by Caro Soles
My mouth begins to water at the thought. Puddings are a treat in our house. I suspect Mother is trying to cheer us up now that Daddy’s not here. As I go through the familiar routine of setting the table, I try to think of a way to bring Brian into the conversation without admitting how I found out his other name and getting into trouble. Then a possible explanation comes to me.
“Mrs. Pierce is divorced!” I exclaim. I hadn’t meant to say this out loud, and Mother is looking at me strangely. “Like Mrs. Simpson,” I add quietly. I begin to polish my serviette ring vigorously.
“You shouldn’t listen to gossip,” Mother says sternly. She gives me one last long fierce look and leaves the room. I collapse onto a dining room chair and blow breath out through my pursed lips. “Just like Mrs. Simpson,” I repeat softly.
11. THE WHISPERING TUBE
IT’S HOT TONIGHT. During the day, the swineys were singing. Mother says they’re cicadas, but I think my private name suits them better. I can’t sleep. I wake up, and the sheet is damp and tangled. Mother has one arm thrown across my waist. Where our skin touches, everything is slippery with perspiration. She is breathing heavily, exhausted from her job. The damp air weighs me down, making me feel short of breath. Sudden panic surrounds me, and I wiggle out from under Mother’s arm, crawl down to the end of the bed, and climb over the metal footboard. I glance at Daddy’s side of the bed, forgetting for a moment that he is still in the hospital. I hope he’s not awake, bathed in this strangling blanket of heat, feeling the sickness under his skin roil and swell and itch
Quietly, I put on an old T-shirt of Jonathan’s and my one pair of shorts and creep out the door. In the hall, shadows cling to the wall, shudder along the tapestry. One pale light glows dimly outside the bathroom door, but it only seems to increase the darkness. Baggy Bones’s door is closed. I imagine her in her cluttered room, curled up on her daybed, surrounded by her ratty shawls like a bird in its nest. I hesitate. I have never been out by myself at night. To my left, the porch door beckons.
Outside, I breathe more easily. The moon sails in and out of the clouds. Everything looks different, sounds different. Even the air feels different. I tiptoe to the end of the porch where the window boxes spill sleeping flowers over the balustrade. The smell of orange blossoms lingers on the air, making me think of sunshine, of Mother and me sitting here surrounded by our flowers, Mother telling family stories about people I barely remember, while Daddy smiles and sands a piece of wood till it feels like skin.
Nighttime pulls everything closer together. I climb a few rungs up the ladder, leaning over to see what the Secret Garden looks like at this hour. The boy in the fountain is silver in the moonlight, the stagnant water around his feet black. Everything is bleached, the neglect hidden under the silvering effect of the moon.
As I hang there above the riot of greenery, a shadow moves. I blink and push up my glasses, trying to focus on the movement. Sitting on the other side of the fountain is Brian, one foot swinging back and forth. He is wearing tiny shorts and what looks like a white undershirt. His hair shimmers like a halo. I pull back, afraid of being seen. I wonder how he got all the way down there from the third floor. Perhaps it is cooler in the Secret Garden.
When I look again, another movement catches my eye. Someone is with him; someone is sitting on the red bricks, leaning against his legs, shadowed by his body. I can’t see anything clearly from up here. I try to imagine Mrs. Pierce climbing over the iron gate in a long lacy nightie, the kind I imagine she wears. I pull back again, stifling giggles. The image in my head is funny, ungainly, impossible to believe. It makes no sense. I look again, and it seems that the shadow companion has dark hair. Not like his mother. Intrigued, I climb higher on the ladder, but the view from up here is no better. I still can’t see the other person, just the two heads—close together now, bent, whispering. One dark, one fair. A secret tryst! Brian has eased down to the ground, his arms sliding around the one who must be his secret girlfriend. Why is she secret? Is she unsuitable in some way? Like Cousin Jim marrying the hatcheck girl in some jazz club in Boston five years ago?
