Duet for Three (24 page)

“And what about me? What am I supposed to do?”

“Don't worry, I'll send money. We can get lawyers and make some kind of settlement. And you know, you can go back to teaching. It's not as if you can't do anything.”

The unconcern with which he could dispose of her! Just plop her back in the classroom, send her a few dollars to raise their child.

“I won't give you a divorce. I won't have that.”

“Oh, June, be reasonable.”

“No, I don't believe in it. And,” she went on, not interested right at the moment in dealing with the future, “I won't have your money, either. If you're going, just go. I don't want anything of yours.”

“Why not get a divorce then? As long as we're married,” and oh, she thought, wasn't this sly, “we're connected.”

“You will be, not me. I've kept my promises and done my duty, I have nothing to blame myself for. And I don't want you stopping off to say goodbye to Frances.”

“I already did, when I took her to your mother's.”

“You mean my mother knows?”

“Of course not. I didn't say why, I just said goodbye. You can tell her what you want, it's up to you. I'm going to pack.”

She could hear his footsteps up there, drawers opening and closing. It occurred to her that, really, he wouldn't have much to take with him. He didn't seem to have much of his own except clothes here.

What she had forgotten to ask, of course, was what brought this on. Surely something insignificant, or else she would have noticed changes. Something this drastic didn't come all of a sudden. Instead of saying, Leave, I can't stop you, she should have asked, Why? It must be reparable, given the will to repair. Nobody throws out a marriage as if it were an old dishcloth or a notebook that's been filled up.

How could he possibly have decided he wanted a divorce?

Oh. Oh, now she knew, now she saw it.

Because think what divorce meant. It meant going to court and people testifying. About infidelity. Adultery must be proven for divorce. He would know that. So he must have done that.

He spoke of pleasure, being happy. He must think mere pleasure is happiness. He wanted easy pleasures, and his happiness would be insubstantial. Like him, it would be surface flash. Like some of those women they met on the street.

She shot raging to the bottom of the stairs. “All right then, who is she? You come and tell me who she is.”

She could see this was it, across all the distance between them, him at the top of the stairs and her at the bottom. His eyes shifted. “Animal,” she spat.

“Now, June, that's not it.” But he wasn't coming closer, he wasn't coming down toward her. “It's us, not anybody else.”

“Liar. Don't lie to me. You couldn't even suggest a divorce otherwise. Oh, I see it now.”

Now he shouted back, as if he still thought he could make her think this was her fault. “Don't be so goddamned righteous! What do you know?”

Now she would not have him back. The contamination, just being in the same house with him. Imagine, she thought, curling herself on the chesterfield, that she had once felt sorry for him, in his lonely hotel rooms. She would have liked to sleep, but how could she close her eyes against all those mean rooms, and all those mean acts?

Early in the morning, she heard him thumping his cases down the stairs, out the door, into the car. She made tea for herself in the kitchen, and admired the steadiness of her hands. She was afraid, though, that she might be sick, right there, sitting at the table.

“June?” He was standing in the kitchen doorway. “I'm going now. I've only taken what's mine. June, I'm sorry, you know. I wish we could have done better, but look, you're still young, and after all, it's not as if you've been happy with me. Or even,” and a rusty razor-blade of bitterness entered his voice, “as if you needed me for anything.”

“And a good thing, too, as it turns out.”

“You'll find somebody else, you'll see.” Now he was being hopeful on her behalf. “Maybe it'll be different with somebody else.”

“It's you that wants to be different. I am who I am.”

He sighed, shrugged, said, “Oh, never mind. I just wanted to say it's too bad, that's all.”

These seemed poor last words, but apparently that's what they were, because he was gone. She heard the front door close, and just for a moment felt the panic of being left. Just for an instant her body was going to run out after him, and she was going to call to him and drag him back and keep him here because, whatever else, he was her husband and all that meant.

But not hers, after all. Her body, which had half risen, sat back down.

