“I love you and I see you just fine,” I said.
Bethany shrugged and breathed in as if to stave off another burst of tears. “I’ve thought about filing a charge against Dad. But I won’t get very far if you or Carmen or Gloria say he never laid a hand on you.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I don’t remember anything. I don’t. But I also said that it made sense to me that he laid a hand on you.”
“So it would be his word against mine. Thanks, sis.”
“Let’s not argue anymore,” I said. “It’s pointless.”
Bethany nodded. “All I’m saying, Rachel, is that I don’t think he’ll be arrested just because you say you have a hunch about him.”
“I know you feel like shit,” Wade said. “But don’t take it out on Rachel.”
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. Sorry. I’m a bit out of sorts. Going mad and overdosing in the park has that effect on me. Jesus, of all the places we could be in the world, we have to be in South Africa. Not exactly the world capital of open-mindedness. I suppose I should have spoken up when we were still in Canada. Bad timing on my part. Not that Rachel’s memory would have been better there.”
“That’s not fair, Bethany,” Wade said. “If she doesn’t remember, she doesn’t remember. Is it possible that you’re the only one? Or is it more likely that you made it all up?”
“Wade,” I said.
“It’s okay, Rachel,” Bethany said. “I don’t blame him for wishful thinking. Besides, I think Wade’s pissed because you guys wouldn’t be here if not for me, in South Africa, I mean. I did ask you to come along. For moral support, remember?”
“Have the DeVrieses been in touch with you?” I asked.
“Hell will freeze over before Peter DeVries speaks to me again. Theresa, too. I’ve broken the heart of their only child. Some parents tend not to take that kind of thing very well. But they’ll stay friends with Mom and Dad. All four of them will just pretend the engagement never took place. And they’ll definitely ignore what I said Dad did.”
The three of us were silent for a while. Then Bethany said, “You know, sooner or later, they’re going to let me out. Mom and Dad will take me back, I know they will. You see, on the one hand, I have to behave myself in here or I’ll never get out, but on the other, if I behave myself, who do you think they’ll entrust me to? I’ll have to live with him again. I have no money, not a cent. Clive and the DeVrieses won’t have anything to do with me. Gloria will side with them, so she and Max won’t take me in, not that I’d want to go there. Don’t even mention Carmen and Fritz. And you guys can’t even support yourselves and haven’t got an inch of extra space.”
“Do you think we should all go back home to Newfoundland?” Wade asked.
“Do you want to?” I said.
“Bethany could live with us there. I could get my old job back, or maybe get a better one. I can’t imagine her going back to live with your parents, or us visiting them and being civil under these circumstances.”
“Actually,” Bethany said, “it’s not hard to imagine at all, not if you’re one of the van Houts, which you practically are. And no more talk about going home, where all three of us would be miserable. I’d be a handful to live with, Wade. And there’s no telling how long I’ll be in here. It’s not called an asylum for nothing.”
“You’ll feel better soon, Bethany,” Wade said.
Bethany wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and nodded. “I will,” she said. “Wade says it, so it must be so. It will be so. Or it won’t. He lost Rachel once because of me. He lost Rachel to me. And here he is, he may think, on the verge of losing her again because of me. Well, thanks for coming, you two, but now you should go before you catch what I have. You know what hospitals are like.” She got up and padded out of the room in her slippers, followed slowly by the nurse.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
THE LAST NIGHT (1982)
(A piece I wrote for Rachel Lee,
who had not yet abandoned me.)
The last verse of the Night Salon?
The other three have long since gone,
so it’s just me and Rachel Lee.
You like to sit across from me;
you look at me, as if to say
you wish that you could get away.
I feel like saying that you could
do as your older sisters did,
abandon me, abandon Dad—
take up with some jock, some hippie,
some boy or man instead of me,
but Rachel Lee is not like them.
Gloria kept coming to my room
but stopped reciting very soon
after she declined the bed
and chose a kitchen chair instead,
a chair in which she sat up straight
and stared as if she couldn’t wait
for me to start so she could leave
to go out with her boyfriend, Steve,
I think it was, or was it Dale?
She was a teen before she failed
to show up in my room one night.
The Night Salon was one long fight
with Carmen, who, night after night,
sat in her older sister’s chair
and called her younger sisters weird
and laughed at things that they still feared.
