Duet for Three (29 page)

Aggie thought not about the fun of being young, but the pleasures of getting on. They were like an old married couple now, she and Barney, sitting briefly together for their chats. Familiarity and fondness. Sometimes she thought, “Whatever would I have done without him?” She would reach out then, perhaps, and pat his hand. She might have burst long ago from too many things kept inside, without his listening ear. Where she might once have taken him for granted, someone fortunate who appeared in her days, she now considered him something of a miracle. The loneliness, bleakness, and narrowness of all these years without him. Or someone like him. If not a sister, or a mother, then a friend.

Poor June, then, she thought: no one to talk to. Might she not burst, with who knew what inside? This was an old concern she could remember vaguely from years ago. Had nothing really changed?

She ought to pay more attention, be kinder. Just, oh, that was all very well in June's absence, but when she was actually in the same room, all righteous and smug, Aggie really couldn't help it. It might be sad from a distance, but up close her desire was to stick pins in and see if anything might puncture that smooth surface.

One Wednesday, Barney didn't show up and didn't show up. By noon, after a morning of anxious glances out the door, and the uneasiness of a disruption in her routine, Aggie knew he wouldn't be coming today. But maybe he'd had something special on, a particular all-morning chore. Or, worse, maybe there was another crisis in his family, another injury or an illness.

On Thursday morning he didn't come. She was worried now, and absent-minded about her work. She gave the wrong change to one customer, and bagged a loaf of raisin bread for another, instead of the cheese bread that was ordered. “I'm sorry,” she apologized, “I don't know where my head's at today.” Her head was off with Barney, imagining things. The trouble could not be just one of his jobs.

On Friday he didn't come and she was almost, not quite, frantic. There would obviously be an explanation, but it was the not knowing that was upsetting. If anything happened to her, or June or Frances, he'd know right away, because he'd show up here and find out. She couldn't do that, go wandering over to his home. “You may think this is awful,” he'd told her long ago, “but I've never mentioned it at home that I come here every day.”

“But why on earth not?” She didn't think it was awful, exactly, but was certainly surprised.

“I'm not sure. It's not that there's anything wrong about it — well, you know that as well as I do — but maybe it's the idea of having to explain. Or that maybe Alice's feelings would be hurt, in a way. She might not understand that we're friends. And of course now it's far too late; I'd not only have to explain you, and coming here all the time, but why I've never mentioned it.”

He thought for a moment. “Anyway, I think it's partly just wanting to keep something to myself. Having something that's private, just to me. I don't mean a secret exactly, not something to hide. Just private. We live,” he sighed, “so much on top of each other.”

So no, she could not now go traipsing over to his house, inquiring about him.

But there was nothing to stop her from phoning. Why hadn't she thought of that before? People must call Barney all the time, wanting him to do this and that. She couldn't come right out and ask, “Is something wrong? What's going on?” but she might find out anyway.

A woman answered: Alice, no doubt. Interesting, to hear the voice and know so much about the person, but not to be able to fit a face to it precisely. “Could I speak with Mr. Holtom please?”

“Oh dear, no, I'm sorry, that's not possible.”

“Can you tell me when it will be possible?” Leaping into a lie. “I have some jobs around the house I thought he might do before winter.”

There was a little silence before the voice said, “I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid you'll have to find someone else. My husband's in hospital. He fell and broke his hip this week, trying to patch someone's roof.”

“You mean he fell off a roof?”

“Off a ladder. It slipped.”

“Is he going to be all right? Do you know how long he'll be in hospital?”

“I suppose he'll be all right. But he won't be able to work any more, so I'm afraid you'll have to find someone else.”

Aggie knew she must have sounded like some stupid woman who couldn't get it through her head that Mr. Holtom was no longer available for home maintenance chores. “I'm sorry to have bothered you,” she said, hanging up.

A broken hip. What did she know about broken hips? Only, really, that they were terribly dangerous and terribly common among the elderly. Barney was right, he was old. She was old, too. She pictured him tumbling, rolling, falling through the air, arms flung out to protect himself, landing on that fragile boniness. Did he cry out as he fell? Was he wondering if she knew, or how to let her know? More likely he was lying in a hospital bed, in pain, worrying about how he and his family were going to get along now. What could she do for him? What would she do without him?

She took a taxi to the hospital that evening, but didn't go into his room. Barely caught a glimpse of him through the open door. He was surrounded by people, members of his family, she supposed. She left the package of books she'd brought with a nurse, to be passed on to him later.

She did see him, finally, the next week. He was barely a lump under the blanket. “I'm sorry I couldn't let you know, Aggie,” he said in a new, frail, and tiny voice. “There wasn't a chance. But I can use the phone now — I couldn't even move before. And I'll be getting out soon, I hope. Another week or so. They've put in a pin. It hurts like the devil.” All of a sudden he was asleep, so she left.

Sometimes she could almost agree with June that changes tended to be fearful things. Maybe just that from now on, possibilities were narrowed and more perilous.

After Barney left the hospital, there was still a long convalescence, and when he did begin to get out, it was a terrible effort. He remained stiff, and the pin still pained him. His face was grey with effort, and he was short of breath. It seemed to wear him out, just hobbling over to the bakeshop. He couldn't manage it more than once a week or so, and she tried to decide, regarding his exhaustion, if it was more difficult to miss him, longing for his presence when she wanted to talk to him, or to have him here, so worn out he was barely present anyway. She hated it, that he was beaten this way; that all his energy now seemed to go into his next step and how to survive it.

