A Good House (27 page)

“What about your job?” he asked. “You just got back.”

“I wasn't planning this,” she said. “I didn't see how I would get the nerve to put it to you. I wouldn't have asked if you hadn't decided you were finished with Charlotte or, I guess more accurately, if Charlotte had not decided she has had enough of you. But now it seems, well, not unreasonable.”

“Only if you can tell me why it has to be me,” he said.

She looked out at the muddy Thames. “You can likely manipulate me enough to make me say what you want to hear,” she said, lifting her head, lifting her hand to touch his mouth. “I think I can feel the words just on the tip of my tongue.”

She turned to lead him to the quiet of her bed. They had from the beginning got into the habit of quiet, perhaps because twice it had been required, perhaps for other, better reasons. On the way to the bed she was deciding that this time she would tell him what he wanted to hear. It was an easy word, she knew that now, having Maggie and wanting another, and it looked to be true.

“You are one crude woman,” he said, following her close enough to touch her again, to run a lonely finger down the deep furrow of her back, which made her go weak every time he did it, made her quiver, as if she had never before in her life been touched there, not like that.

*   *   *

THERE WERE CONVERSATIONS
about Daphne's second pregnancy, full-blown conversations whose fitful purpose, whose work, was to find an acceptably humane context for unexpected or unacceptable behaviour. Bill and Margaret talked, Paul and Andy talked. The first time almost everyone had thought, well, anyone can make a mistake. And they had been more than willing, almost immediately eager, to fall in behind Daphne, to help her make it as right as it could be made for Maggie.

Maggie was beloved, there was no other word for it, and she had emerged a confident child. She was not particularly precocious, she did not constantly nag at the outskirts of adult life as beloved children sometimes do. She was just a relaxed little girl, easy inside her own skin.

Patrick knew again of course. He simply deepened his resolve, disciplined himself to speak carefully. Mary, almost ready to accept that she wouldn't ever learn what was going on with Daphne, tried to undergo a change of heart.

Paul and Andy, who were wanting to rebuild some kind of social life now that they no longer needed a sitter, now that Meg had moved into the group home, had come in to London for an evening of drinks in the screened porch. After Patrick and Paul had each asked about the other's work and exhausted their ball talk, recent catches and hits and errors, questionable trades and undeserved salaries, Mary started to tell Andy about the strawberries she'd got her hands on, how small they were, how sweet, and at nine-thirty the women decided out of the blue to make up some freezer jam.

Patrick had been refusing to discuss Daphne's situation, so Mary hadn't had a chance to speak her thoughts out loud, and she needed to. But standing next to Andy at the kitchen counter, hulling berries while Andy mashed, listening to Andy quietly sing, as she always did when she was happy, she was coming up empty. Her thoughts wouldn't get themselves organized and they didn't even seem to be actual thoughts but just clumps of words banging around in her head, bouncing off the side walls, having themselves a bit of fun. She heard her own rational voice start several sentences and leave them hanging, unfinished, and she saw Andy quietly waiting as she sang, knowing better than to push it. Oh, Andy was smart. Finally, tired to the bone of the sound of her own banging, bouncing thoughts, of her own noisy half-finished sentences, she dropped her paring knife down on the edge of the sink and said, “Oh, hell. At the end of the day, what's it matter.”

In all the time Andy had known her, this was the first and only thing Mary had ever said that impressed her. “That's pretty much what I think too,” she said. Pushing down hard on the berries, adding the cups of sugar, Andy told herself that from this night of jam making she and Mary might finally be able to rely on each other for some womanly comfort, for an occasional bout of satisfying banter. Friend, she thought, maybe.

Mary had never been a quiet talker. Sitting in the porch drinking their beer, the men had heard her change of heart. Looking back through the dining room into the kitchen, watching these women make up the jam he would eat all winter, Paul said his problem was that while he wished things with Daphne could be otherwise, they apparently couldn't. So there it was. He said if there was going to be hell to pay, he'd pay his share. He smiled, saying this.

