Duet for Three (27 page)

“Of course they're frightened,” Aggie said sharply. “So what? That hardly makes them right. Fear can make you crazy, June, it can make you do crazy things.”

June's own aim was to do only small things. She thought of Chinese women with their feet bound, taking tiny, careful steps, moving lightly to avert pain.

One of her small steps, taking her out occasionally from an evening that would otherwise be spent again with Aggie, was to have supper at Brenda Ferguson's house. Brenda, who taught Grades 5 and 6, had started at the school a few years after June went back to teaching, and had originally gone to June for information on pupils June was passing into her classes. They had lunch together in the staffroom sometimes, if they had the same periods free, mainly to talk about pupils. One of the things June liked was that Brenda's questions were specific — had one child shown signs in June's classes of a vision problem, did another act up and what discipline methods had June tried? She did not speak of theories or fulfilment. She had taught elsewhere before moving here with her husband, which made her different from the younger, eager teachers.

It was kind of her to ask June home for suppers on occasion. She was a generous person, in her brisk way, and no doubt intended to cheer June up, or draw her out, or give her a lift. “Gosh,” she sometimes said, shaking her head, “I don't know how you've done it, raising a child and working, keeping it all up by yourself.”

“Well, there's my mother.”

“Yes, but it's not the same, is it? Bringing up a child, I mean, that's your own. Not the same for a grandmother.”

True enough.

Brenda, of course, would have no idea that it was hard for June to sit at the table with three lively teenagers who laughed and argued through the meal. Worse, though, was before supper, when June was helping Brenda make the salad and Brenda's husband Mac came bounding home from work and into the kitchen and kissed his wife on the cheek and gave her a hug, right in front of June. It wasn't just once, a single outburst of affection, but apparently a custom. Here were ordinary lives! Here precisely was what June had hoped for once (except that Brenda kept on teaching). It wasn't fair. As she walked home, grudges ran through her head like a tune.

“Some days,” Brenda was known to complain, “I'm so tired when I get home I can hardly pull a meal together. The kids help now sometimes, they can at least do their own laundries and they get their own breakfasts, but it's still so much! But then, I'd go crazy if I were home all the time. I'd miss teaching, wouldn't you?”

Once when Brenda said that, June had blurted fiercely, “I've always hated teaching,” and Brenda looked so startled, even frightened, that June had clamped her mouth closed against anything else she might have said. And Brenda had apparently decided it was wiser not to pursue it.

It was best to keep things to herself anyway. If no one knew where she was most vulnerable, it would be that much harder for her to get hurt.

She thought that small events, like going to Brenda's for supper, might be like being inoculated against some illness: a small effort that resulted in a small pain, perhaps warding off large events with their huge pains. If she could wrap enough of these minor but sturdy incidents around her, they might armor her against further cataclysmic ones.

It seemed to work, in a way. That really terrible pain, the one like a heart attack, went away finally, for the most part, except sometimes when she could still be stabbed by the smell of aftershave or hair cream. The disappearance of that pain, however, had nothing, it seemed, to do with being healed; more like being anaesthetized, as at the dentist's. At least when she'd had it, she'd known she was alive. “Oh, God,” she prayed, but then what? Not, of course, “Oh, God, restore the pain,” that would be ridiculous. But restore something: sensation, maybe; vision, hearing. The basic senses.

She woke up in the mornings sometimes, staring around her white room, and wondered what on earth she was still doing here.

Once, she'd assumed there would be a day when she would wake up and look around and find herself ready to go. Something firm would have been born and there she'd be, with plans and a future, packing up her belongings and Frances. It was a transformation that would just happen to her overnight, without deliberation or effort. Well, maybe tomorrow, she'd thought for a long time.

But now she no longer hoped for that, and didn't even bother to pray for it. Frances was nearly grown, and years were gone; not only gone, but more or less blank. What of importance had ever happened to her, after all? Only a few things, and they had hurt.