I rest my chin on my arms against the warm metal of the ladder and wonder if I will be unsuitable in some way when I grow up. People seem to have a lot to live up to. I feel sorry for the girl down there, imagining Mrs. Pierce looking her up and down disapprovingly. I also feel annoyed with the girl, but I don’t know why.
I’m just beginning to climb back down the ladder again when I sense yet another movement down below. The two figures are standing up now, arms around each other. They are almost the same height. I still can’t see the girl, and now they are moving urgently towards the bushes, into the bushes, onto the ground. I strain into the shadows but can make nothing out. As I set both feet on the porch, I hear a rising moan from the garden that disturbs the air around me, makes me feel a rush of heat. The sound is cut off suddenly. Tears gather. I dash them away.
“Bugger all,” I whisper, and head back inside. Suddenly I’m very tired.
Sunday morning, we go to church. We used to go to Saint Paul’s, just up the street on Bloor, but now we go to Saint Mary Magdalene’s. Jonathan insisted because of Dr. Healey Willan and the music. It takes a while to get there, but I’m glad we’ve switched. I love it. I love the incense and the lulling chants that sound like history for the ears. I like to think it’s the same music Richard the Lionheart heard before he left for the Crusades. The same smells, too. The same words from the Bible that King James I listened to in Westminster Abbey in London during the reading of the Epistle. The only thing I don’t like is there’s not enough singing of hymns. I love singing hymns. And I don’t like having to leave and go to Sunday school with the little kids. That part is boring.
After church, Father Wayne stands talking to Mother and Jonathan, one hand resting on my head as if I’m five years old. I hate that. I stand very still, feeling the weight of his hand, feeling the heat from his fingers in my hair. They are talking about the Corpus Christi procession and how I could be a part of it, scattering rose petals in front of the monstrance from a basket over one arm. I remember the procession from last year, although I didn’t take part, and as I watch Mother’s face, hoping she will say yes, I suspect she remembers too and doesn’t like the idea. I’m afraid Mother might decide the procession with its statue, candles, and chanting is too much, too High Church, too Roman. I sense she is uneasy here sometimes, and I wonder if she thinks her stern Orangeman father, who I am told is often a marshal in the parade on the Glorious Twelfth, might not approve of this place that I think of as home—a place as close to my own secret identity as I can get, where I experience the scents and images of being French and Catholic without anyone knowing.
At last I squirm, and Father Wayne lifts his hand and gestures with it as he talks. I move quickly out of reach. Talk has shifted to other things, and he and Mother appear to have reached no decision on the Corpus Christi matter. If Daddy comes home in time, I can ask him. Or I can send a note. Mother will listen to what he says.
It’s afternoon. Mother is going to the hospital to visit Daddy, taking my private note, and Jonathan is practising again for the big Recital. I spend a long time trying to get a page of penmanship good enough to show Mother when she gets back. Penmanship is not one of my strengths, Mother says. She writes in a clear, rounded hand, no matter how quickly she goes. Daddy writes in a stiff old-fashioned way, on a slant with curlicues here and there. Jonathan writes in funny crooked scratches. He says it’s because he studies Greek and they have a different alphabet, so he can get away with it. I know the Greek alphabet too, but I don’t do much writing with it.
I have an old penmanship book Mother got from Janet’s mother, and she glued clean sheets of paper under the part Janet has written on and ruled the lines in. I’ve filled in most of it, but it doesn’t look very good. No matter how hard I try, the pencil smudges, the lines wobble, and the loops go too high or too low. It’s discouraging.
At this rate, I may never get to write in ink. Today, in order to make things more interesting, Mother has suggested writing a page of memory work instead, but it has to have no erasures and only three mistakes. I’ve been working on it for a long time and am on my third piece of paper now. This time I think I have it. Mother said punctuation counts, too, so I hesitate a few times between colons, commas, and such, then take a chance. If I look it up, Jonathan might notice.
At last I finish the page of the opening lines of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and put away my pencils and paper.
“Finished?” Jonathan asks, not looking at me.
“All done.” I go to the door.
“Don’t go out of the garden,” he says.
