A Good House (12 page)

He caught on fast, although it was the last thing he was expecting. “Holy shit,” he said.

She gave this right back to him, “Holy shit,” and laughed again.

When he said he wouldn’t let on, she told him, “Go ahead. Let on. Your father isn’t sure just how to do it and it’s likely time. It will be time soon.”

Paul had been taken on at McFarlane’s mill too, a few hours a week, not driving but loading sacks of feed on the trucks for delivery and hanging around the office wasting the bookkeeper’s time with jokes. One day the woman stopped Margaret on the street to tell her that she thought Paul was just wonderful, he was so funny, that he was becoming more and more like Sylvia in that way. But Paul told Margaret the bookkeeper thought everything was wonderful, she was one of those.

He had struggled in grade ten. Margaret had not been able to help him with his French or his Latin but under her eye his geometry marks had improved significantly and after Andrea Sparling materialized it looked like he might pass.

In January, only five months after his mother’s death, he had taken Andrea home from the New Year’s Eve dance at the arena. He had always thought he wanted a tall girl, that he would look stupid with anything else, but Andrea Sparling wasn’t even five feet high. At first when they were dancing they tried to talk but she soon got tired of leaning back to look up at him and finally she just rested her face on his chest. Holding her, he thought, She has such a small back, how could anyone have such a small back.

The New Year’s dance was the big one. You could hardly move around the floor. People had house parties first, then they came over to the arena in laughing carloads. At eleven-thirty the band stopped and everyone got their coats and poured out into the cold night to walk uptown to the main intersection, where Front Street met George, to dance in circles around the lit-up Christmas tree, a twenty-five-foot spruce that had been set in a big tub of sand and secured by guy wires to the highest corners of the two banks. At midnight, the Town Hall siren went off to wail in the new year, 1956. Everyone was supposed to kiss everyone else but Paul lifted Andrea off her feet and held her buried in his arms so no one else could touch her.

Andrea lived out in the country, in the middle of eight hundred acres of corn, and her father kept one of his several old half-tons tuned up so she could come and go without bothering him. Like other farm fathers, he expected his kids to grow up a little quicker than town kids might, mostly because he didn’t have the time or the patience to wait around for it. Paul knew Andrea’s sister’s boyfriend Don, who was in grade twelve. They played on the same hockey team, Paul still a star forward because of his long legs, his long reach, Don a squat brute with a scarred face who played defence, who would take anyone on, who lived to throw his gloves off and get serious. Andrea came to all their games although she didn’t humiliate Paul, didn’t yell at the referee like some of the other girls, or squeal at his accomplishments, or cry into her angora mitts if he got slammed hard into the boards or sliced by some thug’s high stick.

And she became a cheerful fixture at the house when she wasn’t babysitting the Weston tribe after school. Bill started to call her
Andy and she befriended Margaret, pitched in whenever there was work to be done. She jumped up after supper to dry the dishes, put the ironing board away for Margaret, grabbed an extra dust cloth on Saturday mornings. She did her homework with Paul in the dining room, eating the taffied popcorn Margaret made for them.

They appeared to be suited to each other. Andy treated Paul the way a young bride would, enjoying him and pleasing him and teaching him how to please her. They made love more often than any of the others and with the happiest enthusiasm. They parked the half-ton in the drive shed out at the farm and climbed into the back with blankets or they crawled into their own beds when they found themselves alone in an empty house. They were firm in their happiness, oblivious, never gave getting caught a second thought. Andy had no questions to ask Paul about his mother’s death, although she held him when he cried and listened quietly the few times he spoke about it, remembered from one time to the next exactly what he had said, the specific words he’d used.

Margaret knew what they were up to and one night after the dishes were done she quietly reached into her apron pocket and slipped Andy the folded list of contraceptive possibilities that she and Christine Lucas, who was Cooper’s nurse, had come up with between them. She had phoned Christine at home and given her every opportunity to decline the conversation because kids especially were not supposed to be given any official guidance but Christine said she was fine with it. “Go ahead,” she’d told Margaret. “Shoot.”

