A Good House (31 page)

He often looked tired. Well dressed, impeccable in his habits and manners, but tired. His hair had thinned and finally disappeared from the top of his head, although from the ears down it was as thick as when he’d been a boy. Standing behind him, rubbing his hand over Murray’s pate, Bill said, every time, “Your father’s hair. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

Murray never went near the mill, although Bill had been pushing him lately. “Let’s go on over,” he’d say five minutes after Murray was in the door. “Let’s go see how they’re pissin’ away my son’s money now.” He especially despised the newly purchased computer, which he’d never seen.

Bill enjoyed asking Murray about his trips and about the paper he’d quit and the one he worked for now, the corporate world, he called it, and about the stories he said Murray supposedly wrote. He wanted to know what was really going on in Ottawa and at NATO and in the Middle East, said he was after the inside dope, the truth of it, the story the average man would never get to hear. He hated every move Ottawa made and had messy files of clippings to back up his many suspicions, which he would set out on the dining-room table if he knew Murray was coming. He told Murray every time he sat him down that the real story, the unwritten story, was the occupation. The whole country, right down to every God damned song in every God damned elevator, taken over by American this, American that, and why the hell wasn’t anyone writing about it? Exposing it? So maybe people would sit up and take notice? And the stand-off at Oka had convinced him that it was high time the government settled properly and fairly and finally with the Indians and stopped all this bloody screwing around, because in the blink of an eye bloody screwing around could lead to war, and who in his right mind didn’t know that? You didn’t need to have fought a war to know that, he said. Anyone who’d cracked a history book knew it. He said if he was lucky enough to be writing for some big paper, he would be inclined to tell the truth, which was that Ottawa was at war with its own people, that NATO had become a scam, and that the factions in the Middle East had been at some kind of war one with the other from the beginning of time, so what’s newsworthy there?

Murray’s wife Kate charmed Bill, because she was new and had the energy and the inclination. She asked each time to look again at the pictures from the family’s big trip to Florida. She brought him glossy magazines dedicated to sports and hunting and fishing, although she would have known if she’d asked that when Bill was young he’d never had time to play much of anything and had gone hunting up north only once or twice before the war, when he still had his trigger finger. And she brought him thin butterscotch medallions in a fancy foil bag which he held on his lap while they talked, taking one candy after the other into his mouth, not waiting or savouring but biting down hard with his good left molars.

She asked about his garden, allowed him to lead her through it and name for her the plants and the insects and the small anticipated blights. One evening they took the lawn chairs down to sit at the edge of the creek and when he began to complain that something was getting at his sweaty ankles she went back up to the house and returned with the Off! and two empty bread bags, which she slipped over his shoes and tightened on his calves with elastic bands. As she knelt to do this, he reached down to touch her hair. He told her she was the prettiest of the bunch, and the kindest. He said she should have been with them in Florida instead of what’s-her-name, that other cold little fish. He warmed to his metaphor, laughed quietly, intimately, said Murray had been smart to throw the first one back, set his hook again.

After she had the bags secured, Kate straightened and took his hand into her own as a nun might or a mother. He pulled his hand back as if he’d got a small electric shock, and then he leaned down and snapped the elastic bands, kicked the bread bags from his feet, and staggered off. He walked along the creek bank through three of the neighbours’ yards and then stopped, confused, to yell for her to come and get him.

Some of this Kate shared with Murray in the car on the way back to Toronto. She was a fine little storyteller, although she usually kept the coarsest things to herself. The first time, after telling Murray that Bill had squeezed what he called her fanny as she turned to get into the car, when she’d suggested, “Why not laugh?” Murray had taken
his eyes off the road for a few deliberate, unsafe seconds. “What a concept,” he’d said. “I’ll get you a bumper sticker.”

After she’d apologized, and she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to do anything except perhaps make getting through these visits something less than grievous, he told her it was obviously harder if you’d known him for a long time, if you’d known him when he was young and clear, that was all it was.

