A Good House (37 page)

Then he confessed that he felt quite bad for the times he had wished Stephen would set the horn aside and go out for a baseball team or sign up to be a camp counsellor or something. He said he hadn't mentioned this to anyone, only thanked God he hadn't pushed the kid any harder than he had. He said he had no idea what stopped him.

Taking this in, Margaret told Patrick that he wasn't about to hear her say he was a model parent. “You've got lucky,” she said. “Good parenting is just watching for your luck, trusting it to make an appearance once in a while, and sitting up straight when it does.” She poured him his cup of tea. “Bad parenting is mostly bad luck,” she said. “I believe that.”

Listening to Patrick go on about his thoughts, his secret achievements, his small feared badness, had turned out to be one of Margaret's old-woman pleasures. It wasn't like hearing guilt or hesitant pride or regret from a woman. It was, in her experience, much more rare. She watched him talk the way you might watch an animal grooming himself in the dark of night. She kept still, maintained a certain distance.

As he talked this time, Margaret was getting ready to make her own confession. She had decided after Patrick's last visit that she was going to own up to the lie she'd fed him when he was a boy, just after Sarah was born, the lie about his mother and the ball games. She was not inclined to tamper with their other lie, his pretence that he had never faltered, never spent his evenings crying in the arms of a mousy, loving young woman. Which had been the only place for it he could find. Obviously. Although she was willing to expose herself as a self-serving liar, a woman who would lie to a belligerent, grieving boy, she was by no means finished with restraint, with the shelter provided by restraint.

“When I first came here I didn't know your mind,” she started. “I just knew that you'd lost your mother and had this new woman in your house. Me. You were so very quiet, not sulky exactly, but too quiet for my taste. So I lied to you about something.”

Patrick put his cup down and briefly closed his eyes. “Sulky would be the word,” he said. “I know I wasn't helpful to you. Like Paul, for instance. Paul always turned up when he was needed.”

“He must have been born with his easygoing heart,” she said. “I never once saw it fail him.”

They were quiet for a minute. This was the thing given to Paul, a quiet space around his name.

“Anyway,” she said. “About the ball games. Truth be told, your mother and I hardly knew each other when we were young. She was one of the girls who finished high school, which was supposed to guarantee you the chance for a different kind of life. I didn't, of course. My family was on the outside of things. Rougher. Not much money. No one educated. So your mother and I did not play on the same ball team. But I do remember her when she was young. When the men were away. And I remember you kids on the park bleachers, already bathed and ready for bed, you running loose, Paul and Daphne wrapped in blankets in your grandparents' arms.” She waited a little while before she continued, as if she had made a picture they could look at together.

“They'd just put in the lights for night games, sometimes there were two a night, and I remember warming up behind the bleachers, glancing over once in a while to see how the other game was going, seeing your mother 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. I remember this so clearly.”

“She wasn't very big for first base,” Patrick said.

“No, she wasn't,” Margaret said.

“She was a showy player,” he said.

“Showy and funny and very determined to win,” Margaret said. “That's what people would have thought.”

“And the purpose of the lie?” he asked.

“Only to give you something,” she said. “Or maybe to win you over. Maybe I was just covering my bases, or my ass.”

“Well, it worked,” Patrick said, smiling because he liked it when she swore, which was not very often any more. “Perhaps I can tell you a lie some day.”

“That would be nice, dear,” she said.

He sat up straight to finish his tea and then he asked, “You never thought of getting married before you came to us?”

“Thought about it all the time,” she said. “I was lonely. Take my word, it's not good to be alone.”

“I'd know that,” Patrick said. He got up and walked into the dining room and opened the buffet door to find the Scotch, his own bottle, his own brand, kept there and replaced as needed. He sat down again and lifted Margaret's cup from the saucer to drink the last of her tea. Then he poured them both a healthy shot.

“Your dad saved me,” she said. “Asking me.” She lifted the teacup and the saucer together to take a sip. “A life wants work.”