Patrick would have described his brother's smile as one part strength to two parts oblivion. But he said nothing. Sometimes, like now, he caught himself believing that Paul was not much more than a belligerent innocent, that he simply preferred the luxury of being in the dark and would fight very hard to stay there. Once in a while people like Paul paid an extremely high price but more often, more usually, they were spared, excused from the full cost of realizing what was actually going on in the world.

Paul was watching Patrick watch a squirrel balance on the crest of the garage roof. He recognized the concentrated attention, the temporary silence, the threat you couldn't quite hear. He knew his brother's anger as well as he knew his own. “Jesus,” he said. “You could lighten up a bit.”

Almost immediately after Patrick said, “Could I? Is that your considered opinion?” Mary was beside him with a spoonful of strawberry jam.

“Taste this,” she said. “Tell me if it needs more sugar.”

And then Andy came to lean against the garden doors that opened to the porch. She, too, had heard the edge in Patrick's voice. “Whatever's going on here,” she said, “it has to be fixed. Now.” She moved to sit at the foot of Patrick's chaise, facing Paul. “I will not allow another drop of trouble in my life. Not another God damned drop.” She turned to look at Patrick. “Can I make myself any clearer?” she asked. “Because I'm ready to try.”

Patrick had nothing to say to the severity in Andy's eyes. He nodded once and then he took the spoon of jam into his mouth to declare it sweet enough for him. Paul got up and followed Mary to the buffet to get the cards out for a rubber of bridge.

Sally found it very tough sledding this second time. At twenty-one and having just about completed her first biology degree, she was more than sometimes fiercely judgemental about even the smallest transgressions, so her attitude about Daphne was not a surprise to anyone. But the word she slung around this time was
humiliation,
which did seem a bit strong, even for her. On a Sunday evening over one of Margaret's roast chickens, in Daphne's and Maggie's absence, she tried to share her theories with the others. She said it was clear to her that Daphne's pregnancy was either an act of aggression or an indication of a lack of caring on both sides, theirs and Daphne's too. She said she could not understand why this couldn't be faced head-on. “It's our business,” she said. “It's obviously our business.” Patrick was the only one who watched her as she lectured them. The others looked at Margaret's new plaid wallpaper, or out the window above the sink.

When she tried to provoke them into joining her discussion, asking, “What kind of family are we?” they did begin to look around the table at each other. But no one could come up with a satisfactory or useful answer.

“Can't tell you,” Paul said. “Not on the spot like that.” His face was deadly serious with concentration, as if this were a quantum physics problem that might be solved had any of them been anything other than mere idiots. The rest of them laughed but Sally didn't. She judged their refusal to join her, to engage, to be evidence of a shared shame that had left them understandably inarticulate, and forced them to retreat, as usual, to the false comfort of a limp joke.

That night, tucked into Bill in their bed, Margaret said, “I suspect there was quite a bit of ridicule when Daphne was a girl, when she was out of Sylvia's sight, away from her protection. Kids do god-awful things to each other,” she said. “It isn't any myth.” She pulled away a bit to look at his craggy face, which had too quickly aged there on that pillow, year by year, as had her own beside it. “Ridicule has a way of sticking to the ribs.” She reached up to rub his shoulder. “Maybe Daphne just lost her chance to believe in her own worth.”

Bill shifted his shoulder slightly, like a tamed animal moving its body under an affectionate, trustworthy hand. “Sylvia and I both watched for that kind of thing,” he said. “It seemed to us that she regained her confidence not too long after she fell. She appeared to be more or less her same old self. From what we could tell anyway.”

“What I mean is,” Margaret said, rubbing him harder, “maybe she lost her chance at truly believing. There is perhaps a significant difference.”

“She's made her bed,” Bill said.