She might wake up some mornings wondering what on earth she was doing here, and sometimes she might, she thought, even verge on despair. But despair was better than terror, if that was her choice. Terror lay in change; despair in keeping still.

It did seem to her very strange, though, that considering her greatest longing was for safety, a guarantee against pain, she seemed to have suffered inordinately. A puzzle, that.

NINETEEN

Barney wept on Aggie's shoulder the Monday after his son lost his leg; put his head down and let the tears run. “Thank God,” he said finally. “I couldn't do that at home. Everybody's so upset, and I sort of feel I have to be strong. Thanks, Aggie.”

Not since Frances was a child had she felt the helplessness of someone seeking comfort from her. She patted his shoulder and stroked his hair, to tell him she was glad at least that he felt free to weep with her.

Over the weekend, Barney had aged. So many years of friendship, recounting their days and exchanging their questions in that single hour nearly every morning — simply the routine of smiles, a break, that breather in their days — and suddenly, in just a matter of a weekend's absence, he was abruptly aged. Even his hair seemed more white than grey, and the lines of his face dragged it downward. Some internal sagging had left him shrivelled and small, like a child leaning on her shoulder.

So many hours they'd spent talking about, wondering about, wars and murders, assassinations and atrocities, all those events that consumed the newspapers and television, but always at a distance, trying to imagine, peering at incidents through lines of print and pictures. It was hard, impossible, to grasp deliberate infliction of pain. There was so much pain anyway, they agreed, without going out creating it.

But now this accidental, random sort of tragedy had happened to Barney. His middle son, John, himself by then a father of two young children, worked in the warehouse of the box factory. A transport truck had backed up to the loading dock and John, misstepping his usual vault from the ground to the dock, from which he would supervise the loading of the truck, had been an instant too late pulling a trailing leg to safety, and it was crushed against the wall. “They tried to save it, the doctors worked all night Friday,” Barney said, “but there was too much damage.” On Saturday they had amputated.

And everything was altered. Not only for John, but for a widening collection of people that now included Aggie. The ripple effect of disaster; that shock, she thought, of being reminded that anything can change in an instant, everything can be overturned.

For Barney there was not only the terrible mutilation of his child, his son, but there also would be specific, concrete changes. John would have to undergo long therapy, and then might never work again. He would have a disability pension of sorts, but he also had two children and a wife who did not have a job. They had decided over the weekend that they would have to move in, for some time at least, with Barney and his wife. It would be crowded, but that was hardly the point. “It's tough, two families, and John's going to take a lot of care, and not just physically. He's always been so active — hunting and fishing and building things, all that outdoor stuff — it's going to be hard on him.” Also there was Barney's wife, who had grown frail. “She cried all weekend. Nobody could get her to stop, and she wouldn't take the pills the doctor gave her.” Barney looked so weary and lost; well, the shock of course, and that awful impotence to prevent or even control the pain of people he loved.

Aggie too felt some of that, able to comfort but not cure. She tried to imagine his home, where she had never been, and this seizure of horror striking it breathless. This friendship of hers and Barney's, it occurred to her, almost seemed to float in the air; it couldn't be set down firmly in any location but her kitchen.

She loaded him up with loaves of bread and a cake to take home with him and watched, worried, as he dragged his way out, off on his rounds again. His own feet stumbled, as if his capacity to walk had been, like his son's, diminished.

“Oh, poor Barney,” Frances cried. Unlike June, she was fond of him, even used to give him a kiss on the cheek in the morning when she was a child coming downstairs for breakfast. But then, for her he was a fixture in the routine of the house, not an intruder, as he apparently was to June.

June herself, hearing the news, just shivered.

Aggie looked at Frances and thought, “Oh, God, what if she lost a leg? Or an arm, or a life?” It really was a struggle not to be terrified like June. It really was hard to advise Frances to be daring but alert, brave but comprehending consequences. But fear was as paralysing as a broken back. Look at June, afraid to move. As crippled, apparently, as if she'd actually been in one of those accidents she worried about all the time.

