A Good House (6 page)

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IN THE TIME
before Sylvia died the family often sat around after supper talking, their empty plates pushed toward the middle of the table to make room for their elbows or their folded arms. All her life Sylvia had been a better-than-average mimic. From the time she was a very young girl she had been able to cancel her own voice and bring someone else into the room, someone with an easily recognized cadence, an easily scoffed opinion. Although her face was thin now and her Wedgwood-blue eyes unnaturally large, she could still do a few people dead on, among them Katharine Hepburn and the town's shy young mayor and, with relish, her hopelessly cheerful sister-in-law, who had firmly established herself as the kids' least favourite aunt. All of the impersonations brought applause.

If Paul's height was mentioned, and it often was mentioned as one way to lighten the talk, Sylvia would say he must have been a foundling, a switch, brought to her hospital bed by mistake. She would describe some very tall mother somewhere puzzling over her short kid. But no one believed that this had actually happened because it was Paul and Paul alone who could do his mother's trick. Like a monster from a horror movie he could claw his hands, he could bend the top knuckles of his long fingers and keep the other knuckles locked straight. Paul and Sylvia often performed their trick together, smiling across the table at each other, pleased to be giving the others the creeps.

Two or three times in these months Sylvia called up some energy and tried to say what was actually on her mind. One night, with a deliberation only partially camouflaged by her casual approach, she said she was going to describe each one of them, their skills and their particular talents. She was going to explain why they'd been put on this earth.

After she said, “Patrick is quiet but steady. He can steady other people when they most need it. This has always been true and always will be,” Patrick stood up from the table and bowed.

After she said, “Daphne has a mystery about her, something to remind people if they are capable of being reminded that things are not necessarily what they seem,” Daphne got out of her chair to stand in the middle of the room and curtsy in all four directions, as if an attentive crowd surrounded them.

After she said, “Paul moves fast and thinks fast. And he is funny, and that is a wonderful and useful thing, never to be underestimated,” Paul assumed the exaggerated modesty of a truly humble man, lowering his head solemnly, which made them snort with laughter because what Bill sometimes called his newfound cockiness had once or twice prompted a necessary reminder to Paul that his glorified status as the centre on the Bantam hockey team didn't automatically carry over.

Not finished, because under no circumstances would she have left him out of this, Sylvia turned to Murray. “Murray,” she said, “is just good. Good as in, born that way.” Believing he knew the truth about himself, Murray stayed right where he was, turned his face away, and shrugged his narrow shoulders.

Bill had been nodding yes while Sylvia spoke, as if they'd talked it over and decided together what was true. The kids knew full well that this kind of testimony was rare. Other kids whose mothers had not been moved down to the living room didn't get to hear themselves described so kindly. But in spite of their clowning they soaked it up, believed what their mother told them, took the words and stacked them away for future use against other words, a few of which they'd already heard.

Sometimes when supper was finished everyone would drift into the living room to surround Sylvia on the bed and talk. They would begin with shamelessly enhanced reports of recent events: somebody's drunk, raging brother-in-law evicted from a dance at the arena, a wedding already planned for July with the bridesmaids to be decked out in dark red velveteen, the highest stained-glass library window unaccountably broken on Thursday night, likely in the middle of the night by a book-hating cult, Daphne said.

From there they would move on to casual, recreational gossip, to conjecture and guesswork. When the momentum picked up they would home in on the oddest people, the misfits, or the ones they knew the least about, or the ones they didn't like. In full swing they encouraged and contradicted and interrupted and accused one another and lied as much as they had to, to keep it going. Sylvia still knew everyone they talked about, she hadn't been in bed long enough to forget how the world worked, and she egged them on and sometimes topped them with mildly nasty but apparently precise accounts from a distant past.

When she couldn't continue she would fade back into her stack of pillows and pronounce, “We are really, really despicable, every one of us,” and Bill would respond with his own line, “We're not so bad we can't get worse.” If Sylvia was very tired, the kids just squeezed her feet through the blankets as they made their way out of the living room.