She heard the car door slam, and the motor start, and the tires on the gravel, and that was it. She thought, “But there's so much more I could have said.”

Last words: theirs hadn't captured at all what she wanted to express; although she couldn't think just what words might have suited. But last words, surely, should wrap things up, finish them off properly so that a person wasn't left sitting around feeling as if she might be going to have a heart attack.

Because of the tea, she had to go the bathroom. It was ill-timed, this sort of ordinary demand, when everything else was extraordinary.

However, in the bathroom she saw the dot of shaving cream on the mirror, and the trace of hair oil in the sink, and she cleaned all day like fury. And really she has done pretty well, over the years, at not thinking about it very much at all.

SEVENTEEN

It was annoying — actually it hurt a bit — to hear from the women clustering in her bakeshop on a Monday morning that her son-in-law had left her daughter. They regarded Aggie curiously, although not necessarily unkindly, and said, “What a shame. What does June think she'll do?”

“I have no idea.” How did they know so soon? Barney hadn't heard when he visited this morning or he would have told her, gently. And only last night she'd spoken with June on the phone to ask about keeping Frances over, and really she might have said something. Certainly her voice had sounded odd, but with June that could mean anything — that Herb was out playing poker again, or that she'd spilled something on her blouse that would leave a stain.

But after all, poor tight-lipped, tight-souled daughter. Tenderness wouldn't help, though. A bit late, and June had too much pride to appreciate Aggie trundling over to offer — what? Condolences and sympathy? Still, Aggie thought, “My heart goes out to her.” And then, “So that's what that expression feels like” — as if her heart had walked its own way over to June's.

“Do you know what happened?” the women asked. As if she would say if she did. But she had a pretty good idea. She'd sized up Herb at first glance, and warned June as best she could. It was all very well for Aggie to like him, but it was June who'd married him. She hadn't considered this precisely, but now could see clearly enough that a fellow like Herb was unlikely to have gone to all those movies he mentioned on his own, or eaten all those suppers on his own. It should have been obvious he would also not have slept alone. Also, maybe, that June was geared against pleasure. Poor June. Well, maybe poor Herb as well, but it was her own daughter who had nothing to fall back on, her own daughter who was adrift.

Whose fault? Whose fault that a flashy, fleshy man and June had come together and then come unstuck? Fault everywhere, tracking right back into this very house like sandy footprints; Aggie's house, where a little, thin, fatherless girl had pretty much had to raise herself.

And now June herself had a child, and no job, and no husband. Surely Herb, even if he were well-intentioned, and who knew if he was, could not support a separate household.

Frances was playing in the back yard. Had he and June made some arrangement for her care between them? Surely nothing so sophisticated. Aggie could not imagine the sort of weekend they must have had. June would not have taken this easily.

How amazingly old she looked when she came to pick up Frances. Bleak eyes in a pale face. She looked, Aggie thought, as if she had learned too much too suddenly. People get permanently hurt that way, the shock, their systems can't absorb so much. It might be better, after all, to learn more slowly, spreading disaster over a decade or so.

“Oh, June,” she said, and impulsively embraced her. She was sure that briefly there was a struggle between a June who might, just once, weep on her mother's shoulder, and the June who would never, in her twenty-eight years, have dreamed of doing such a thing. The latter, the stiff one with pride, the one, Aggie reflected sadly, who did not have much reason to believe her mother had the gift of comfort, straightened and tightened and said, “I just came to get Frances. I'm sorry I couldn't get her sooner, I hope she hasn't been in the way.”

“Frances is never in the way. You can leave her longer if you want. Why don't you stay to supper, and then you won't have to get anything ready?” Something, surely, she could offer — food at least. A more solid and trustworthy comforter anyway, she'd always found, than arms.

“Thank you, but no. We'll go home.”

“Well, if there's anything you want ...”

“All right. Thanks.”

