A Good House (14 page)

She did have a memory of the Chambers kids on the bleachers those summers when the men were away. They would already be bathed and ready for bed, Paul and Daphne wrapped in blankets in their grandparents’ arms, Patrick running loose with the other boys. Banks of park lights had been installed to illuminate the diamond for night games, sometimes there were two a night, and she did remember warming up behind the bleachers, glancing over once in a while to see how the other game was going and seeing Sylvia on first base slamming a fist into her glove, yelling ball talk with the other women, jumping funny little jumps on the bag to keep herself revved up.

And what’s a lie, she thought, against everything else? Against Sylvia’s bone-thin dying? Or Bill’s having to learn to love a second woman a second way? Against her own stale life above the Hydro office, the small rooms holding like swamp gas the uncut smell of her own body, her own habits, her own little difficulties. Against her living-room view of the cenotaph, where a name she had once said softly and often was etched two inches high in the granite column, her view of that column fouled by filthy windows she could neither open nor get anyone to wash. Against the secret, muffled, after-the-war footsteps of a man not her husband mounting the stairs late in those long evenings above the Hydro office, the pleasure of his company, his praise, and then the hush of broken, wondrous promises. What, pray tell, is a lie?

She was ninety per cent certain Patrick would never mention the championship to anyone, he wasn’t that type, and even if it did get mentioned one day, she could rear up and say, Sure we did, of course we did. She could talk about those years long enough to make them all believe they misremembered. And they would defer to her, just as surely as they watched her. Truth be told, she thought they should be ready to offer a few lies on her behalf.

Alone now, she turned from the window and looked down at the basket at her feet. And then she snapped her sudsy wrist hard in the air above the basket, releasing a cluster of rainbow bubbles that fell in slow time down to her perfectly formed Sally who, sleeping, could neither reach to touch them nor watch with an innocent’s bewilderment their bursting.

T
HEY
rented Dunworkin for the entire month of July. Other years Bill had taken his holidays when they were at the lake, but because it was only a fifteen-minute drive from town and because he couldn’t see sitting around on his duff for four whole weeks, he decided not to that summer. The plan was that he would go back and forth to work every day and Margaret and Sally would stay put. The rest could come and go as it suited them.

Dunworkin was one of the oldest and biggest cottages on the beach. It was painted a muted light green, and it sat in the dunes, was tucked into the grassy dunes for protection from the winds off the water. As part of the deal, a fourteen-foot cedar-strip outboard with an easily managed twenty-five-horse motor sat beached on the sand in front of the cottage, and after an evening spin out on Lake Huron, when it was time to make the turn to come in for a drink, Bill sometimes made a game of testing the strength of his middle-aged eyesight against the block letters painted on a board above the screen-porch door. Like most of the other cottages up and down the beach, Dunworkin had always had its name, was probably named soon after it was built in the twenties, or maybe before, when it was still just someone’s good idea.

It was a magnificent cottage. Across the front, a deep, screened-in, slightly sloping porch with hinged board shutters that in good weather were left hooked up to the ceiling held a picnic table for card games and Margaret’s jigsaw puzzle, several Muskoka chairs painted either a deep cherry red or black, an old canvas hammock at one end and at the other a swinging couch suspended from the ceiling on rusty chains.

Inside the cottage proper there was a large main room with two old maroon sofas and several low-slung upholstered chairs, none of
which matched each other or anything else, and beside these a few rickety little tables, each with an ashtray, one with a stack of
Reader’s Digest
s and
National Geographic
s for rainy days. The ceiling was a grid of rough-weathered beams and painted plywood. The walls had been finished with good pine panelling and the floor was covered with broad pine planks. Visible footpaths had been worn into the planks’ grain from the front door back into the kitchen and from the kitchen past the big oak dining table to the open staircase.

The fieldstones in the fireplace on the end wall had been darkened with years of smoke curling out before the fire got going properly and above them a heavy, broad mantel held a spread-out collection of necessities and treasures: pink shells from some ocean, four arrowheads, a red flyswatter, a flashlight, a transistor radio, a small, decorative Japanese fan, and a large box of Eddy matches. Beside the fireplace the owner had left a well-stacked supply of dry wood and a beat-up wicker laundry basket filled with newspaper and kindling.