Once, after Murray and Kate had pulled out of the driveway to return to Toronto, Bill said to Margaret, “I never took Murray for an ass man but, then again, you can learn something new every day if you keep your eyes open.”

I
N
his busiest years, Patrick had come only intermittently, sending Mary and the kids in his place, but he visited fairly often now. Although he had watched the disintegration from the beginning, it was all just small changes to him, first this, then that, too much of something, too little of something else. He decided it could be managed and he didn’t want to spend much time giving it a name. His experience with clients divorcing and squabbling over money and children had long ago convinced him that if people could just handle the small things as they came, complete breakdown could often be prevented. He used words on Margaret like
adapt,
thinking only to help her. She didn’t bother to try to spell things out for him.

Stephanie, Patrick’s second wife, almost always accompanied him on his visits and once in a while they’d bring Teresa, Stephanie’s poised and beautifully made-up daughter from an earlier marriage, who called herself Tess and who was of all things a fashion model. Sometimes Margaret turned on the VCR and they watched Sarah’s tapes from the coast. The movies, Bill called them.

And Stephanie, too, was asked to sit down to look through the old pictures from Florida, even though she was not the tanned and voluptuously pregnant wife who stood beside Patrick on a balcony in the sunset, brilliant in a white linen dress that exposed her bare and bony Jackie Kennedy shoulders. Not much effort had been made to eradicate this first, much-admired wife and Stephanie understood how this could happen with a woman who was the
mother of grandchildren. She understood, too, that Mary had experienced some bad luck with her health and she was careful to take no offence when her name came up, naturally and casually, as if she were just someone they used to know.

Looking through the pictures with Bill, she said what a good idea it had been, going away together for a big holiday, and as he turned the pages she put a name to everyone, pointing to this person or that as if the others didn’t know who they were. “There’s Sarah,” she said. “What a pretty teenager she was.” And, “Daphne always tans so well, I envy her.” And, “I can’t believe Murray would be caught dead in those ridiculous sandals.” She said she could see an easy resemblance between Bill and Paul, whom she had never met, she said anyone would see it. No one corrected her. Paul had never looked like any of them, least of all Bill, although his long tall son Neil was clearly his own.

If Mary had still been involved, still the one coming to visit an elderly father-in-law, she would have put up a resounding struggle. She would have talked to her own doctor and to a specialist or two, she would have read every recent article on dementia and stroke she could get her hands on, and not in the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
She would have called Bill’s doctor up at the clinic, made an appointment for herself, talked to him frankly about the evident debilitating strain on Margaret and about the possibility of a drug regimen to take the edge off. But, although one or two or all three of Patrick and Mary’s grown kids still arrived once in a long while, Margaret and Bill no longer received visits from Mary, understandably.

Mary had come up to see them the last time on her own. It was in 1987, the summer after Paul died, just when Margaret, at least, was beginning to adjust herself to his terrible absence, to accept his absence as an ever-present, always visible scar across all their lives. She had known there were people who had to live that way, people who grieved daily. And now she and Bill were among them.

Although neither of them had formed even half a sentence to indicate their concern one to the other, for some time Margaret and Bill had both noticed, had separately believed, something was very
wrong in Patrick’s marriage, something worse than the usual kind of thing that people had to live through.

In the ten minutes before Mary stood up from her favourite lawn chair to leave them herself for the last time, she’d said what she’d driven an hour to say.

“Six months ago,” she said, “I found an earring in Patrick’s car. A big cheap earring. So I cornered him, I nailed him and made him tell me who she was. She is twenty-two. He met her when she came into the office for a job interview. A job for which she was not even slightly qualified.”

“Oh, Mary,” Margaret said, thinking, This is going to be an awful story.