“I don't suppose it's ever a good idea to make assumptions,” she said, lifting her hand from his shoulder. “I'm going to have something to say to Sally about this, and if Patrick doesn't climb down soon, I'm going to have something fairly straightforward to say to him as well.” She flipped her pillow, to get the cool side up. “He might be surprised to find out that I can win an argument, but we know I can, don't we?”

“She has made her bed,” Bill said, turning away from her, to sleep.

If any of them could have asked her, Daphne might have tried to say that it wasn't the deformity of her jaw. It was hardly her jaw at all. There certainly had been some cruelty, sometimes more than she'd thought she would be able to withstand, but in her experience kids with a physical oddness were not mocked so much if they'd had an accident, as she had. And she'd had herself a famous accident. From what she'd seen, from what she knew, you had to be born with something wrong to get the worst of it.

She might have tried to tell them that she didn't even remember much about what happened in the time after she landed on the mattress: the bleeding, the pain, the painkillers, the trips in to Toronto to have her jaw reconstructed, the wires, the clamps, the months she was not allowed to chew, or able to speak clearly, to make herself understood. And it wasn't the actual fall she remembered either.

It was the time between, between the hard-swinging, show-off happiness under the Christmas lights and the dropping straight down through the cold air. It was that everlasting split second when there was nothing she could do to save herself.

1986

PAUL AND ANDY
had been married for twenty-six years. Sometimes Paul found this hard to believe. When they started out together at nineteen they'd had lots of energy, lots of momentum, and then, running the farm and their lives, they'd slowed themselves down. They'd got into the habit of talking things over, planning things out, and they were conservative with money, deliberate. No one had told them that they should live this way, in sync and carefully. It was a kind of gut instinct that came naturally to them, from their careful natures, from their natural affection for each other.

Besides the farm, for almost fifteen years they had been operating the feed mill in town, hiring extra help when it was needed to keep things moving. Now Neil was almost old enough to take over. He appeared to be a mature twenty-five and it looked as if he might be able to handle it.

Right after Murray's parents died he had come out to offer them the mill for a lot less than he should have got for it and the steady income from that had paid off both the loan and most of the mortgage on Andy's parents' farm, which was now their farm because Andy's mother had sold it to them and moved into a bungalow in town out near the golf course. Over the last ten years there had been enough extra money to modernize the old farmhouse, to put on a new roof and insulate the draughty walls, to replace the furnace, and then to build a fourteen-by-thirty-foot addition with an efficient, sunny kitchen that Andy had designed herself and a breakfast nook and a downstairs bathroom with a shower. And recently there had been enough money for the seventeen-foot Bowrider that Paul docked at Grand Bend.

With a dedication that was a surprise even to himself, after the crop was off and between Oldtimers' hockey games, Paul had begun to look into his ancestry. It wasn't a deadly serious hobby but he was interested enough to make a couple of trips to the county library, to talk to the people there and let them help him with his searches. He had got his start from Grandma Ferguson, who was not just old now but elderly, frail, although she was still getting along all right in her own place. Near the end of one of what she called Paul's too rare visits, she had opened a closet door on three cardboard boxes of very old pictures, most of them formal in the extreme, all of them black and white. And, while not inheriting any land, wheeler-dealer Grandpa Chambers had been left in recompense a very old, dried-out journal called “Our New Life in Lambton County,” which he handed over to Paul casually, as if he himself had no use for it. The formal faded script described in full the back-breaking demands of daily life without the ease of technology, the awkward, slow-moving courtships, the sicknesses and some of the early deaths, the marriages, the many births, the stillbirths, the visitors, the families that moved on, often to the West, to the promise of sections of very good land. It described the years of stubborn work, the need to clear farmland properly, the threshing crews, the accidents, the food poisoning, the quilting bees, the prized horses and the barns that burned in the night, the roar of the fire and the frenzy of the prized, dying horses that could be heard for miles around. The journal had been written by a woman who would have been Paul's distant, many-times-removed aunt, and the assumptions she made, the attention she paid, could not have been mistaken for anything but a woman's, although she had tried, she had taken some trouble to describe the life completely, as a whole.