The youngest sprawled face down in bed,
as if pretending she was dead,
while Bethany, head in her hands,
recited to the ceiling fan.
Rachel will be the last no-show,
the last to come, the last to go.
I’ll wait until it’s after nine,
but you’ll be gone, no longer mine.
The last night in the Ballad Room?
My sweet, I wrote this just for you.
I’m not sure what is on your mind—
the thought of leaving me behind?
But also something more than that;
I lack the nerve to ask you what.
For weeks, you’ve watched me on this bed,
remembering, I would have said,
the early days of the Salon,
or something else, for what goes on
inside your head, behind those eyes,
you know too well how to disguise.
Your three sisters were open books—
at least to me, I knew those looks—
but Rachel, you’re illegible,
expressionless, inscrutable,
unnerving in your reticence—
what might that blank look mean for Us?
And soon you’ll shun the balladry
and turn that hollow look on My.
The only one of four at home,
you all but live in your bedroom.
I stay in mine, across from yours
or go out driving in the car
(my footsteps on the creaking stairs,
the creaking stairs that no one hears).
You keep on with your diary,
you read and write obsessively.
That adamantine will of yours
may break as if a dam has burst—
it did before; this would be worse.
(What might that breakdown mean for Us?)
It bothers me, I must confess,
but not so much as that blank stare.
I’m not alone, yet you’re not there.
But I’ve done things that few can do,
far greater things than any Jew.
So let them jeer and let them laugh
and let them read my epitaph:
“He lived his life as he saw fit,
the man who go
t away with it.
It doesn’t matter what They know:
He lived Above, They lived Below.”
You know I had high hopes for you—
the truth is, Rachel, I still do.
If nothing else, the diary
you think you must withhold from me
will serve as your apprenticeship.
You write and I cannot keep up,
you write because you cannot stop.
Did you begin because of me,
because I shared my poetry
with you each night for years on end?
You’re sick, my love, but you will mend
and when you do, I hope that you
write even better than I do.
The time that you’ve spent practising,
the reams you’ve written with your pen
may vindicate your Mom and me
and you, of course, my Rachel Lee—
it may be this was meant to be;
the crucible of misery
that we have burned in all these years
may have refined that mind of yours.
Van Hout the Poet may be you.
If fate dictates that it be so,
I won’t be sad to see you go,
for I have taught you all you know.
I loved it in the Land of Hout
when no one thought of getting out,
before the Rumours scaled the wall—
at times it seems beyond recall.
The four girls made me feel so young,
back then before the song was sung,
the siren song’s seductive rhymes
that wrecked us on the rocks of time.
We came by love so honestly,
we talked about it openly,
accepted it so gratefully.
The love that we have long since lost
came to us without a cost,
before the girls broke faith with Us,
before the failing of their trust.
They give love so begrudgingly
it hardly seems like love to me,
a hug, perhaps, perhaps a kiss—
how could their love have come to this?
It’s something I must bargain for.
The girls keep count, not like before,
when no one ever closed their doors.
I blame the girls for playing games,
for finding men whose very names
preoccupy me through the night:
I cannot sleep, I cannot write.
I must admit they madden me,
the men who gaze so longingly
(as girls their age once gazed at me).
They madden me unspeakably,
the boys and men they left me for.
I must pretend that I adore
the Woman who so loudly snores,
the aging face, the greying head
I cannot bear to touch in bed.
I’ll be the van Hout balladeer,
though no one ever comes to hear
the words that I set down by day.
I’ll go out in the car alone;
She’ll wait up till van Hout comes home.
Each night, before I leave, I’ll say
the verse that I wrote yesterday.
I never needed any praise,
just my audience of four,
and I don’t need you anymore.
You turned your backs on the Salon—
one day you’re there, the next you’re gone.
But it goes on, the words still rhyme;
I read them out from time to time.
I put aside some time each day—
I still have things I want to say.
I read aloud when I’m alone;
the house is dark, though My is home.
I’ll read it to your children too—
perhaps you’ll join us when I do
and say the words along with us
or merely listen to the opus,
the lines you’ve never heard before.
I go on writing more and more,
though I’ve no one to read them to,
for I have nothing else to do.