“I tracked her down last month,” Mary said. “I interviewed her myself. She was appallingly confident for someone so unqualified, sitting in her tawdry little apartment with the sentimental posters taped all over the walls, the pink walls that matched the pink coverlet on the bed that matched her rosy cheeks. She was very soft-spoken, very polite as she advised me that I do not really know my husband, that if I’m not careful, I am going to be his wife in name only, and perhaps not even that. She isn’t even pretty. She is a plain, sentimental, stupid little mouse of a girl. I don’t know why I didn’t slap her down. I don’t know how I stood it. But apparently he can cry in her capable arms. He rides up her elevator to cry in her arms and she gets to pretend that she is a wise young woman. Theirs is not a very complex affair.”

“Perhaps the loss of a brother…?” Bill said, dropping his head back heavily, staring straight up at the empty sky.

Sitting between them in her lawn chair, Margaret concentrated on the willows moving in the breeze above the creek. For days she had been watching a pair of cardinals settle in, although there was no sign of them now.

“Miss Rosy Cheeks was keen to share with me something Patrick should have told me himself,” Mary said. “I think in fact it might be the one thing, the only thing, he’s never told me. She said it should be obvious to me that he has worked so hard and so long because he wanted so badly to live up to his mother’s wish that he use his time
and energy, his life, to help people. She told me that in her experience,
her experience,
men like Patrick almost never get the credit they deserve. And she was kind enough to reassure me that I don’t really have anything to worry about because he is going to continue on, he doesn’t even want out. He is just very tired. She said he needs a place for himself. A safe, separate place where he is not needed.”

“She said that to you?” Margaret asked, lifting the pitcher to refill Bill’s glass and then her own.

Mary appeared to be winding down a little and very soon Margaret would be expected to have something to say to her about this business, something useful perhaps or, at the very least, not hurtful. But sitting there so close to Mary, waiting for the cardinals to appear, and where did they go when they stayed from their nest so long, out to the fields for grain, for the simple pleasure of the flight? she could think of nothing honourable to say.

At the time, after the war but before Sylvia’s death, before she’d imagined the possibility of Bill, when for almost three years she herself had so gladly comforted and taken comfort from a man who had a perfectly good wife, a wife he never spoke of because she would not allow it, she had believed that what she’d given and received truly was, in its essence, a kind of love. She had believed that even in its secret, sneaky, rushed articulation, there was a legitimacy to what she’d done. That those heavy, middle-of-the-night footsteps on the stairs that she’d listened for with such patient, sympathetic hope had been legitimate steps. That there had been a necessity.

Although she had been more than old enough to fear the possibility of consequences, there had been no consequences. Certainly she’d felt heartache when it ended but she’d understood from the start that it would have to end, and the heartache was only for a time, and it was as nothing against his presence in her narrow bed. She could not have known then that the only cost to her would be the requirement for a difficult, respectful silence on an afternoon such as this, an afternoon that could not have been anticipated.

“I’ve invited him to cry at home,” Mary said, “where the rest of us cry. Apparently it’s not going to happen.” She shook her head to
Margaret’s offer of more lemonade. “But really,” she said, “she is nothing. She is only the thing I can describe.”

Oh, Margaret thought, she is not nothing. Such women are rarely as little as that. You could ask Daphne, for instance.

“I am asking him to leave,” Mary said, “not because he’s been soft and weak and stupidly self-serving. I’m almost sure I could have lived with that. But because of the thing that must have driven him, the thing that prompted the recklessness of his needing such a vacuous, stupid young woman, which is
not
nothing, not at all. Of course he remembers whatever it was his mother said to him, of course he has been a helpful man, an extremely strong, cold-blooded, steadying influence on his miserable clients, hundreds of them, year after year after year, but he
has taken
his pay-off. He
has taken
the right to stand tall on his own self-satisfied moral high ground. And he’s very much enjoyed overlooking everyone, judging everyone. I am sure you’ve noticed that Patrick and I have both been playing around at righteousness, for years. And now he’s got himself locked in. Even with his own kids. Often with his own kids, who should not be expected to bear it.”