Frances, lacking many fears of her own, was restricted by June's. “But what is she afraid I'll do?” she had demanded when June forbade her to go out with boys, at least until she was sixteen. “Doesn't she trust me? Couldn't you talk to her for me?”

“I could, but it wouldn't make her change her mind.”

Well, Aggie thought, Frances had hit on the word. All one could give was blind trust. Whereas June, with all her blind faith, was still afraid.

Later, Aggie heard Frances telling June, impatiently and bitterly, “I can't wait to grow up. Then I'll get to do what I want.” And June answering, “Is that what you think happens when you're grown up? You've got a lot to learn, my girl.”

If Frances was a somewhat grumpy teenager, it wasn't entirely without reason. Then, too, it was surely strange for her, being raised by two such different women. Bound to be confusing, and perhaps bound to lead to a few years in which she frowned a good deal more than she smiled.

June kept trying to
do
something about her. She'd say, “Goodness, Frances, do you know how unattractive you are when you pout like that?” or, attempting a more light-hearted rebuke, “Careful, now, your face doesn't freeze that way.”

What an exclusive world Frances lived in, though, outside of June and Aggie. Once she was finally old enough to go out on dates she was rarely home, and when she was, she spent much of her time in muffled conversations on the telephone. Aggie, catching only odd words and laughter, thought how natural and easily accepted Frances had turned out to be, despite her moods. So unlike the isolation of her own growing up, or the withdrawn quality of June's. Of course, June came of age in wartime, quite as queer a circumstance as Aggie's, in a different way. Times were freer now, there were more possibilities, more things known, and also more opportunities for pleasure.

Aggie did wonder, though, if June sometimes watched Frances slam into the house and out again, off to parties and movies and dates, and thought this was something she had missed. Did she regret a lack of choice, the result of the war or her own rigidity? Did she envy Frances? Because sometimes when Aggie was lying awake late on a Saturday night, listening for car doors closing, footsteps coming up the walk, low voices, and sometimes a long quiet before the front door downstairs opened and then clicked shut — sometimes despite herself Aggie felt a stab of envy, or worse, resentment. Not nice, that. Not generous, or loving.

She was reminded, regarding this sturdy young woman, that Frances would soon be leaving home. It would be a triumph of reason and generosity and courage, Aggie felt, over sentiment and greed and cowardice, to help Frances go off to university, instead of flailing about like June, who wanted Frances to stay home, go on to teachers' college, and repeat, as far as Aggie could tell, all their mistakes. “There'll be a job right here for you then,” June insisted.

“But I don't want to be a teacher.”

“Whyever not? It's secure, you get all those holidays, and if you're that set on going to university, you could do it in the summer. It only takes a little longer.”

“But I don't want to be a teacher, and I don't want to stay here. I want to get out and do different things. Anyway, you hate teaching. Why do you want me to do something you hate?”

“Because, as I'm trying to explain to you, it's a good job and something you can always fall back on. It's something for you to do at least until you get married.”

“Married! There you go again, wanting me to do something you didn't like.”

June's face went white. “Oh, Mum, I'm sorry.” Frances really has never been deliberately cruel, just inadvertently, sometimes. “I didn't mean that the way it sounded. It's just, I don't want to settle down here.”

“What
do
you want, then?”

“I don't know exactly. That's what I want to go away for, to find out. Do you see?”

“No. Nor do I see how you think we can afford it.”

Which was where Aggie stepped in, unnecessarily, she thought later. “I'm sure we could afford it, June, if that's what she really wants. I have money saved, and she can work in the summers, and there are loans. You might,” turning to Frances, “even get a scholarship.”

“Not likely,” said June. “Not with her marks.”

“Oh, Grandma, thank you,” Frances cried, and flung her arms around Aggie's neck.