I still go to the Ballad Room
and lie upon the Ballad Bed
and hear The Ballad in my head,
my eyes closed as I say the words
I wrote for you, my little girls.
The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
will not end here or in Without,
for you’ll be mine despite the years—
forever mine, my little dears.
You’ll crave the balm of Daddy’s love
as if it comes from God above.
You’ll still crave it when I’m gone—
it can’t be had from other men.
You’ll go without what you once had,
what none could give you but your dad.
It has to do with family,
it has to do with memory,
it has to do with history—
it has to do with you and me.
This piece was composed and read
by me upon the Ballad Bed.
I think of when you were all ears,
when you were in your early years.
This piece was composed and read
by me upon the Ballad Bed.
When Gloria abandoned me,
my audience was down to three.
This piece was composed and read
by me upon the Ballad Bed.
My audience was down to two
when Carmen said, “I’m through with you.”
This piece was composed and read
By me upon the Ballad Bed.
My audience was next to none—
just her, the last and smallest one.
When Bethany abandoned me,
I still had little Rachel Lee.
This piece was composed and read
By me upon the Ballad Bed.
For years it was just her and me.
I read to little Rachel Lee
until, one night, she didn’t show—
I knew she’d be the last to go.
There was no one left to witness
the first night of my loneliness.
From The Arelliad
THE LAST NIGHT (1985)
My father’s ballad was in iambic tetrameter, a rhythm that has been branded on my brain. Perhaps he thinks in tetrametric rhyme. Perhaps that fate will soon be mine. He read to me till I was twenty-one, when Bethany, calling from Halifax, said, “Save yourself. He’ll read for your entire life unless you say you’ve had enough. Stop going to the Night Salon. He won’t complain or say a word or let on that he feels absurd without an audience. He’ll get the message, you know him—he’ll think of it as martyrdom.”
She rhymes in his metre sometimes too, just like me. But it was easier for her to leave the Night Salon, to walk out on the balladeer, because he still had me, an audience of one. An audience of none?
To be the last to turn my back? It wasn’t easy to leave him there with no one to hear The Ballad. It should have been but it wasn’t.
It turned out Bethany was right; he never said a word the night that I renounced the Ballad Room but fell short of renouncing him. Eight thousand readings in a row but, at last, the balladry was done. Though I had written more than him by then, having taken the torch he offered me.
The four girls. We never spoke of The Ballad except when we were memorizing, reciting as he taught us to. I don’t kno
w why he bothered to tell us to keep it a secret. The four of us, we simply knew what daughters must and mustn’t do. We each, in turn, stopped going to the Night Salon, but still we didn’t talk about it.
When Gloria first failed to show—she was sixteen—the rest of us pretended not to notice, him included. Though we were four, no longer five, the Night Salon would still survive. The numbers shrank, The Ballad grew until we numbered only two, which means there are five versions of it. No one but him knows more of it than me.
The Ballad of the Clan van Hout means this to Carmen, and that to me, and something else to Bethany, and Gloria may remember parts that I was too young to memorize. Five versions of the gospel truth. Six if you count The Arelliad, though it’s getting harder to say how much of that is true. The backwards English alphabet, the simple code, the plain password, the way into another world…I’m writing more than ever now. I must get out of here somehow, before I sink into the page—
Gloria: For two years we were only three;
my sister Carmen made us four.
We sisters, love, yes—you and me—
will sisters be forevermore.
Carmen: At first there were the four of us,
but then there was one more of Us.
One more made five, though We were three—
the third one was sweet Bethany.
Bethany: They called me daughter number three
till they no longer spoke to me.
They never called you number four—
my darling, you were just one more.
Rachel: There will be Her, there will be Him—
we never will be free of them:
four sisters We are bound to be
their daughters for eternity.
WADE
As we drove home from the hospital, I wasn’t sure what to make of what Bethany had said. For so long, nothing, and now, suddenly, everything. How trustworthy was a woman who had tried for years to starve herself to death and attempted suicide four times? It seemed possible that her behaviour had been brought on by abuse, but it seemed even more likely that her anorexia had driven her to accuse her father of causing all her problems. How could you distinguish one anguish from the other?
“You don’t believe her, do you?” Rachel said.
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