A Good House (7 page)

Margaret sometimes showed up with a few groceries and one time books from the library, some light history, a couple of dog-eared mysteries, but none of the books got read. Sylvia did ask for a good atlas, which Margaret drove into London to buy, and she spent some of her hours studying the changes in the world.

After a few weeks Margaret brought Daphne into her mother’s bed and gave her the tray with the china soup plate and the silver spoon. She stood at the dusty picture window until the soup was half gone, asking Daphne questions about her schoolwork and her friends. She knew who Daphne’s girlfriends were because she often saw them walking on the street together uptown, nudging shoulders as they talked, still a bit playful but serious too, newly careful with Daphne and with each other. You could see it in their posture, in their stern faces, the eyes that brazenly searched another’s eyes with the promise of understanding. None of the girls came inside the house now, the farthest they could be coaxed was just inside the kitchen door, but this was easily recognized as one more clumsy, misplaced, well-meant gesture of respect.

As Daphne finished spooning the soup to her mother, Margaret asked herself how the boys would feel if she sent them out to the dusty windows with some newspapers and a bucket of vinegar water and then after the dishes were cleaned up she got her Harris tweed coat and her purse, said her goodnights, and let herself out the back door.

T
HE
grandparents usually dropped in after supper, after Margaret had left. They were sometimes accompanied by one of Sylvia’s brothers and his wife or by her sister from out of town or by Bill’s brother from Windsor with his cheerful wife and their young children. Kitchen chairs were carried in and placed haphazardly around the room, facing Sylvia. The nieces and nephews were allowed to sit briefly on the bed to embrace their aunt and then they sprawled out on the carpet to play secret little whispering games or snap or jumping jacks.

The adults tried to talk about things Sylvia might find interesting, Sandy Koufax and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Lassie, James Dean being killed like that, but everyone listened too politely, too attentively to the speaker, almost all of them were too unnaturally quick to laugh or offer agreement. Sylvia heard their words not as sentences deliberately formed to tell a person something but as dull, one-at-a-time thuds against the dull silence that had begun to wall her in. She heard the words as small, well-meant blows against a concrete bunker. Although she did not ever ask, Could they please just shut up and go home.

Occasionally they would forget themselves and talk just to each other, for which she was occasionally grateful. The most astute among them watched her closely as they talked, recognized for what they were the small, jerking movements of her hands, the slight ducking of her head as if to avoid something flying too low above her.

Daphne decided it would be nice to use the silver tray from the buffet to serve the cookies or squares the women always brought, and Bill’s father, a heavy, large-boned man who spoke slowly and loudly, made a huge fuss over her as she circled the room with the tray, said she was coming along so nicely. Sylvia’s father, thin and wiry and wheezing with emphysema, paid no heed to the conventions expected of him. He cried openly and said awful heartfelt things like “You were always the strongest,” and “Half a life,” and “Why can’t I be taken instead,” and always when he started the others took a deep, collective breath and prepared themselves to put an end to it.

The third or fourth time this happened Paul had to turn his suddenly streaming face to the living-room wall and, recognizing himself in his grandson, Sylvia’s father left his armchair to go to Paul, making it worse. Patrick, who in just these few short months had learned to carry love as an unspeakable pressure inside himself, got up from his chair so fast he knocked it over. He took the stairs in five great leaps and slammed the bedroom door and after that night he wouldn’t sit with them, would not even say hello when his grandfather came in the kitchen door.

Sylvia’s mother remained stoic. A born coordinator, she discussed practical matters with Margaret to reassure herself that everything was well in hand. She took the laundry home with her because she had a new clothes dryer in her basement and she wrote the letters that had to be written to tell the news that had to be told, attempted to supervise the homework at the dining-room table. And privately but firmly she scolded Paul. “I can’t abide this crying, Paul,” she said. “Not now. And trust me, there will be plenty of time for it after.”