And Aggie did have to admire the way June went out, chin up, to collect Frances, and came back through the shop, and greeted two customers quite coolly, and kissed Aggie briefly on the cheek and said firmly, “I'll be talking to you, Mother,” and walked briskly out the door and down the walk, holding Frances's hand, making the child run a little to keep up. Aggie was quite irritated when one of her customers said, “She seems to be taking it well, doesn't she?” Whose damn business was it, and who the hell did the woman think she was?

Her love for June might not be on the scale of what she felt for Frances, but it was certainly ferocious and protective. Right now, at any rate. Maybe need was the root of love. Maybe helplessness, or blankness, triggered it. Oh, but surely not; how terrible that sounded, how bleak and cynical.

But it might be true that if June had ever been more helpless, she might have drawn more affection. Maybe if she had felt ardently loved by someone other than a father who died and a God who wasn't exactly on the spot, she would have turned out lovable.

Aggie sighed; back to fault and blame. But she would like to help. June need not, after all, be entirely alone. A mother was a mother, and however odd this amputated sort of family was, surely that essence of being there wiped away the rest, if it came to the crunch. Would June feel that? This was, after all, her crunch.

Beyond the immediate shock, and looking ten years older than she really was: what was June going to do? How would she manage? What a terrible spot to be in, abandoned with a small child.

But how stupid; this was the same spot Aggie'd been in herself once, and she'd managed, had she not, quite on her own? And she had not had a mother handy to fall back on. But the only request June made for some time was help with Frances. “She's so active,” she explained, sounding limp and exhausted.

It was a pleasure, anyway, to keep Frances overnight on occasion. She slept in June's old room, and sat up in bed asking for stories. Sometimes, sitting back on a hard old wooden chair she'd brought upstairs, Aggie told stories from her own life. Colors and smells — trying to describe to the child the smell of a field when the hay has just been cut, the way rabbits would dart out of the paths of the stolid old workhorses, whose flanks might twitch with the surprise, but who never shied or bolted. The cats in the barn, living on mice, and milk directly from the cows. A big grey rat found dead in the cellar, and her mother picking it up by the tail and carrying it firmly outside to the barn, setting it down and telling the boys to bury it, but not to touch it, and then going back to the house and scrubbing and scrubbing her hands. It occurred to Aggie that there wasn't much that had scared her mother. She tried to tell Frances how it was to have acres to play in, instead of a yard. “We'll go there some time and you'll see.” Well, she thought, they should. A child should know her own family; and Aggie might see something new herself, with eyes that could recognize love. Although it would be too bad if she found out it was only sentiment.

Her stories lacked plots, but Frances didn't seem to mind. “Do you think I could jump across the creek, Grandma?” she asked, and Aggie eyed her. “Yes, I think you just about could. But if you missed, you'd only get your feet wet. It wouldn't matter.”

At some point, the child would be bound to ask about her father. “What do you want said?” Aggie asked June, who shrugged wearily. “I don't know. Just that he's gone, I guess.”

At least when Frances did ask, it was Aggie she went to, not June, who was still delicately if bravely balanced, like a child trying on her mother's high heels. Teetering around, hanging on but barely, the effort showing.

“When's my daddy coming home?”

“Well, pudding.” Well, pudding, what? “I don't think he is, you know. I think maybe he's gone away.”

“Oh no, Grandma, he always goes away. And then he comes home. He brings me presents.”

“Yes, I know. What kind of presents?”

“Last time he gave me a chain to put keys on, and he said he'd get me some keys, too. Before, he brought me crayons.”

“Well, tomorrow maybe you and I can find you some keys, would you like that?”

“Yes. But what's my daddy going to bring?”

“Oh, pudding, your daddy's moved away. He's not coming home this time.”

“But sometime.” Frances was nodding, so sure.

“No, honey, not sometime.”

“Not ever?”

“I'm afraid not.”

So would she cry? Or turn away, disbelieving and mistrusting? Demand her mother? If she cried, Aggie could hold her. Otherwise she wasn't quite sure what to do.

Anyway, Frances didn't do any of those things: just stared for a minute, and then said only, “Oh.” Her eyes unfocussed a little, as if they were interpreting something inside, not seeing out. That was all.