“All right.” I slip out into the hall and take a deep breath of relief. I’m not going to the garden. I turn toward the front stairs and see Baggy Bones outside her door, talking to Mrs. Tyndall. When she sees me, she scowls and hooks an arm around Mrs. Tyndall’s narrow shoulders. “Come on inside where we can talk in peace,” she says, scooping her in. She closes the door behind her. I stick my tongue out and think how rude she is.
I pause at her door, listening, but can’t hear anything but the murmur of her voice. The archway leading to the third floor is nearby. As I stand in the opening, I catch sight of a round brass cup-like object sticking out of the wall next to the curtain just above my eye level. I never noticed it before, probably because the curtain usually covers it. I touch the brass, pull on it, and it comes out of the wall on a red velvet rope. I put it to my ear and hear voices far away. As I listen, Patricia whines, “But I don’t want to lie down, Ma. I don’t feel tired.”
“You need your strength,” Mrs. O’Malley says crossly.
“All I did was go to church and eat lunch!” Patricia complains.
“Twenty minutes.” A door slams.
I listen for a few moments more, but all is quiet down in the kitchen quarters. I put the tube to my lips and make a long moaning noise. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” exclaims Mr. O’Malley. I drop the tube and run upstairs quickly.
I push the door to my left and go out on the roof. It’s sunny and the air is clear. I can see through the trees on one side, out over the fences, and into other people’s gardens. Not much to see there really. I walk over to the edge and look down at the Secret Garden. It seems to sleep in the sunshine down there, so different from the time I saw it in the moonlight a few days ago.
“Don’t get too close to the edge.”
I leap back and whirl around, staring at Brian as if he has two heads. I feel an odd guilt, as if I had been talking about him behind his back, and I have, in a way—inside my head. I flush and stammer something that makes no sense.
He laughs. “Sorry, I startled you. Guess you were miles away.”
I nod, but I’m not miles away—only down two floors, in the basement, thinking of his name in all those books I found, a different name no one here knows.
“It’ll be summer soon,” he says, looking out over the trees. “No more school, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.” He laughs, but he doesn’t sound happy.
“I don’t go to school.”
“In British Columbia, where I went to school, we only have twelve grades, not thirteen,” he says.
This is so surprising I look right at him, at his silver-gold hair, his green eyes that seem to draw me inside them. I look away. If we lived there, Jonathan would be finished school, too.
“But Rona Layne lives here,” I say.
“Exactly.”
Brian slides down onto the roof, his back against the wall. I sit down, too, cross-legged, and start to play jacks with some pebbles.
“I met your brother a few days ago at the Conservatory,” he says. “I really admire him.”
I nod, feeling warm pleasure in the praise, as I always do, as if some of it is meant for me too, even though I know it isn’t.
“What do you all think of his decision?” He looks at me suddenly, as if really interested in what I have to say.
I look back steadily, my mind racing as I try to come up with what he wants to know, but I can’t interpret the question. Does he mean the summer job at the lumber camp? “The job will keep him in the outdoors a lot,” I say, but I can tell this is not what he wants to hear. “Mother says it will be healthful.”
He smiles and nods and says, “Yes, I’m sure it will,” but something is missing in his words, and I know I have failed in my answer.
“It’s hard sometimes, not knowing what you want to do, isn’t it?” he says.
I nod, but I’m not sure what he means this time either. He’s already doing what he wants to do, isn’t he? I reach into my pocket and finger the crystal, my little rainbow maker, my good-luck piece.
“Have you decided what you want to do when you grow up?” he asks.
Vague panic clouds my mind as the question hangs in the air. When most adults ask this, I know they don’t really want to know what I want. They expect to hear the usual answer, the approved one, the one that everyone agrees is right for me. Usually, Mother answers for me anyway.
But this time Brian really seems to want to know what I think, and it gives me pause. I have thought about it from time to time, but my plans are all much closer to the present. “I’m going to university,” I say. That much I know. It’s part of the approved answer Mother often tells me, so I feel on firmer ground now. “I like history,” I say. “I like the stories of kings and queens and wars, and the way countries change and the borders swing from side to side. So sometimes you wake up and your official language is one thing. Then twenty years later, you wake up and it’s another.”