There was cottage art. Hanging above the mantel a large, heavily framed oil depicted a man in a small boat who was making his way through dense, drifting fog toward a looming clipper ship, the man sitting hunched against the elements, the long oars just lifted from the water, the only real light the painter allowed caught in the drops falling from the oars back into the sea. On the wall at the kitchen door a small framed needlepoint sampler firmly admonished all who entered to leave their troubles behind them and taped to the wall beside the stove a 1963 calendar, courtesy Trevor Hanley’s Chev Olds, had been turned to July, to Saskatchewan. It was the kind of calendar with each month of the year matched to a picturesque colour photograph of a touristy scene from one of the provinces and July was an aerial shot of two lonely but evidently prosperous prairie farms, each of them surrounded by a rectangular shelterbelt of trees and by worked fields, muted tan or green. A small river twisted across the photograph and the sky above the fields was a western summer blue, bouncing with light. And hanging perpetually crooked on the pine wall beside the front door there was another, quite-a-bit-smaller oil painting, this one of a tiny-waisted turn-of-the-century woman dressed in a voluptuous rose dress and a wide-brimmed pink
hat. She carried a parasol against the sun and offered the room an old-fashioned, come-hither smile. Bill named her the Tart of Dunworkin and straightened her every time he went out the door.

Compared to town, the kitchen was primitive but adequate. There was hardly any counter space but there were two large banks of pine cupboards, both hot and cold running water at a deep porcelain sink, and a fridge new enough to have a decent freezer across the bottom. The prize was the stove. It was an old six-burner with both a baking and a warming oven. In May, when they’d come out looking for a cottage to rent, it was the stove that had clinched it for Margaret. This was a stove she would have traded her own for.

Upstairs there were five bedrooms and a screened-in sleeping porch that sloped down toward the beach in agreement with the porch below it. There were beds of every kind, old double beds very high off the floor that had once been good pieces of furniture, likely picked up at auction sales, newer single beds on wheels, a rollaway, three army cots.

When the owner had shown them the cottage, he had followed them from room to room and Margaret hadn’t had the nerve to inspect the mattresses with him standing right there, but as soon as they’d brought everything in from the cars, the first thing she did was go upstairs to lift and turn each of them. When Daphne brought up the basket of sheets and blankets, Margaret told her she had been hoping for something fresher on the other side but these warhorses had been turned before, many times. Then she said they would just have to do, wouldn’t they?

Everyone came for the first weekend, all eleven of them. Bill and Margaret and Sally, who was six, Patrick and Mary who were to be married in two weeks in the chapel at Springbank Park in London, Murray on his own again because his wife Charlotte was in Hamilton at her parents’, Paul and Andy with their arms full of Neil and Krissy and all their attendant gear, Andy pregnant again with what she called their last baby for sure, and Daphne.

None of them mourned Murray’s wife’s absence. He had brought Charlotte up the previous summer, just before they were married in Toronto, and everyone had been first surprised and
then disappointed. Charlotte dove right in, and while they understood that working for a television station might make someone necessarily forthright, she couldn’t seem to have a conversation without trying to enlarge herself. She paid an extraordinary amount of attention to her appearance, changed her clothes three times a day, expected other people to change theirs. She sat at the supper table puzzled as if she didn’t quite know how to manage just one fork, dropped names like Tolstoy and Chanel and Yves St. Laurent and Bloomingdale’s, drank only what she called the best Scotch, assumed ignorance, presumed envy. Looking across the supper table at Sally, who at five was freckled and bony and sometimes clumsy and often left in general but happy disrepair, Charlotte told them that she herself had been an unusually beautiful child. She was without question pretty, with her mink-brown eyes and her snub nose and her white, gleaming teeth and she did have the body of a slightly underfed showgirl. But she wasn’t the first good-looking person they’d had a chance to eat supper with. They’d never heard anyone say such a thing.

After Murray decided to marry her, he told them that her father had three car dealerships in Hamilton, that he’d got a pretty good start in the fifties. He said her mother was a great woman, very funny, and a big volunteer. None of this explained anything.

Patrick in particular detested Charlotte and was always ready to call her the Queen if Murray wasn’t around to hear it. Bill and Paul simply ducked out when she came into a room, the sight of her reminding them always of some important thing they’d forgotten they had to do. Daphne tried the hardest, taking the trouble to slip Charlotte a few easy clues. After the third meal at Margaret’s table in town she handed her a fresh tea towel, meaning to say, Margaret looks tired, she cooked, you ate, now maybe you could help dry the damn dishes. She deliberately and repeatedly said Margaret’s name, meaning to say, It would be a really good thing if you stopped calling Margaret Marg. She carefully referred to her niece and nephew as the kids, meaning to say, If you’d pay attention, you would see that we are not the kind of people who want the kids called the children. Charlotte might have saved things if she’d noticed and adapted a bit but it looked as if she couldn’t be bothered. And they
hadn’t wanted much. Margaret told Bill the absence of a patronizing tone of voice would have done it for her.

No one could imagine Charlotte at the lake anyway, so far away from a decent hairdresser, the sun so hot, the flies so thick on a muggy day, the mattresses turned but still clearly suspect under Margaret’s crisp sheets.