“There must have been others,” he said. “Before.”

“Almost all the men were married,” she said, “all the good ones. And that didn't appeal to me much. Sneaking around.” These were the necessary words, the lies that betrayed nothing. “It could have got known.”

“But before,” he said. “Before everyone was married.”

“I was very tall,” she said. “About as tall as I am today. Most men then didn't even like to stand beside a tall woman. Let alone lay her down.”

Patrick laughed, leaned his head way back. In the middle of his pleasure he noticed for the first time in his life the array of fine spiderweb cracks in the plaster ceiling. He thought maybe he should acknowledge the cracks out loud and offer to fix them or to have them fixed, but then he thought he would probably let them go. It had to stop somewhere.

“Men your age have had to learn to hide their egos,” Margaret said. “I've noticed this. And it's a good thing. But they didn't hide them then. A woman had to have a certain look about her. Not weak exactly, but if you looked like you could make it on your own, mostly they let you make it on your own. The last thing wanted was a partner.”

“That's pretty harsh,” Patrick said, watching her face.

“And pretty true,” she said. “In my judgement.”

“Too harsh,” he said, shaking his head, refusing to believe.

“Your dad needed a partner,” she said. “Because he'd been stopped. Because he had something under way here that had to be carried on with.”

“Us,” he said.

“And himself,” she said. “He was a settled man. He needed to stay settled.”

“I heard once,” he said, “just after you came to us, that you had someone who went overseas. Someone who didn't get back.”

Came to us, she thought. Like a revelation? Is that how he thinks about it now? “Heard that, did you?” she said. “I didn't think busy boys had time for gossip.”

He most certainly would have described her joining them differently when he was a boy. But at the time, although she'd been casually affectionate with him, and careful and smart and patient, she had not really concerned herself with how Patrick judged her decision because at eighteen he'd been just too young to comprehend much about how a life got built. And she would have to say that she didn't really care now, either.

“Was it true?” he asked.

He wasn't going to stop. He was going to keep at her and that was fine. “It's still true,” she said.

“And…?” he said. “And…?”

“I'm an old woman, Patrick,” she said.

“You are old,” he said. “An old tall woman.”

She thought she heard something and looked toward the stairs, stretched back to look around the archway into the hall to make sure it was empty. She coughed, once and hard.

“He was,” she started, just loud enough to be heard across the coffee table, “tall. Not noticeable, not handsome or extraordinarily smart. But he would have been able to make a good living somehow. He would have been as steady as a rock, not unlike your father. And he was a beautiful lover.”

“Whoa,” Patrick said. “Do I really want to hear this?”

“His body almost matched mine,” she said. “We used to take our bodies out to the inland lakes, over to the east side where there weren't any cottages.” This is quite nice, she thought, this memory of an innocent young woman, before the war. And she did remember a purity, the pure grace of good sex just discovered, and she felt so lucky to have had that when she was starting out, when she surely could not have survived without it. I loved him,” she said, finishing her Scotch, “and he most certainly loved me.”

Patrick topped up their drinks. “And then there was a war,” he said. “And because he was young and fit he got sent overseas. And then he was killed.”

“And then he got blown to bits in a field in France. And he wasn't alone. There were sixteen from just here, so multiply that. And lots of the ones who did get back were lost in some other way. Some of your father's bits got left behind, remember. Bits he could have used.”

“Were you engaged?” Patrick asked.

“Not officially,” she said. “They came to tell his mother. I didn't find out how and where and when for hours.” She drained her cup again. “His mother would not have liked me much, although I didn't ever hear that for sure.”

“Because you were rough,” he said.

“But I wasn't,” she said. “I've never been rough. Only my family, my background.”

She sat up straight to begin to gather things on the tray. “I kept myself busy,” she said, “remembering him, all the things about him. It can pass a lot of time. I wouldn't have noticed another man's interest if it had parked itself outside my door.” Oh, such easy words, she thought. And said with such a convincing firmness, as if she had been always ready, always on guard, for questions like this.