“I just wanted to check that there wasn’t something I’m unaware of,” Margaret had told her. “Perhaps something new.”

“Nothing new under the sun,” Christine said. “Not that I’ve heard about. And I’d hear.”

They had agreed to list sheaths first, which Christine being Christine called galoshes, then a cap, which she said she could likely get her hands on because there were sometimes one or two lying around the office, then the killer foam, then the Pope’s old standby, rhythm, which Christine said certainly worked for him, and finally they threw in pulling out and abstinence. They’d debated a bit about the pulling out and the abstinence, Margaret’s position being
that there was no sense recommending something that wasn’t likely to happen and Christine’s position being you never knew.

“I heard once that women used to make caps out of lemons cut in half,” Christine said. “Which makes you think about lemonade a little differently.”

“Really?” Margaret said. “I expect my mother might have used a sponge with vinegar.” Until that moment, she had not once wondered how her mother had solved her own problem.

“Then likely mine did too,” Christine said. “No such thing now though.” And then she couldn’t stop herself. “Do you mind me asking who this information is for?”

Margaret did mind and she had prepared herself for the question. But still, she was thoroughly disappointed in Christine. “All and sundry,” she’d said. “All and sundry.”

Andy just smiled as she read the list of possibilities at the kitchen sink. “It’s fine,” she whispered. “I know what I’m supposed to know. I asked Cooper and he filled me in. But thanks.”

“Oh,” was all Margaret could think to say. Cooper was taking his chances. But then again, maybe not. Before Andy could return the list, she thought to ask and was pleased she did, “Maybe you could mention some of this to Daphne?”

“Sure,” Andy told her, still whispering, still smiling. “If you like, I can do that.”

When Paul wasn’t at the mill working, he took it upon himself to stay close to home. Andy had taught him what it meant to be thoughtful and he tried to anticipate Margaret’s needs, to prevent her from doing any of the heavy work. He cut the grass and set up a fan in the kitchen. He and Andy helped her empty and paint the cupboards, chucking the odd things that had been sitting unused at the back of some of the shelves: a cracked teapot, a rusted strainer, two tins filled with years of unrecognized buttons. They made room for Margaret’s good china which had been waiting all this time in boxes in the basement. Knowing because she was told every time she turned around that she would soon have her hands full, Margaret said what she would really like would be to get the living room and dining room and hall painted. Paul and Andy took right
over. They did it all, without any help from Patrick or Murray or Daphne or Bill.

And the three of them drove into Sarnia to buy a white crib with a good mattress, set it up in the big bedroom where it would stay for a while at the foot of Bill and Margaret’s bed. After that, Daphne would be gone or almost ready to go and the plan was that one end of her room would become the baby’s.

Bill had told Paul when he got his grade-ten results in June that if his marks didn’t improve considerably by October he would have to hang up his skates for grade eleven. So Paul was planning to work fairly hard when they went back to school. Now that you no longer needed two languages besides English to do anything, he decided he could afford to drop Latin. He thought things should get easier without the Latin and Andy said she thought so too.

A
T
the beginning of September, Patrick and Murray started their second year at Western. They liked their apartment and they appreciated the casseroles Margaret sent in, the shepherd’s pie and the meat loaf, the baked beans. On their own they ate a lot of bologna and bread, sometimes not even making the effort to slap these together into a sandwich, and spaghetti and meatballs was a time-consuming big deal, a near feast.

They studied hard, compared marks. They brought home armloads of books and went for days without talking unless something actually had to be said. Their papers were twice as good as they needed to be and they both began to rank near the top in all the courses that mattered.

Some weekends Sandra came in on the bus to be with Patrick, telling her parents that she slept on the couch in the living room. She was in grade twelve with Daphne and worked in her aunt’s dress shop after school now, so she had lots of clothes. Murray was happy enough to see Sandra, at least in the beginning. He told her she should bring Daphne with her some weekend, suggested they could go some place, the four of them. But she didn’t bring Daphne and she didn’t say why either, or even if she’d asked her.

