A Bird in the House (9 page)

“Where does he get his lines, Edna?” Jimmy was saying. “He’s like old-time melodrama.”

“Yeh, I know.” Aunt Edna sounded annoyed. “But let me say it, eh?”

“Sorry. Honest. Listen, can’t you even –”

Scuffling sounds, then my aunt’s nervous whisper.

“Not here, Jimmy. Please. You don’t understand what they’re –”

“I understand, all right. Why in God’s name do you stay, Edna? Aren’t you ever coming back? That’s what I want to know.”

“With no job? Don’t make me laugh.”

“I could help out, at first anyway –”

“Jimmy, don’t talk like a lunatic. Do you really think I could?”

“Oh hell, I suppose not. Well, look at it this way. What if I wasn’t cut out for the unattached life after all? What if the old leopard actually changed his spots, kiddo? What would you say to that?”

A pause, as though Aunt Edna were mulling over his words.

“That’ll be the day,” she replied. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Well, Jesus, lady,” he said, “I’m not getting down on
my knees. Tell me one thing, though – don’t you miss me at all? Don’t you miss – everything? C’mon now – don’t you? Not even a little bit?”

Another pause. She could not seem to make up her mind how to respond to the teasing quality of his voice.

“Yeh, I lie awake nights,” she said at last, sarcastically.

He laughed. “Same old Edna. Want me to tell you something, kiddo? I think you’re scared.”

“Scared?” she said scornfully. “Me? That’ll be the fair and frosty Friday.”

Although I spent so much of my life listening to conversations which I was not meant to overhear, all at once I felt, for the first time, sickened by what I was doing. I left my listening post and tiptoed into Aunt Edna’s room. I wondered if someday I would be the one who was doing the talking, while another child would be doing the listening. This gave me an unpleasantly eerie feeling. I tried on Aunt Edna’s lipstick and rouge, but my heart was not in it.

When I went downstairs again, Jimmy Lorimer was just leaving. Aunt Edna went to her room and closed the door. After a while she came out and asked me if I would mind sleeping in the spare bedroom that night after all, so that was what I did.

I woke in the middle of the night. When I sat up, feeling strange because I was not in my own bed at home, I saw through the window a glancing light on the snow. I got up and peered out, and there were the northern lights whirling across the top of the sky like lightning that never descended to earth. The yard of the Brick House looked huge, a white desert, and the pale gashing streaks of light pointed up the caverns and the hollowed places where the wind had sculptured the snow.

I could not stand being alone another second, so I walked
in my bare feet along the hall. From Grandfather’s room came the sound of grumbling snores, and from Grandmother’s room no sound at all. I stopped beside the door of Aunt Edna’s room. It seemed to me that she would not mind if I entered quietly, so as not to disturb her, and crawled in beside her. Maybe she would even waken and say, “It’s okay, kiddo – your dad phoned after you’d gone to sleep – they got back from Freehold all right.”

Then I heard her voice, and the held-in way she was crying, and the name she spoke, as though it hurt her to speak it even in a whisper.

Like some terrified poltergeist, I flitted back to the spare room and whipped into bed. I wanted only to forget that I had heard anything, but I knew I would not forget. There arose in my mind, mysteriously, the picture of a barbaric queen, someone who had lived a long time ago. I could not reconcile this image with the known face, nor could I disconnect it. I thought of my aunt, her sturdy laughter, the way she tore into the housework, her hands and feet which she always disparagingly joked about, believing them to be clumsy. I thought of the story in the scribbler at home. I wanted to get home quickly, so I could destroy it.

Whenever Grandmother Connor was ill, she would not see any doctor except my father. She did not believe in surgery, for she thought it was tampering with the Divine Intention, and she was always afraid that Dr. Cates would operate on her without her consent. She trusted my father implicitly, and when he went into the room where she lay propped up on pillows, she would say, “Here’s Ewen – now everything will be fine,” which both touched and alarmed my father, who said he hoped she wasn’t putting her faith in a broken reed.