One evening in the middle of a week when Sylvia appeared to have a resurgence of strength, she called Daphne to come into the living room alone. When the door was shut and Daphne was comfortable on the bed, Sylvia said she wanted to tell her how much she regretted that she wouldn’t be around to help later, with her marriage and her babies. She lifted her hand when Daphne tried to speak, tried to say, Don’t say that, Mom. Don’t say that. Sylvia wanted badly to be frank, to be truthful. She wanted to say, Take your time when you think you’re ready for a husband, don’t just go by looks, make him talk, find out how he thinks. Or, Don’t let your heart outshout your head. Or, Whatever happens to you, don’t just settle. But she said what she had rehearsed.

“It seems to me that smart women look for comfort and loyalty when they’re deciding on a husband and I think men want more or less the same thing. And it never hurts to have a bit of laughter thrown in.” She didn’t mention the long-ago break in Daphne’s jaw, or her apprehension about men whose interest might be queered by the malformed face, who might, instinctively, turn away.

“Childbirth,” she said, “isn’t nearly as bad as some women will
happily lead you to believe. A young body can be trusted.” She put her hands on her own distended stomach. “There are specialized muscles in there with a job to do and one job only.” She didn’t say anything specific or descriptive about sex, except that Daphne shouldn’t be afraid of it. “Sex is mostly just for comfort and fun,” she said. “And meant to be.”

Listening now with her eyes wide open and her hands covering her mouth, Daphne nodded and tried to lift her hands away. “I want three babies,” she said. “I’m going to have three.”

“Three is a very good number,” Sylvia said. “Tell me what you’ll call them.”

“Girls will be Maggie or Jill or Paula,” Daphne said. “Boys will be David or Daniel or Michael.”

“Those are very fine names,” Sylvia said. “I like those names a lot.”

The next evening she called Patrick and Paul and Murray in and sat them down to tell them that they would soon have wives and children, which made them look down through their knees at their feet and shake their heads. Thinking about this talk all afternoon, she had known she would have to thread her way carefully between one son’s rage and the other’s anxious tears, and looking at them now she could see her boundaries announcing themselves in Patrick’s clenched fists, in Paul’s wet cheeks. What she wanted to say to them was, Take it slow, as slow as you can. And, Before you decide, have a good long look at the mother because a daughter usually turns out just the same or just the opposite. She wanted to say, Loud, silly girls often grow up to be loud, silly women, and sullen girls tend to stay sullen.

Instead, she told them, “Women expect strength from men, and gentleness and absolute loyalty. And a good ear.” She said, “You will have to work hard if you expect to raise a family.” Looking just at Patrick and Paul, meaning it as a joke, she said, “You might even have to think about giving up hockey.” Then she took the deepest breath she could take. “Of course sex is fun,” she said. “Likely, you have already discovered that. But you should try to get it into your heads that with just a little extra thought, a little extra time taken, it can be something altogether different, altogether more.” She didn’t
make them sit there wondering if they had to say anything back to her about any of this. She shooed them out of the room like small boys told to stay away from the creek in the spring, hoping only that she hadn’t lied to them.

Bill had offered to set up a small bed for himself in an empty corner of the living room in case his rolling around in his sleep disturbed Sylvia or gave her discomfort. As proof of his consideration, he borrowed a foldaway cot from the McKellars down the street and wheeled it into the dining room where it stood ready, sheets and all, but Sylvia told him no, she didn’t want that, not yet. All these months they had continued to do what they could, when they could. Cooper had told them early on and pointedly to go ahead and take whatever pleasure was available to them.

Cooper told Bill now that Sylvia was on a very high dosage, which he was more than ready to up if he became convinced she needed it. He said that death comes in different ways to different people, more ways than an average layman could imagine, and that an easy death was still possible. He said there was no reason to anticipate extraordinary pain, not with the dosage he had her on.

Bill never did set up the cot. In the last week of July, Sylvia didn’t want to eat anything and then she began to fall into an extremely deep sleep that could last the night and through the next day and overnight and halfway through the day again. Cooper said this was the blessing of her brain’s own morphine, better than man-made.

