After the Fire (13 page)

But most ignorant people felt superior to Karen and her father. Even their rights as citizens were at the whim of the government. Why wasn’t he angry? Why did he instead want to prove himself good enough to people who should have been beneath his contempt? Red was still just a kid, but she’d learned that she was “trash” even to pathetic drunken Sadie, and she kept her pride. She didn’t care what they thought, any of them.

Why should I?
Karen wondered. For all the contempt she felt for Milly Forbes, her judgments nevertheless stung. And, if Henrietta Hawkins was friendly, Karen felt reassured of her own value. And was shaken to see that old woman in a state of collapse.

Was she wrong to see her father’s vanity exposed in his sexual behavior and therefore to judge his pride in the same way, a false striving of self-serving ambition that would never change the color of his skin or the design of his eyelids? There were people in the camps who had killed themselves. Surely their despair wasn’t more honorable than that surviving generation of overachieving super-patriots.

There were simplicities in being a fatherless bastard which Karen both mistrusted and envied. She was learning that the mirror of her own value could not be the face of a father, lover, or child, nor could she find it in the old women among whom she’d been looking for role models. Certainly she didn’t want to be someone who perpetually ran away from failed loves, inadequate friendships, and meaningless work until she was so old and deaf that her inadequacies could be blamed on great age.

The healing wound of Karen’s pride had begun to itch.

M
ILLY LAY WATCHING THE
sunlight on the fresh roses which Bonnie had brought this morning. If Milly had had more energy, she might have demanded whether these, too, had come from Forbes, but she hadn’t the strength or mind for vexation. She was reduced to passive and basic pleasures. Roses in sunlight, the at first very painful and now just miraculous reawakening of her bladder and bowels. Milly had dealt with her body so long as an aging enemy that it was a largely forgotten experience to be aware of it simply as a servant to her consciousness. She breathed and felt her lungs at work acquiring oxygen for her blood which traveled through her veins carrying nourishing messages. For every conscious effort she made, her body carried out thousands of instructions she was not aware of. She felt amazed by it and grateful.

In birth, the child’s body was the miracle. Milly’s own, torn and depleted, breasts sore with her first milk, had been something to be pitied—a crude and vulnerable vehicle for life, hardly belonging to her at all, though a vital convenience for the child. And very soon—she had never been able to think how—it would have to be repaired and restored to the uses Forbes made of it.

Now no one else’s need pushed at her. She could lie and rest and let herself heal for herself. She didn’t resent the nurse’s urging her out of bed for the short journey to the bathroom, and, though she didn’t yet look forward to the time she spent sitting in a chair each day, she knew she would.

While Milly had been very sick, Bonnie seemed nearly always at her bedside. Now she came briefly in the morning with flowers or a magazine, came back in the afternoon for a real visit and occasionally again briefly in the evening.

“Don’t muck up your evenings for me,” Milly told her. “There must be lots of old friends you’d like to see.”

“I don’t,” Bonnie assured her. “You were on the way to a party tonight, that’s all.”

Milly didn’t really remember most of the people Bonnie referred to, expecting her mother to be familiar with high school and college friends who had frequented the house and who had often been more charmed by Milly than Bonnie had liked. They had never been much more than a blur of young faces to Milly but when Bonnie had complained at her mother’s behavior, her friends became something more of a challenge to beguile. “I’m teaching you how,” Milly had said to her daughter.

Instead of complaining that she couldn’t be expected, even with full presence of mind, to remember all those callow young, Milly let Bonnie chatter on about them and their affairs until, for lack of other interests, Milly began to look forward to Bonnie’s reports like episodes in the soaps. She could probably have watched television instead, but, since she had lived on the island, she was out of that habit. Bonnie, right there in the room with her, was an easier distraction.

“You should do your eyes like that all the time,” Milly commented one evening when Bonnie came more dressed up and made up than usual.