After a couple of months of her visits, Murray got tired of
Sandra’s presumption, as if her place in Patrick’s bed gave her the right to make herself entirely at home. He got fed up finding the cereal box empty, or the cheese gone, used as a middle-of-the-night snack, and he got particularly tired of the sounds she made in bed. He practised asking them what the hell they thought the walls were made of and did they think it was enjoyable to listen to, all that groaning and her stupid cat sounds?

He came in drunk one night and said he wanted some ground rules. He said she could come some weekends but not every weekend. And she could damn well bring some groceries with her. And she could try to use a little vocal restraint when she was on her back.

In a quiet, mincing voice that was worse than screaming would have been, Sandra asked him why he didn’t just pretend he couldn’t hear anything. She said that’s what friends did. And then she wanted to know why someone with all the money in the whole God damned world would take the time away from his busy schedule to worry about who ate what. Murray didn’t answer her. He was very unsteady on his feet. He went to bed.

Sandra left in the morning and stayed away for a month. This was what Patrick had been saying he wanted, so it should have made him happy but he soon began to feel marooned without the sex, without sex being there for him, regularly. He sulked around and banged dishes and left the bathroom a roaring mess in the mornings. Murray held back, didn’t say, Tough shit, partner.

Murray did start to bring the occasional girl back after a session at the library or after a party he’d tripped into, usually someone who looked to have a bit of spirit. When he got one of these girls in bed he would always encourage her to let herself go, as if he wanted to free her from some sad old restraint. One night after several loud, boisterous sessions in a row, when Patrick and Murray were both in the tiny kitchen, each of them heading for the fridge, Patrick shoved Murray out of the way and then Murray shoved harder, surprisingly hard, and then they pulled themselves back against opposite walls.

“At least Sandra loves me,” Patrick said. “At least she knows what she wants. She’s not just some little piece, some one-time only…”

“What crap,” Murray said, stepping forward to open the fridge door, taking out a beer and handing it off, taking out another. “You don’t love her and she’s the only one on the planet who doesn’t know it because you haven’t got the stones to make her comprehend. What pure crap.”

Sandra stayed mad. This was her plan gone wrong. Patrick knew that she assumed he was pissed off for the same reason she was angry, that she expected him to do something, to stand up for her, to make it right. But he didn’t. Murray had given him his chance and, unfortunate as it was, he pretty much had to take it. Sandra was going to have to stay mad.

He had promised in September to take her to the Christmas ball with another couple, some cousin of hers who was in fourth-year law and his girlfriend from McGill. He believed he should stick to that promise, so Sandra came into the city and dragged him downtown to rent a tux to go with the heavy peau-de-soie dress she had just finished. The dress was a soft sea green to set off her dark red hair and it had a scooped neckline that exposed her freckles and her cleavage, which she darkened just before they left the apartment with brown eye shadow, a little trick she said she’d recently learned.

Before the dance, the four of them went out to a new, classy restaurant for dinner where the guys talked about law and drank too many Rusty Nails, a two-hour start that more or less ruined the rest of the evening. Patrick was hanging over the toilet in his rented tux when Sandra went out the apartment door for the last time, her hair still sprayed to perfection and her sea green dress still beautiful, far too beautiful for rejection.

A week later Murray’s father arrived out of the blue to have a talk with Patrick. He climbed up the steep derelict stairs to the back door to ask Patrick if he had a few minutes and then told him to get his coat so they could sit in the Buick to have their talk. Sitting in the car he explained to Patrick that he understood he was doing very well, and he asked if he thought a further degree would be useful to him. Patrick confessed that he had been encouraged by one of his professors to keep going, that law looked interesting. Mr. McFarlane told Patrick that he expected nothing in return for what
had been provided so far but perhaps they should look at future support as a business deal. He said he would be pleased to see Patrick continue if he would agree to make reasonable repayments when he was properly established, as he most surely would be, in almost no time. He said, “Business goes in cycles and we’re in a slight slump at the mill now, maybe you know that.”