Margaret was forty-nine and Bill had turned fifty-one that March. Bill’s hair was mostly grey and he had what he liked to call bandy old-man legs. This would have astonished him even five years before, his legs going. They had always been strong, for most of his life his strength had been in his legs. He was deeply embarrassed to wear the Bermuda shorts Margaret and Daphne had decked him out in the summer before, two identical pairs of them, plaid, but he wore them then and he was wearing them again this year. What else could you wear at the lake? He drew the line at sandals. He was either in his normal shoes and socks or he was barefoot.

It had been a wretched winter, long at both ends, with weeks of high wind and sleet that had made driving treacherous. Then for one solid month after Christmas there was nothing but new snow, wet and dangerously heavy on the roofs. Lots of people had decided to climb up to shovel their roofs clean that year, Bill and the boys among them. Margaret had got herself through the winter imagining this month at the lake and after they had spoken for the cottage she told Bill that it might be the last summer with all of them together, and for this reason they should do what they could to make it one of the best summers they’d ever had.

She was very much looking forward to Patrick’s wedding. She had her dress, which was not the expected mother-of-the-groom beige but teal blue with panels and a very low-cut back, and Bill had bought his first new suit since Sylvia’s death, a good navy pinstripe that should do him another seven or eight years. Aside from the groom’s dinner, which was to be held the night before the wedding and which they had decided to have at the cottage, they didn’t have any particular responsibilities at their end. The wedding was to be quite small because Mary wasn’t much for ceremony and her parents, nice people who had always lived in London and who had
a cottage down the lake, said when Margaret called to offer her help that they had everything under control.

Patrick and Mary seemed to Margaret perfectly matched. Where Charlotte appeared to be just a run-of-the-mill phoney, Mary was forthright, pleasantly frank and blunt. She was never rude, not even slightly, but if you asked her for an opinion, you might as well be ready because you’d get one. You could tell listening to her that she would have been astonished to be told she was blunt. And meeting her mother you could see it was not likely that she would be mellowing with age. Like her mother, Mary had large, wide-set eyes, a very thick head of dark hair, and good, delicately squared shoulders. But she was gracious about her appearance, laughed about it, said she was more than happy to be told that she looked like Jackie Kennedy, who wouldn’t be? Although Margaret neither said nor indicated anything of the sort, she was pleased to see that Mary had almost cured Patrick of his habit of taking refuge behind his sulky little moods. When he did try to escape, Mary went right in after him to haul him out.

And Murray had his own someone. Charlotte was quite unlike any woman Margaret had ever known but she’d had a good talk with herself about Charlotte and she had decided that at the end of the day, if that was what Murray wanted, they were all going to have to learn to like it. There had to be something there, something Murray could see. He wasn’t a fool.

There was no question at all in Margaret’s mind about Paul and Andy. Three years married, two kids, bang, bang, and another due soon. They’d had a big country wedding out at Andy’s church on a hot Saturday in June. There were two hundred people in the pews, friends, relatives, neighbours, and then a wonderful country meal and a dance of course. The only thing that spoiled it was Andy’s Dad’s coughing, not because it interfered with the vows or the music but because it made a few of the people who loved him think they might be back at the church sooner than they wanted to be. And so they were. A year later, after he was gone, and gone quickly, diagnosed, cared for, and then dead inside of two months, his wife moved into town and Paul and Andy had a farm to run. But they
were doing all right. They planted only cash crops and there was no livestock, so it wasn’t a twenty-four-hour kind of farm.

That left Daphne. As far as Margaret knew there had been no one at all since Roger Cooper. But Daphne was only twenty-three. And she worked shifts at the hospital which had to make a social life difficult, the odd hours, the fatigue, the constant regime of having to grab some sleep when you got the chance.

Aside from wanting each of them to connect with someone who was good enough, who was comfortable and dependable and, given the choice, easygoing, Margaret didn’t care much what the kids did with their lives otherwise. She assumed they would be able to make their living. They were all smart, exceptionally smart in her opinion. As far as she knew they were doing fine.

Most of them spent the best part of the first Sunday at the lake lying on the sand on blankets drinking illegal beer from picnic tumblers and then swimming out to the third sandbar and back to cool off. By noon, Bill had taught Sally how to float. He had been a strong swimmer since the war. Before he left for overseas he’d come out to the lake alone and taught himself, tested himself way out past the last sandbar. He’d started Sally off with the dead man’s float, face in the water, arms extended, holding her up with one trustworthy hand under her small ribcage. When she had almost mastered that, he turned her over to face the clouds. With his hand light on her spine, over and over again holding and releasing her, he told her that floating was the first and most important part of swimming, that if you could relax your body, if you could get that feeling, the rest was only technique, just muscle control and breathing.