It pleased Milly that Bonnie after that came to visit with a careful face, whatever the time of day. It was as if she were a kind of stand-in for Milly until she could rouse herself to prepare her own public face again. She was relieved that Martin had gone away now that she was better, for he would have been a strain on her vanity.

Bonnie asked her if she would like other company.

“Who?” Milly wondered.

When Bonnie mentioned Chas Kidder’s wife or Chas himself, Milly declined.

“Hen might come one of these days when she’s in seeing Hart.”

“He died, Mother,” Bonnie said gently, as if such news might upset her mother.

“Well, good!” Milly exclaimed. “I hope Hen packs up and goes round the world on a freighter.”

“Would you like to do something like that?” Bonnie asked.

“Oh, I’ve hardly got the money to live the way I do,” Milly said dismissively.

“I get a lot of perks in the travel business, you know,” Bonnie said. “I maybe could arrange something.”

“I wouldn’t have the clothes,” Milly said.

“They’re not all fashion-plate cruises,” Bonnie said.

“But those are the ones I’d like,” Milly said. “And anyway I wouldn’t want to travel alone.”

Bonnie didn’t press the issue, and, though Milly didn’t take her seriously, she got a new vicarious pleasure in the travel magazines her daughter brought to her.

“What a comfort it must be,” the nurse said to her, “to have children like yours.”

Milly realized that, in fact, it was. But nearly everything was a comfort to her in these placid days of her returning strength. She did not want to be hurried, and no one was hurrying her.

Then one day Bonnie said, “The doctor thinks you might go home day after tomorrow, if I’d go with you for a week or ten days.”

“You can’t miss that much work!” Milly protested, who had not until that moment put her mind to the work Bonnie had already missed.

“I can,” Bonnie reassured her. “And I’d really like to, Mother.”

“But what would you do with yourself on the island? You’d be bored to death.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I always loved it there.”

“Did you?” Milly asked, mildly surprised, and then she remembered that she had once loved it there, too. “Nobody your age comes any more,” she said.

“I’ve seen enough people in the last couple of weeks to last me a while,” Bonnie said. “I could take walks. I could do a little yard work for you. There must be things you’d like done around the house. And we can just go on visiting. It’s been years since we’ve done that.”

Bonnie spoke in a tone wistful rather than reproachful, allowing Milly to remember faintly a time when she had felt companionable with her children before they had begun to witness her humiliation and to tell her all those things about herself that made humiliation even more inevitable. Bonnie had never been brutal to her as the others could be, but Milly had shrunk back even more from her kindness which made it all too clear that she had become an object of pity.

“The girl, Red, said she’d come in as much as I need her,” Milly said. “And Hen. But, if you can spare another week, I would like it.”

Admitting this wasn’t difficult because Milly really was feeling proud of this healing body of hers. It deserved Bonnie’s attention and kindness as it did her own. Milly had a peculiar feeling that she and her daughter together would be leaving the hospital with a new life on their hands—her own—and she was free after all these years to give herself that attention and receive it from her daughter.

The rationale for great community effort quite left Henrietta when she was faced with the question of a funeral for Hart.

“Is there really any point?” she asked her soberly concerned son. “For his friends he died years ago.”

“He didn’t for you,” Hart Jr. reminded her.

That certainly was the fiction she had kept up for all these years, but now she had to face the fact that the disagreeable stranger she had visited so faithfully was really her husband, and he was dead, his body lying on a shelf in the funeral parlor awaiting her instructions. Deprived of his company all these years, she didn’t want him carried back into the house like a piece of furniture.

“Did he have … any wishes?” Hart Jr. asked, this solid, middle-aged banker, being her son.

“Wishes? He would have liked just once to win the salmon derby.”

“I mean about what’s to be done now,” her son said with obvious patience.

“Oh. Not really. He favored cremation generally. But for himself I don’t think he cared one way or the other. He used to say it was for the living to bury the dead any way it suited them.”

It was hard to call up such information. The Hart who had been so accessible to her for these lonely years had been replaced by a dying old man who could be angry with her for bringing the wrong flavor of ice cream and might have a tantrum at the thought of her turning him into ashes, except that he was dead.

