A Good House (34 page)

Halfway through the evening, when the McFarlane house was pulsing for the first time in fifty years with music and wine and with the raucous noise of conversation, with stories and anecdotes and praise and questions and lies, when the air was filled with the steamy temptation of good food well prepared, chicken pot pie and beans and ribs and curried shrimp and stir-fried vegetables and paella and leek and potato and squash pie, which was the new recipe, because there was always a new recipe waiting to be tried on a crowd, someone lifting freshly laundered sheers to look out a window noticed a March blizzard gaining strength under the streetlights, so many of the guests who had come from out of town stayed for hours after the party was supposed to end, stayed the night, filled the beds and couches and slept on the floors in sleeping bags like middle-aged kids, pulling each other upright in the morning and stretching and complaining about their lower backs as Jill carried a large tray of orange juice through the rooms, loving it.

Margaret and Bill had been invited to the party but Margaret had declined for them, as she was expected to. Instead she sent a wild-rice casserole and a big silver tray of miniature lemon tarts and, at the last minute, two dozen glads from the new flower shop uptown, the card saying what she always said on cards, “With all our love, Your Dad and Margaret.”

When Bill finally got a partial description of the evening out of Maggie and Jill, the gory details, he called them, he said to the girls, “I expect they were all drunk as lords. What else do they know how to do?”

The next night he turned off a debate about a Gay Pride Parade and phoned Daphne to give her hell. “If they were too drunk to get home, why didn't you send them over here to sleep?” He listened to her scrambling for a response and, fed up, overspoke her. “If you're fifty-five, you're old enough to know that not even drunks like sleeping on the floor.”

Maggie and Jill sometimes brought one boyfriend or another to meet Margaret and Bill, young good-looking men who had been well warned on the way over, prepped to listen and nod and lie according to their best judgement, which was, on the whole, surprisingly reliable.

Margaret had sat Daphne down just once to ask her to forgive her father, simply because she knew she was the only one to do it and she would hate herself later if she didn't make some effort. She did not believe for a minute that Daphne would be able to offer this imagined forgiveness. Like any daughter, Daphne had never seen her father up close and defenceless, not the way a wife does, so she didn't have that to fall back on. And his words had been obscenely cruel and said in front of the girls, just after Daphne had moved them back to town.

Right out of the blue he'd asked her, “So where's the father?” As if this information could make any difference now. “In all this time,” he said, “you've never shared that with us.”

When Daphne stood to leave he got up from his chair and followed her through the kitchen to the door. “Just took what he wanted,” he said. “And you too stupid and ugly to deny him.”

They had all spent a good part of their lives, Bill as much as the others, more than the others, much more, trying to help Daphne believe that she was not ugly, not “dee-formed,” as she used to like to put it. Her load was plain when she was still a teenager, you didn't have to be a brain surgeon. Margaret thought now that Daphne was like a small boulder pushed almost to the top of a hill by a dozen willing hands, and then comes a sneaky well-placed kick. Premeditated, guaranteed. The bastard, she thought. And that's what she'd said to him at the time, playing rough, breaking for once the firm promise she had made to herself. “You bastard. You God damned bastard.” Knowing it would do no good, except that Daphne and the girls would have those words too, as a modest entitlement from her.

She marked his words to Daphne as the first outside attack. Until then no one would have believed what he could say. But Daphne had taken it to heart. She apparently thought it was real.

Andy came over regularly, as she always had. Once in a while she would have Neil or Carol in tow, or their kids, or Krissy, who was married now and the mother of three boys, the little hellers, Bill called them, taking them back to explore the creek, his control of their loud, confusing play firm but not unkind. He didn't scare them. For nearly a year, Carol and Krissy had been sharing a dark green Jag XJS. They'd bought a Dream of a Lifetime ticket together, partly because Carol's mother had won a thousand dollars in the previous draw but mostly to support the hospital, and then they'd won the car. Everyone expected them to sell it and split the money but they didn't. They'd taken the train in to Toronto to pick it up and they traded it off month by month, loading their kids into the back seat, which was not intended for kids, and taking Bill for a short spin around town whenever he asked, which was often.

When Meg was brought home from London for a visit, she and Andy would come in and stay for part of the afternoon. Meg had needed a hysterectomy soon after Paul was killed and the surgery had frightened her, subdued her more than any of her drugs. She hadn't been herself since.

Bill still tried to make a big fuss over Meg, although one afternoon when they were at the kitchen table playing their version of crib, he laid down his hand and backed away from her and scowled and barked at some little thing she'd said. Not understanding at all what she had done wrong, Meg stood up and started to bawl, loudly, and then she banged the table with her fists, which made the cards and their glasses of Coke jump.

“Just like old times,” Andy said, coming in fast from the living room.

Margaret steered Bill out of the kitchen quickly so Andy could tell Meg that her grandfather must be very tired, that sometimes old people just got very tired, and then it was over, forgotten. In ten minutes the two of them were sitting on the couch together, one on each side of Andy, looking at the pictures from Florida.

Andy didn't farm any more, she leased to a neighbour, putting most of that money aside, but she was still managing the mill, wisely, still getting her living from it. Neil, who was thirty-four now and, like his father, tall and fast and sometimes funny, worked for her, and between the two of them they knew almost everyone around, who could be trusted, who shouldn't be. Over the past five or six years she had been going to Europe for a few weeks every spring. The first time, she took Krissy and Carol to England, another year Daphne and Maggie and Jill flew over to join her for a week in Italy and then a few days in Spain. And one year Mary went with her, although this was long after Mary had divorced Patrick, so it went without saying that the pictures of the two of them, standing on the Pont Neuf looking down at the Seine or sitting at a sidewalk café having breakfast or drinking wine, would not be shoved under anyone's nose. The last time she was over, so much more confident than she'd been when she started, she had gone to Italy again, with Meg, just for a week. After Meg recovered from her jet lag, which had made her cry with confused exhaustion, they'd got along fine. Meg had liked Rome best, the hot slices of pizza bought right on the sidewalk from dark men who flirted with her, the narrow winding streets she walked holding her mother's hand, the women who could run across these streets on very high heels. She had liked the churches especially, their thick stone walls, the high, dark emptiness inside, the echo if you shouted.

Andy didn't seem to be bothered by anything Bill said or did. Nothing fazed her, not even Bill's insinuations that she and Neil were spending far too much money, that they were running Paul's mill into the ground. One morning, after a visit when Bill had been tired and thoughtful, when he had talked for a long hour, for which she was thankful, about Paul, jumping around in time but still so obviously and painfully filled with love for his dead son, she went to Daphne under the full steam of nervy anger to tell her that she thought anything was better than having your father die so young your kids had no actual memory of him. “Do you even remember my father?” she asked. “Does anyone?”

Daphne told Andy yes, she did remember her father. She remembered dancing with him at the wedding and out at the Casino in the summers, many times. She said he was the one who first took her out onto the floor to teach her to dance. This wasn't true, he had been only one of the first, but Daphne thought, It's true enough.

Murray came. He had always come up to visit a few times a year. During Charlotte's reign he came alone, the reasons for her absence usually having a nice ring of truth to them, but Charlotte was almost forgotten now. For the last twelve years he had been bringing Kate.

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.”

*   *   *

IN 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.