When she came out of these sleeps she could speak only a few necessary words, could hardly take a drink, could only breathe and listen and watch. Bill stayed home and the kids got some time off from their summer jobs and someone stayed with her in the living room every minute, often two at a time. On the last of these sleeping days and nights Bill was with her and, exhausted beyond discipline, beyond even his time overseas, he crawled in and slept beside her. He woke from a dream of rolling fingers and knew without looking.

He took a few minutes for himself, stayed mute on his side of the bed, resisting full consciousness, making it wait. As was his sleepy habit, he reached to smooth her eyebrows, to try to smooth the lines from her forehead. Then he sat up, stood up in his pyjamas. He
tidied her hair the best he could and straightened the pillow and then he made himself search beneath the quilts to find her hands, to bring them out over the quilts because she looked so strange lying there without her hands.

He manoeuvred through the hall and up the stairs to wake the kids, sitting for a few minutes on the top step to listen to the memory of Sylvia’s voice telling him what to say to them when this day came, but by the time he reached the first warm bed he had nothing in him but silence. He couldn’t help them when they opened their eyes.

When their first wretched grief, loud and clumsy beyond remembering, was almost spent, when the July sun, which was nothing more to him now than the blunt instrument, the mindless impulse of an emptied day, was fully risen, Bill went into the kitchen to phone Cooper and they all stayed in the living room until they heard the Cadillac pull into the driveway. Cooper brought fresh morning air in with him and turn by turn he put one warm arm around their shoulders, which quieted them and brought them back to their separate, independent selves, to the floating, airless absence that each of them had already begun to define as differently as they might have defined Sylvia’s full life, given the chance. Then he asked that they go out to the kitchen.

Bill poured himself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table, and because he couldn’t bear the quiet now, because it was making him sick to his stomach and dizzy, he began to walk his kids step by step through their mother’s funeral. He’d done nothing about it before, had been repulsed by the thought of anticipating it.

Paul and Daphne sat down with their father but Patrick opened the fridge door wide and slammed it shut, twice and hard. When he asked, “What the hell difference does it make what happens now?” Bill nodded yes and yes again, told him, “This is what we do.”

After Bill finished outlining his plans for the funeral, Paul went outside to stand in the gravel driveway and Daphne went after him. The sun was over the garage now. It was promising to be a very hot day. They stood together for a few minutes and then she pulled on his arm to bring him back to the cool of the kitchen.

Cooper had called the undertaker and he must have called Margaret too because she was soon there, standing at the counter with her long back to them, opening a can of salmon, buttering a double row of bread. Bill went upstairs to get dressed and when he came back down he made the call to the grandparents.

Murray came in the kitchen door just after the undertaker. He sat down at the table and cried on his arms like a child, which caused Daphne to move across the room to stand close behind him.

Then Bill told the kids they might as well go and get dressed, so they went upstairs. After they had their clothes on, Daphne sat with Paul on his bed, her own tears mysteriously stopped by the racked renewal of his tears. Murray was slumped on the floor, leaning against the other bed with his back to Patrick, who was silent. They stayed that way until they heard Margaret come up the stairs to look through Sylvia’s closet. Soon after she went back down they heard the unmistakable sound of the hearse on the gravel, backing carefully out of the driveway.

A
WEEK
after Sylvia’s funeral Margaret came through the kitchen door on a Sunday afternoon with a mostly roasted chicken. They had been given so many meals that week, scalloped potatoes and baked ham, meat loaves, baked beans, angel food cakes and butter tarts and fruit pies. A dozen empty casserole dishes, good sturdy ovenproof bowls taped with names to identify the owners, sat piled biggest to smallest on the counter. These were the dishes that moved around from one house to the next, following the need.

Margaret told Daphne as she opened the oven door that the chicken wanted only another quick half hour at three-fifty. She said she’d do up a few potatoes to go along with it and did Daphne think peas or corn or what? As they moved around the kitchen together, Margaret was careful to keep a respectful distance between them, careful not to touch Daphne even by accident. At the funeral and at the lunch in the church basement after the funeral she had noticed that Daphne pulled back slightly when anyone threatened to lay a hand on her. And people did try. People did assume you wanted it. She could sympathize with that, she knew what that felt like.