Bill left Sylvia's daytime care to her mother because he still had to show up for work at the hardware store. And he still sat in the front booths of the Blue Moon with the other men who worked uptown, the wits, as they were called. The wits knew the situation with Sylvia Chambers and they tried to accommodate it, tried to group their working bodies around it. Normally they passed the time talking politics, casually confusing the facts and enlarging the issues to the point of hopelessness, repeating like slogans the words
damnpoliticians
and
highertaxes.
Some days, for a change of pace, they attacked rumoured advances in science or technology, their suspicions banked up by the always reliable tag team of half-baked information and rampant skepticism. But with Bill's situation as it was, they stalled, hesitated a half beat before they spoke, tempered their jumpy, mocking, scatter-gun talk with oblique half-phrased sentiments and couched clichés carefully aimed to miss the mark. They endured the occasional silence, asked short, gentle questions, not for any answer but for the gentleness itself.

This couldn't last. Worn down and fed up with gentleness and care, they conceived a plan.

The men knew that Sylvia had been moved down to the living room and that there was only the one bathroom in that house, so they decided that a group of dilettante carpenters would build her a downstairs bathroom. Archie Stutt was signed on and both grandfathers and the Anglican minister. Trevor Hanley, who had the Chev Olds dealership, said he'd come, said he was all warmed up because he'd just put the finishing touches to a shed out at the cottage last fall. And Archie said that he'd talk to the new guy at the Esso to see if he could be had.

Bill didn't put up any resistance. Although he'd pulled the old picket fence down on his own when he got home from overseas, he couldn't help with something like this because even now, more than ten years after he'd had to start relying exclusively on his left hand, it wasn't entirely trustworthy, not with precision work, not with heavy tools. And he wasn't in any position to leave his job at the hardware.

But he used his discount to pay for most of the materials and he borrowed a thirty-cup coffeemaker from the Presbyterian church. He made new coffee every morning and put it on a makeshift table in the kitchen near the back door because it was March and the ground was hard, the work was cold.

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THE CONSTRUCTION STARTED
from the outside. In the beginning the neighbourhood dogs congregated to bark their interest and this caused the yard squirrels to run straight up the hickories to hide in the winter branches. The squirrels returned when they saw there was nothing much to be feared and the men gave them names, engaged them in conversation. The new guy's language was rougher than what the older men were used to but they toned him down by declining to respond in kind, by taking the trouble to choose their own words. They were in the habit of controlling talk this way and they didn't think badly of him, they just assumed he'd been raised differently. Perhaps by wolves, the minister suggested early on.

Most of the men brought their own shovels and hammers and saws, their own tape measures. They dug through the thin snow into the earth, broke through the shallow frost with the mildest profanity and a bit of extra push from their steel-toed boots on the blades of their shovels. They hauled the lumber from the snowed-on pile in the driveway, built a frame for the foundation, and mixed cement in one of Archie's wheelbarrows. After it was poured, Archie fired up a propane heater under a makeshift tent, which was only an old stained tarp thrown over the lawn chairs, to help the cement set.

They framed three walls out square on the cold ground and pounded them together and after the walls were up Trevor Hanley made a sketch of a low-pitched roof that he said they would have to build with particular attention, making sure that the join to the house proper had integrity because if there was ever going to be a leak, that was where it would want to be.

The plumber came over to install the drain. He drilled holes through the old foundation wall and soldered extensions to the existing water lines in the basement and when he said he had all the lines he'd need they built the subfloor, leaving him only a trap door, which he said was likely good enough. They covered the wall studs with plywood and tar paper and with siding that someone would paint white in the spring to match the rest of the house. The Anglican minister threw a half-dozen bundles of shingles onto the roof and climbed up after them.

Archie and a couple of the men on the town payroll dug a long trench from the new bathroom drain to the sewer line out on the street and laid a five-inch pipe to make the connection. Soon after the pipe was buried the wide snake of mounded dirt that would settle and sink by summer was covered by the last of the drifting snow.