Late that winter, she became ill again. She did not go into hospital, so my mother, who had been a nurse, moved down to the Brick House to look after her. My brother and I were left in the adamant care of Grandmother MacLeod. Without my mother, our house seemed like a museum, full of dead and meaningless objects, vases and gilt-framed pictures and looming furniture, all of which had to be dusted and catered to, for reasons which everyone had forgotten. I was not allowed to see Grandmother Connor, but every day after school I went to the Brick House to see my mother. I always asked impatiently, “When is Grandmother going to be better?” and my mother would reply, “I don’t know, dear. Soon, I hope.” But she did not sound very certain, and I imagined the leaden weeks going by like this, with her away, and Grandmother MacLeod poking her head into my bedroom doorway each morning and telling me to be sure to make my bed because a slovenly room meant a slovenly heart.

But the weeks did not go by like this. One afternoon when I arrived at the Brick House, Grandfather Connor was standing out on the front porch. I was startled, because he was not wearing his great bear coat. He wore no coat at all, only his dingy serge suit, although the day was fifteen below zero. The blown snow had sifted onto the porch and lay in thin drifts. He stood there by himself, his yellowish-white hair plumed by a wind which he seemed not to notice, his bony and still handsome face not averted at all from the winter. He looked at me as I plodded up the path and the front steps.

“Vanessa, your grandmother’s dead,” he said.

Then, as I gazed at him, unable to take in the significance of what he had said, he did a horrifying thing. He gathered me into the relentless grip of his arms. He bent low over me, and sobbed against the cold skin of my face.

I wanted only to get away, to get as far away as possible and never come back. I wanted desperately to see my mother, yet I felt I could not enter the house, not ever again. Then my mother opened the front door and stood there in the doorway, her slight body shivering. Grandfather released me, straightened, became again the carved face I had seen when I approached the house.

“Father,” my mother said. “Come into the house. Please.”

“In a while, Beth,” he replied tonelessly. “Never you mind.”

My mother held out her hands to me, and I ran to her. She closed the door and led me into the living room. We both cried, and yet I think I cried mainly because she did, and because I had been shocked by my grandfather. I still could not believe that anyone I cared about could really die.

Aunt Edna came into the living room. She hesitated, looking at my mother and me. Then she turned and went back to the kitchen, stumblingly. My mother’s hands made hovering movements and she half rose from the chesterfield, then she held me closely again.

“It’s worse for Edna,” she said. “I’ve got you and Roddie, and your dad.”

I did not fully realise yet that Grandmother Connor would never move around this house again, preserving its uncertain peace somehow. Yet all at once I knew how it would be for Aunt Edna, without her, alone in the Brick House with Grandfather Connor. I had not known at all that a death would be like this, not only one’s own pain, but the almost unbearable knowledge of that other pain which could not be reached nor lessened.

My mother and I went out to the kitchen, and the three of us sat around the oilcloth-covered table, scarcely talking
but needing one another at least to be there. We heard the front door open, and Grandfather Connor came back into the house. He did not come out to the kitchen, though. He went, as though instinctively, to his old cavern. We heard him walking heavily down the basement steps.

“Edna – should we ask him if he wants to come and have some tea?” my mother said. “I hate to see him going like that – there –”

Aunt Edna’s face hardened.

“I don’t want to see him, Beth,” she replied, forcing the words out. “I can’t. Not yet. All I’d be able to think of is how he was – with her.”

“Oh honey, I know,” my mother said. “But you mustn’t let yourself dwell on that now.”

“The night Jimmy was here,” my aunt said distinctly, “she asked Father to be nice, for her sake. For her sake, Beth. For the sake of all the years, if they’d meant anything at all. But he couldn’t even do that. Not even that.”

Then she put her head down on the table and cried in a way I had never heard any person cry before, as though there were no end to it anywhere.

I was not allowed to attend Grandmother Connor’s funeral, and for this I was profoundly grateful, for I had dreaded going. The day of the funeral, I stayed alone in the Brick House, waiting for the family to return. My Uncle Terence, who lived in Toronto, was the only one who had come from a distance. Uncle Will lived in Florida, and Aunt Florence was in England, both too far away. Aunt Edna and my mother were always criticising Uncle Terence and also making excuses for him. He drank more than was good for him – this was one of the numerous fractured bones in the family skeleton which
I was not supposed to know about. I was fond of him for the same reason I was fond of Grandfather’s horse-trader brother, my Great-Uncle Dan – because he had gaiety and was publicly reckoned to be no good.