“Do you think that's strange?” Aggie asked Barney the next morning. “Do you think I said the right thing?”

“I doubt there's a right thing to say. It's bound to hurt, isn't it, however you put it? I think you did fine.”

She was so grateful to have a friend to reassure her that she did her best.

He also said, in reference to other matters in his own life, “Well, what's done is done. You can't make things happen again so you can do better. You can only go on.” She agreed; regrets were a waste of time. Only she would hate to hurt Frances, however inadvertently.

Just what did June feel for Frances? Did she love her, the way Aggie meant the word now, or had she caught somewhere along the line Aggie's own sort of detachment from a child of immediate flesh? Surely that wasn't something passed on, though, like blue eyes or broad shoulders.

Surely, too, such a feeling was not irrevocable. Did Aggie not, now, looking at her dull-eyed daughter, wish for some offering that would help? Did she not sympathize with so much suffering?

“There's something,” June said firmly, arriving one evening after the shop was closed, “I need to talk to you about.” Aggie looked at her alertly, ready, she thought, for whatever might be asked. “I've been talking to people at the school board. There's an opening I can have this fall, teaching Grades 4 and 5.”

Thank heavens, action finally, some steps toward survival. “Is that what you want to do, then?”

“No, but I don't have much choice.” But still that bitterness, instead of healthy rage.

“Is Herb not sending money?”

“Two cheques so far. I ripped them up and mailed the pieces back.”

“So you know where he is?”

“No, I just sent them to his company. They'll mail them on. He wants a divorce, too, but he won't get one.”

“Why ever not?”

“For one thing, they probably wouldn't give me a job back if I was divorced. Anyway, marriage is marriage. There are promises made.”

“But surely they're broken now. What difference would divorce make?”

“Oh, never mind, you wouldn't understand. Anyway, that isn't what I wanted to talk about.” Deep breath. Aggie couldn't think what June might be going to ask for that was so difficult.

“If I go back to work, I won't have anybody to look after Frances, for one thing. She'll only be in kindergarten this fall, just half days.”

“Well, that's easy enough. She can come here, it's no trouble and I'm glad to have her.” And wouldn't it be nice, hours a day with Frances?

“Yes, but that's not it. The house is in Herb's name. I saw a lawyer yesterday, because I thought I'd better get things like that straightened out, and he said if it's in Herb's name, I don't have any rights in it.”

“You mean you've nothing to show for all those years? You don't get anything out of it?”

“Apparently.” June shrugged. “So I have to start again, and I have a proposition I'd like you to think over.”

Again she came to a halt. Aggie wondered impatiently if she was supposed to guess, and then was ashamed of her impatience.

“Can I come back here?”

Could she have heard right? She leaned back in her chair, mouth opening in quick dismay before she could stop herself. June leaned forward, talking earnestly and quickly, now that she'd gone so far.

“You could look after Frances while I'm working, and I'd pay you rent and board; it's not that I want something for nothing. It's just, I can't stay in the house and I can't afford to do anything else yet. It'd only be till I work out something better, just for a little while.”

Well now. She must hate Herb quite a lot, then. She must have weighed them, his cheques against Aggie's charity and their long unhappy history, and decided on Aggie. Was that flattering?

Oh, but think what it meant: so many changes. Just having more things in the house, as well as bodies. Clothes and toys, footsteps and voices, a whole upheaval. No more silence or solitude. Her life would no longer be her own; but then, maybe it would be pleasant to share it. And only for a little while, after all. Until June got on her feet.

How selfish could she get? Hadn't she wondered how she could help? Hadn't she thought that help was what a mother could reasonably be asked for? Just, she hadn't expected anything quite so large.

“You don't need to say right away, Mother. I know it's a lot to ask.”

“No, of course you and Frances are both welcome, naturally. Where else? And I wouldn't consider taking money. If you're trying to save to get back on your feet, you might as well save it all.”