Patrick picked up the bottle to fill his own cup again and reached across to hers but she stretched out a hand to block the flow.

“Sometimes I used to take Sandra Elliot out to the east side of the inland lakes,” he said. “For years I never travelled without a blanket.”

“You and Paul both,” she said. “I was the one who pulled your blankets from the trunk every fall and washed them. Did you never notice that they didn't smell as bad as they might have?”

“Maybe we found the same dunes,” he said. “Do you remember where you went exactly?” He lifted his eyebrows, mimicked an exaggerated, prurient interest. “Perhaps we spread our blankets on the same warm, moonlit sand.”

Margaret laughed, abruptly, loudly, covered her mouth to stifle the sound.

“You're blushing,” Patrick said. “This I've heard about but never seen.” He reached for her arm. “Take your hand away.”

She brushed him off, stood up and turned her back on him, bent to gather the cups, her laughter muted from sound to the familiar shaking movement of her broad shoulders.

She lifted the tray and started toward the kitchen, through the hall. She stopped in mid-stride. Bill was sitting on the stairs, on the steps that fanned to make the turn, curled up in his pyjamas, his arms wrapped around himself for warmth, his eyes shut tight against God knows what.

“You're there,” Margaret said.

Bill stood up, pushed himself up, staggering a bit against the wall. “Sylvia,” he said. “Come to bed. Both of you.”

Patrick recovered quickly. “Yes,” he said, loudly, cleanly. “It's about that time.” He pulled off his work socks and held them tight in his hands, did not drop them to the floor and leave them for Margaret as he had when he was a young man. “Our room?” he asked, meaning his and Paul's. He knew it was up there waiting for him, the sheets on his old bed newly washed and ironed so they would feel cool on his skin, the faded quilts stacked three thick the way he liked them, the air in the room freshened with the late afternoon breeze. Earlier, standing sweating in the garden, he had looked up at the sound of their window being thrown open. He had seen his father's arms spread wide to grip the heavy sash.

*   *   *

HE UNDERSTOOD THAT
he was expected to get up and follow his father. This day, the work he'd done this day, had exhausted him, as he had wanted it to. His body needed and for once had earned the deepest sleep. But he stayed put. Hearing the stumbling footfalls on the stairs, he thought about the man who was still supposed to be his father sitting out there listening, knowing, if he still knew anything, that he would soon be discovered, and then climbing the stairs to his bed to lie there alone and rage about what he'd heard or thought he'd heard. A man who had possessed for most of his life no talent for rage at all, now lost, now helpless, without it.

He lowered his head. He could not, for anything, have lifted his head. He thought about Paul, how good a man he had been, how terrifying it must have been to die so fast, without warning, to be killed instantly, although surely not absolutely instantly, surely not without a brief, black comprehension, and then he thought about sweet Meg, who had not for one moment of her life been sweet and who would never again now be her beloved, difficult, ragged self but always something else, some doped, defeated thing, and he thought about his mother, a mother he could remember not only sick and dying but just as clearly alive at the kitchen table and in the car and in the yard, dying the furthest thing from her mind, her quick, light voice calling out to all of them with praise or correction or surprise, and he thought about Daphne, the steady nerve of her mothering and how wildly, recklessly courageous she was before she fell, pumping the makeshift trapeze as hard as she could above the watching crowd, above the mattresses, smiling her showmanship smile for Murray. At the end of it he thought about a finely wrought first marriage broken by a stupid, sanctimonious man, himself.

He thought if Margaret had not been standing in the hall, he might have … might have what? What? Broken down? Wept? Lost control? Lost himself? No. Except for the one time, the one long moment of losing Paul, the sharp, blunt shock of losing Paul … None of that had ever made itself available to him, not even when he was a boy. His options, if that's what they were, had always been much more limited.