I sat in the dining room beside the gilt-boned cage that housed the canary. Yesterday, Aunt Edna, cleaning here, had said, “What on earth are we going to do with the canary? Maybe we can find somebody who would like it.”

Grandfather Connor had immediately lit into her. “Edna, your mother liked that bird, so it’s staying, do you hear?”

When my mother and Aunt Edna went upstairs to have a cigarette, Aunt Edna had said, “Well, it’s dandy that he’s so set on the bird now, isn’t it? He might have considered that a few years earlier, if you ask me.”

“Try to be patient with him,” my mother had said. “He’s feeling it, too.”

“I guess so,” Aunt Edna had said in a discouraged voice. “I haven’t got Mother’s patience, that’s all. Not with him, nor with any man.”

And I had been reminded then of the item I had seen not long before in the Winnipeg
Free Press
, on the social page, telling of the marriage of James Reilly Lorimer to Somebody-or-other. I had rushed to my mother with the paper in my hand, and she had said, “I know, Vanessa. She knows, too. So let’s not bring it up, eh?”

The canary, as usual, was not in a vocal mood, and I sat beside the cage dully, not caring, not even trying to prod the creature into song. I wondered if Grandmother Connor was at this very moment in heaven, that dubious place.

“She believed, Edna,” my mother had said defensively. “What right have we to say it isn’t so?”

“Oh, I know,” Aunt Edna had replied. “But can you take it in, really, Beth?”

“No, not really. But you feel, with someone like her – it would be so awful if it didn’t happen, after she’d thought like that for so long.”

“She wouldn’t know,” Aunt Edna had pointed out.

“I guess that’s what I can’t accept,” my mother had said slowly. “I still feel she must be somewhere.”

I wanted now to hold my own funeral service for my grandmother, in the presence only of the canary. I went to the bookcase where she kept her Bible, and looked up Ecclesiastes. I intended to read the part about the mourners going about the streets, and the silver cord loosed and the golden bowl broken, and the dust returning to the earth as it was and the spirit unto God who gave it. But I got stuck on the first few lines, because it seemed to me, frighteningly, that they were being spoken in my grandmother’s mild voice –
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come out
–

Then, with a burst of opening doors, the family had returned from the funeral. While they were taking off their coats, I slammed the Bible shut and sneaked it back into the bookcase without anyone’s having noticed.

Grandfather Connor walked over to me and placed his hands on my shoulders, and I could do nothing except endure his touch.

“Vanessa –” he said gruffly, and I had at the time no idea how much it cost him to speak at all, “she was an angel. You remember that.”

Then he went down to the basement by himself. No one attempted to follow him, or to ask him to come and join the rest of us. Even I, in the confusion of my lack of years, realised that this would have been an impossibility.
He was, in some way, untouchable. Whatever his grief was, he did not want us to look at it and we did not want to look at it, either.

Uncle Terence went straight into the kitchen, brought out his pocket flask, and poured a hefty slug of whiskey for himself. He did the same for my mother and father and Aunt Edna.

“Oh Glory,” Aunt Edna said with a sigh, “do I ever need this. All the same, I feel we shouldn’t, right immediately afterwards. You know – considering how she always felt about it. Supposing Father comes up –”

“It’s about time you quit thinking that way, Edna,” Uncle Terence said.

Aunt Edna felt in her purse for a cigarette. Uncle Terence reached over and lit it for her. Her hands were unsteady.

“You’re telling me,” she said.

Uncle Terence gave me a quizzical and yet resigned look, and I knew then that my presence was placing a constraint upon them. When my father said he had to go back to the hospital, I used his departure to slip upstairs to my old post, the deserted stove-pipe hole. I could no longer eavesdrop with a clear conscience, but I justified it now by the fact that I had voluntarily removed myself from the kitchen, knowing they would not have told me to run along, not today.

“An angel,” Aunt Edna said bitterly. “Did you hear what he said to Vanessa? It’s a pity he never said as much to Mother once or twice, isn’t it?”

“She knew how much he thought of her,” my mother said.