So Barney's son lost his leg; and Aggie's granddaughter went away. These were not comparable sacrifices, of course, but she was also bereft and sad. To be truthful, lonely. Frances's departure was trivial in comparison with Barney's loss, and Aggie was ashamed to tell him how she felt; so when she wept, she did so on her own. And yet in its way, this
was
an amputation. She even thought of it that way. Sound had been cut off: no music rocking from Frances's room, or quick footsteps pounding up and down the stairs, no slamming doors, or raised voices, or, for that matter, whispers. The phone hardly ever rang. Absence was in the air. She missed confidences, secrets: the quarrels Frances had with friends, and how her first kiss felt. Even the small sins, like the time she shoplifted lipsticks and a powder compact from the five-and-dime.

Periodically, Frances returned from university and later on spare weekends from her work. From the world in which, as she told them, people called her “Fran” and “Frannie”, never Frances, as if she were someone else entirely.

“You'd love it, Grandma,” she said, shining with her own pleasure. She talked about men and making love, and books and lessons and friends, protests and discussions. She brought home dispatches from a world outside that Aggie had never been able to see for herself. She also brought home petitions against the war in Vietnam, and wept over pictures of napalmed babies. “My God, Grandma, how can people do things like that?”

She developed, Aggie thought, a finer sense of rage and a more intelligent sort of compassion. June said, “Well, at least she doesn't sulk any more.”

Of course, June disapproved of Frances's choice of a career. “So unsettled,” she said. She wondered how Frances could take such risks as flying frequently in airplanes, or meeting people she didn't know, with who knew what results. “You simply never know,” she warned, but Frances said, “Exactly.”

As her father had once done, Frances brought home tales of life out there. Except that hers were more interesting. His had been about people in furniture stores, and movies he'd seen, whereas his daughter could fill in unknown, unprinted details about stories they might already have read in newspapers: an unsolved murder, for instance, in which she knew that the police were quietly waiting, collecting evidence, perfectly aware who had done it. A politician who had taken his mistress on a junket with him, and introduced her to foreign dignitaries as his wife. Aggie loved this inside knowledge, confirming her view of there being so much underneath the surface.

Of course, it was a jolt to have Frances confirm it, too, to learn that this young woman whom Aggie assumed had kept so little from her had had a secret, something almost like a secret life, for years. Only when it was gone, apparently, was it possible for Frances to talk about it.

She was home for a visit and June was out shopping. Aggie was in the front room in her big chair, reading, when Frances came wandering in and curled up in the corner of the sofa. “I did something really stupid a couple of weeks ago,” she began.

Aggie's mind leaped to a man who was wrong, or another pregnancy; but maybe nothing quite so serious. “What?”

“I tracked down my father.”

“Good God.” That brought her upright. “Herb? How on earth did you do that?” She might have meant why.

“Oh,” almost airily, “I've been hunting around for years. Whenever I go someplace, I check the phone book. Do you have any idea how many H. Bensons there are in this world? I wrote his old company, too, but he left there years ago and all they knew was that somebody thought he'd gone out west. I remember you said he had a sister on the prairies somewhere, so I thought maybe that's where he'd gone, but it turns out he went all the way to the coast. I found him in Victoria.”

“I had no idea.” That was what was astounding: that she hadn't known any of this.

“You know, Grandma,” Frances said wistfully, as if she were looking so far back at something it was really some other person she was speaking of, “when I was little, I used to pretend sometimes that he was looking for me and someday he'd find me and take me with him, maybe on the road, and everything'd be different.”

Different? “Was it so bad here then?” Aggie asked sharply, but Frances didn't seem to notice the tone.

“Well no, I don't suppose it was bad really, most of the time. I mean,” catching herself a bit belatedly, “not with you, but sometimes with Mother I used to feel I wanted to get away. And it is weird when you don't have a father. Other kids' fathers were so neat. They'd take us places and make tree forts and all that stuff; I guess I missed that. And I guess I made up something better, so it wouldn't bother me so much.