the six of us are six again.

  We never have to lock the door,

  we never have a visitor.

  We never have to leave the house—

  there’s no one in the world but us.

  The house has everything we need.

  We even have a book to read

  that’s getting longer all the time;

  the only book Within is mine,

  The Ballad of the Clan van Hout—

  we don’t want other books about,

  just the one, the book you study

  (written for the student body)

  the history and geography

  of each of you and My and me,

  a family society.

  —

  The only sounds come from Within,

  Carm practising the violin,

  the scratching of my fountain pen—

  I’m grading papers in the den.

  (The girls know that I’m grading them,

  for I have no one else to teach—

  four daughters with one classroom each.)

  We have unnecessary things,

  such as a phone that never rings,

  and other sounds that no one hears,

  the footsteps of the girls upstairs.

  There is a mail slot in the door—

  we never wonder what it’s for—

  a radio that never plays,

  though Rachel looks at it and says,

  “I like not knowing what it is.”

  We even have a TV set

  that no one’s figured out just yet.

  We have a large grandfather clock

  that never ticks and never tocks.

  The timeless van Hout family—

  I love its perfect privacy.

  The van Houts’ private universe

  consists of nothing but the House,

  no History, just Memory

  of what took place between these walls,

  which only some of us recall.

  One day, that silent phone will ring

  and, ringing, will change everything,

  for all of us will run for it,

  and one of us will answer it.

  The mail will come in through the door

  and lie in piles upon the floor.

  The silent radio will play,

  reminding us of Yesterday,

  and books will turn up in the den,

  reminding us of Where and When.

  The TV set that we’ve ignored

  will come to life when we are bored.

  The silent clock will start to chime

  and we will be returned to time.

  WADE

  “Wade the writer,” Bethany said, taking my hand lightly in hers in the front room of the van Houts’ house. “What writers do you like, Wade?”

  “Thomas Wolfe, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald—”

  “Ah yes, the great Gatsby. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, whatever that means. I was supposed to read it at Dalhousie, but I was too busy starving myself.”

  “It’s a great book,” I said. “And very short, so you should have been able to make time for it no matter how busy you were.”

  “Oh, I would keep this one, Rachel. If I had a razor blade as sharp as him, I wouldn’t be here now.” Anorexia, suicide—she spoke of them as wryly as she did of books. Rachel had warned me she would, but I couldn’t disguise how taken aback I was.

  Like her sisters, Bethany had round, inquisitive eyes that darted about as she spoke to me as if she was trying to detect what made Rachel fall for me. Beneath hers, however, there were black circles that she had not bothered to conceal with makeup. She wore a heavy sweater and loose track pants that I guessed were intended to disguise her thinness, but she still looked thin, engulfed by the clothes. “The writer appraises me,” she said. “He is intrigued. Better than disinterested, I suppose.”

  “Looking forward to South Africa?” I said.

  She arched her eyebrows and turned to Rachel as if in the hope that she would translate what I’d said. “Have you told him about Glormenethalee?” The two of them threw back their heads and laughed. I looked expectantly at Rachel, who rolled her eyes.

  “It’s a name Dad made up. It stands for the four of us. ‘Glor’ from Gloria, ‘men’ from Carmen, ‘etha’ from Bethany, and ‘lee’ from Rachel Lee, which is my full name. So, Glormenethalee. The four of us collectively. It’s kind of sweet, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And clever.”

  “And have you told him about you-know-who yet?” Bethany asked. Rachel nodded. “She
really took it literally when her teacher said that The Diary of Anne Frank was compulsory reading,” Bethany went on.

  “Het Achterhuis,” Rachel corrected her.

  “Ik ben je gewoon aan het testen,” Bethany said.

  “She knows about twenty phrases in Dutch,” Rachel said. “She said she was just testing me, which is meaningless, because I always say Het Achterhuis.”

  The atmosphere in the room was tense now, and I was relieved when Bethany laughed. “The amount of time you spent reading one book and writing your diary. Think of all the books you could have read or written. You could be better read than Wade by now. On the other hand, you do write more than he does.”

  “Knock it off, sister,” Rachel said.

  “No one in this family is playing with a full deck,” Bethany said to me. “But each of us has a different number of cards missing. I’m sure you know all about my attempt.”

  “I heard about it, yes. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry. I’ll get better with practice. So, Rachel, are you on the wagon?”

  “Yup,” Rachel said, turning to me. “When I’m on the wagon, it means I’m not diarizing. If I was off it, well, you get my drift. It’s good for me to be on the wagon but bad for Bethany to be on it, because it means that she’s sworn off food. So what about it, Bethany? Are you off or on?”

  “On it,” Bethany said, “but trying to get off, no double entendre intended, Wade.”

  “Wrist test,” Rachel said.

  “What’s a wrist test?” I said.

  “Rachel puts her hand around my wrist. Like this.” She demonstrated, wrapping her own fingers around her skinny wrist. “She can guess my weight by how much her thumb and middle finger overlap. No more wrist tests today. The doctor did one this morning because I wouldn’t let him weigh me. And it’s not an exact science.”

  * * *

  —

  That evening, I stayed for dinner with the van Houts. We all had spaghetti except for Bethany, who delivered a ceaseless, self-lacerating but entertaining monologue while watching the four of us eat, then excused herself as we began dessert.

  After coffee, I excused myself too and went upstairs to use the bathroom. When I reached the top of the landing, the bathroom door opened and Bethany came out stark naked except for the towel wrapped around her hair. She didn’t run back into the bathroom or across the landing to her bedroom, but simply stood there, her hands on her hips, and stared at me. Her clavicle, sternum, ribs and pelvic bones were far too well defined. Her breasts, which might once have been the size and shape of Rachel’s, sagged like those of a woman three times her age. “You look so shocked,” she said. “Exactly what kind of games did you and Rachel play all summer?”