The men moved inside, brought their tools and their noise and their blunt male talk into the kitchen. They used mallets to gouge a door-sized hole in the kitchen wall, trimmed the opening carefully with handsaws. The kids cleaned up, shovelled sawdust and chunks of plaster into boxes to be carried out to the garage and hauled away to the dump when someone had the time. Insulation was stuffed between the studs and covered with top-grade plywood and then a cupboard arrived and a mirror and a sink and a toilet. The plumber came back, and the electrician, bringing with him a small electric space-heater. A thick grey carpet was glued to the floor so it would be warm on Sylvia's bare feet in the middle of the night.

The grandfathers took off in one of Trevor's brand new '55 Chev pick-ups, a demonstrator, he called it, which meant it was the truck Trevor wanted to drive that year, and after cruising up and down the streets discussing just who might have a loose door lying around they pulled into Bert Wynne's driveway and, sure enough, Bert had an oak door that he'd saved for just such a purpose up in the rafters of his shed. They offered him twenty dollars but he settled for ten, and after the door was home and hung on its frame with new, stronger hinges, Archie patched and smoothed the ragged plaster that surrounded it.

When the work was finished a dozen men pulled chairs around the kitchen table or leaned on the counter to share a forty-ounce bottle of Canadian Club, courtesy of Archie Stutt. They drank quietly, satisfied with themselves. There were no jokes and the few starts at gossip faded off from lack of worthwhile embellishment.

Sylvia's mother stripped the old kitchen wallpaper and burned it in the barrel down by the creek. She stayed with the paper as it burned, used the crowbar to push it down and down again into the fire. Waiting for the fire to do its work, she pulled her thick old cardigan tight and turned to watch the rush of the cold April creek on its way to the lake.

She repapered both the kitchen and the bathroom with a pattern very close in colour and design to what she'd stripped. It took her three days. She was helped by Margaret Kemp, who let herself off early from the hardware store.

The bathroom fixtures were pale sandy pink. Because she asked him to, Patrick drove Daphne down to Sarnia and over the Bluewater Bridge to Port Huron to buy two expensive sets of thick pink American towels and on the way home they stopped uptown at Clarke's for pink Kleenex and toilet paper, which was new on the market and very popular.

When the bathroom was absolutely finished, the men were invited back one evening for coffee and a slice of Sylvia's mother's specialty, double dark chocolate cake. Paul was the one picked to throw open the door on their work. Sylvia sat in a kitchen chair pretending she hadn't been watching and listening all along, hadn't already begun to use the toilet. She told them they'd done a tremendous job, said it would be so convenient for her, and, “Tell me, how can I ever thank you?”

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TWO MONTHS AFTER
its completion Sylvia was standing in the bathroom in the middle of the night, washing her sweaty face and neck, when she fell. She watched herself go down in the mirror. In the few seconds it took their father to get to her, the kids had time to make it only as far as the stairs where they could hear her loudly going after God a dozen different ways and then after their father, telling him in a cold middle-of-the-night voice that he would be doing them both a favour if he would just give up on pretending to understand.

“Give it the hell up,” she said to him. “It doesn't help me.”

And then they heard him helping her up to her feet, trying to soothe her with choked words and his own disciplined sobs.

Doctor Cooper dropped in twice a day every day after the night of the fall to give Sylvia shots in her hip, telling Bill privately that he should be warned that this drug might alter her nature a bit, there was no telling really, but it was the very best available for now.

Reverend Walker from the United Church came once a week, usually in the morning. On his first visit, after he had been served his coffee and muffin, he asked Sylvia's mother if she would leave them for a time and she did so reluctantly, closing the door behind her with perhaps a bit too much force. Bill told Sylvia he'd back Walker off if that was her wish but she said no, it was all right, he was only doing his job. She told no one what they talked about those once-a-week mornings.