He smiles. “Maybe you should study languages so you’ll be prepared.”
“That only works in Europe, but I think I’ll study languages too, anyway. That’s a grand idea.”
“Better to be on the safe side.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes. “When I was your age, I wanted to drive a truck along the Trans-Canada Highway. I imagined pulling that air horn whenever I wanted, making people jump with surprise.” He grinned.
“I want to be a singer,” I say. It just bursts out. I have never told anyone before. “Or a dancer,” I add, an even deeper secret.
“I love to dance.” He jumps to his feet and holds out his hand to me. “May I have this waltz?”
I take his warm hand and stand up, suddenly feeling like Cinderella at the ball, but without all the preparation of ball gowns and coaches and such.
“Just follow along.” He starts to hum something vaguely familiar, and somehow we are dancing, his hand firmly on my back, swirling me slowly in a circle. He smells like cinnamon. This is much better than dancing with chairs.
When he stops, I am dizzy. I touch the wall with one hand while he bows with a flourish, thanks me for the dance, and goes back inside. I hear music almost at once. He, too, I suppose, is practising for the Recital.
I sit there alone for a long time, my eyes closed, basking in the warmth left by his presence. Even though I didn’t guess what he wanted to hear, it didn’t matter. I told him the truth in the end. And we danced! He is amazing. I don’t care if his mother did get a divorce!
12. A KNOCK AT THE DOOR
SOMETIMES I GET TIRED of hearing my own voice inside my head, of talking to the imaginary Gemma, of dancing with chairs. So I listen at the tube in the wall near Baggy Bones’s door and hear Mrs. O’Malley scolding Patricia because she hasn’t done her homework or her husband because he hasn’t done something he was supposed to. Patricia talks back and whines a lot, but he doesn’t say much at all. Patricia practises a simple piece over and over with heavy hands on their small upright piano. No wonder she didn’t enter the Kiwanis way back in February.
I don’t get to see Janet much these days. She’s studying for exams. I’m supposed to be studying,
too. Mother found a retired high school teacher last week while waiting in line at the butcher’s on Church Street, and he is coming in to give me some tests in a while. I’ve been through this before, and it’s not fun. Learning should be fun, Mother says, and usually it is, except for arithmetic. The numbers confuse me. They make no sense. Everyone has tried to help, to show me how simple it is, but each one seems to make it just that much worse. Daddy is the worst of all because he does the sums and problems differently from Jonathan or Mother or the way it says in any of the math books Mother found in a second-hand store. If train A leaves the station at nine a.m., travelling at sixty miles an hour.... I am on the train. I feel it sway. I see the telephone lines dip and rise outside the windows, the way they do when I go down to New Brunswick to visit Grammy. But by this time I have lost track of how fast it’s going or when it gets to the other station. In my experience, trains are never on time anyway, so what’s the point? And what is a number anyway?
Today is Thursday, and I’ve just finished helping Mother hang up the laundry on the line on the porch. She doesn’t have to go to her job anymore, which is good for me, but Mother is very angry at being let go. She says it’s because Aunt Rose can’t find her diploma in the family house in Saint John. Mother raged when she got the letter. She says her family’s neglect is like a conspiracy against her. “They can’t even save my important papers!” she shouts. “One box! That’s all I asked them to do for me, and now they can’t find it. Dorothy’s old essays from high school are carefully preserved, oh yes! But important papers of mine? Of course not! How important could they be if they’re mine? And the school doesn’t exist anymore so I can’t get a copy. Everything is against me!”
She went on and on for days about this “fatal blow,” and I sat there and tried to be sympathetic without getting her angrier. When she’s this way, I’m like the sounding board in our piano, vibrating with every cry and accusation. Her anger is like waves breaking over me, and even though I know I am not to blame, I feel like crying. Now she seems resigned, and I’m happy she’s here with me, even if we’re just doing the laundry.