“I didn’t bother to wake him when I left the last time I saw him.”

“For him, I’m sure that was the right thing,” her son said gently.

“We don’t know, do we?” Henrietta replied sharply.

Hart Jr. sat unnaturally still. She wanted to shout at him that that dead body was nothing but an embarrassment to her, a sick joke. But she was aware that her feelings were inappropriate.

“I have to give the funeral people instructions this afternoon,” Hart Jr. said finally. “And, if there’s to be a funeral, I ought to call Georgie.”

“She wouldn’t try to bring the children!” Henrietta protested.

“No,” Hart agreed, “but she’d want to be here herself.”

“It’s such a big disruption for everyone,” Henrietta objected.

“Mother, you’ve always seen the value in ceremonies.”

“Oh,” she said, “for other people.”

“Well, there are other people involved—friends, nieces and nephews who may want to pay their respects.”

“And you,” Henrietta said, suddenly remembering. “What do you want done, son?”

“I don’t want it to be difficult for you,” he said, drawing back from her. “It doesn’t have to be a funeral. It could be some sort of memorial service here or in Vancouver.”

Henrietta couldn’t think where. She couldn’t think. She wept, frustrated and angry tears which her son accepted as one of the manifestations of grief. He put an arm around her and offered a box of Kleenex.

“I’m not really falling apart,” she said when she had recovered herself. “I just don’t seem able to think, to make decisions.”

“Well, unless you have any real objection, I think cremation is the right thing to do.”

“The ashes?” Henrietta asked timidly, the idea of them a lot less daunting than a corpse. But ashes were still in need of disposal.

“I could scatter them out in the pass,” Hart Jr. offered, “where he liked to fish.”

“You hate boats,” Henrietta reminded him.

“That’s overstating it,” her son said mildly.

She could see that he resented her old reflex to protect him from his father’s enthusiasms. She was inadvertently reminding him of a way he had been a less than perfect son for his father. What Henrietta would have liked to say to him was how much she admired the grace with which he had always refused to be the focus of all their needs, all their lost hopes for the children who hadn’t survived. He had managed to grow up to be himself in spite of all their errors. Hart Jr. hadn’t gone fishing with his father not only because he lacked any real interest in it but also because he had no desire to usurp his brother Peter’s memory. But one word about any of that would sully his sense of the past.

“Well?” Hart Jr. asked.

“Yes, all right,” Henrietta agreed, not quite sure what she was agreeing to except to let him make the decisions.

In many ways by now he was a stranger to her. She didn’t know him at work and had had only glimpses of him as a husband and father. But it was right that he should grow away from her into manhood. He was a stranger she trusted.

How unnaturally her husband had separated himself from her until he became a stranger she didn’t trust even for ordinary human concern. And dead, that stranger couldn’t call up any of the emotions she was expected to feel. Why were the stories of changelings always about children when so often it was the old who were stolen away, in their place such helpless and horrible substitutes?

Your father was horrible, simply horrible!
Henrietta wanted to shout and was immediately ashamed of herself.

Why did she have to face this terrible failure of love, this knowledge that she never had really accepted that damaged old man as her husband until he finally managed to die, taking the memory of Hart with him?

“I’ll make arrangements for a memorial service, Mother,” Hart Jr. said. “In Vancouver, I think. More of his old friends are there. We can provide transport for anyone on the island who wants to go.”

He held up her address book and asked, “Could you maybe just check the names of those who should be asked?”

“Half of them are dead,” Henrietta said. “I always meant to update it. I never got around to it because it’s hard to cross people off.”

“What you need is a new book,” her son suggested.

“I must try to be some help to you, darling, but just at the moment I have to lie down.”

Though they still met in the ferry parking lot, Karen and Red no longer used the space for driving lessons. Red needed more practice driving in traffic than the island easily provided even when Karen made her feed into the arriving line of cars.

“I can’t take you off island behind the wheel until you get your learner’s permit,” Karen said.