“I guess,” he said finally one morning, “I've had it. I'm giving up, Aggie, I'm sorry. We've decided to sell the house, and John and his family are going to take an apartment and Alice and I are going to move out to Winnipeg to Ben's. He and his wife just bought a duplex, and we're going to take one side of it.”

Oh no, lose him entirely?

“But we can write, Aggie.”

She didn't think they likely would; not very often. It wouldn't be anything like this.

“Is it what you want to do?”

“No, it's just apparently what I have to do. Jesus, Aggie,” with a flash of his old self, “I hate it. I hate having to get used to a new place, and being a burden. I hate hurting all the goddamned time. Jesus, you know,” and he looked at her bleakly, and with anger, “I think I hate being alive. It isn't fair.”

They did write a few times, for a little while, but of course it wasn't the same.

For all she knows, he's dead now. If he died, no one would let her know. She would have liked to think that all those years would mean he could not vanish without some corresponding shiver in her life, but that's not likely the case. Did he not break his hip while she was doing something like rolling out biscuit dough without a twinge?

Maybe Frances, if she's so goddamned clever at finding people, could find Barney, too, and let her know what's happened to him.

What on earth is this ferocious clutch on life about, when more and more it requires letting go of one thing and another? It comes down, it seems, more and more to a slow vanishing of the irreplaceable. One of these times, the irreplaceable vanishing object will be herself.

Once she saw a series of lights, flashing on and on, lighting up time into the future, into the next century, with Frances. Now she sees lights going out, like a city bedding down for the night.

PART III

TWENTY

It's become terribly familiar, this moment when Aggie's bedroom door opens and she looks up in distress and June looks down with distaste, almost routine. “Up you get, Mother,” June says matter-of-factly, deftly hauling and swinging until Aggie is on her feet. June has become adept at stripping the bed and wiping the plastic sheet that no longer crackles, and wrapping the sheets in her arms and carrying them down to the washer.

This morning, as she pulls Aggie's nightgown over her head and stoops so that Aggie, resting a hand on her shoulder, can step into her panties, she says, “Frances called last night, after you'd gone to bed.”

Aggie feels her breath catch and her heart set out on that more violent pounding. “Oh?”

“She has this weekend free. She'll catch the train Friday night.”

Two days. “What else did she have to say?” Aggie asks cautiously.

“Nothing much. Just that she's coming.”

“Did you mention — anything?”

“No.”

They seem to have developed a way of speaking that avoids crucial nouns. Like “accident” and “nursing home” or “plans” or “future” or anything terrifying.

Aggie searches June's face for intentions, but finds only that look of studied blankness she has perfected. Oh God, Frances is coming, and what will that mean?

Aggie imagines Frances's face, not glowing with life and delight and stories and energy and love, but drawn with — oh well, what? Pain, Aggie supposes. Pity. A concealed disgust.

Imagine her coming into this room on Saturday morning and finding her like this.

Exactly what does it take before love is outweighed? What tips it over?

TWENTY-ONE

June could simply kick herself. She's done it again. Or is still doing it. Or, precisely, has not been doing anything at all. Now Frances is coming, and what can she tell her? What arrangements have been made? The biggest actions she's taken since all this started have been buying a plastic sheet and putting Aggie's name on a waiting list. Nor has she pressed George for help, or a decision, or more tests, or just a nudge in the right direction. For all she knows, Aggie's name may still be at the bottom of the waiting list. Or it may be near the top, with a call to come any time, who knows? What happened to that urgent sense of future?

What a coward she must be.

And now Frances is coming. This must surely be a sort of deadline for finishing something that can't go on. So what is she going to say? It's not the sort of thing that drops easily into a conversation. When Frances asks, “So what's new with you guys?” she can't just blurt, “Your grandmother's having accidents and I think she'll have to go to a nursing home.”

Or Frances might find out for herself, wandering into Aggie's room on Saturday morning. June imagines Frances coming to her in the kitchen and saying, “Oh, Mother, why didn't you tell me? You can't go on like this, it isn't fair to you, we'll have to do something.”

How unnerving Frances is, the difference she makes, the decisiveness she imposes, just by coming.

Aggie sees that, too, June knows from the apprehension that leaps to her face when June tells her. That's never happened before. Usually Aggie is overjoyed by word of Frances, and immediately sits down with her cookbooks and starts planning treats, like a child getting ready for Christmas. “Shall I get out your recipes?” June asks, setting breakfast on the table.

“No, don't bother.”

“Aren't you going to bake for Frances?”

“Not this time, I think. She's usually watching her weight. Probably if you get in lots of lettuce it'll be enough.” How dry her tone is — or is it defeated?

June ought surely to have a sense of victory, then. If one loses, the other wins, isn't that simply logical, clear-cut? It is necessary only to make a move.
Do
something, she scolds. Just, what?

For one thing, aim for Frances's support, her sympathy. Not easy. If she does it wrong, Frances will look at her with horror and say, “Oh no, you couldn't, it'd kill her, she'd hate it.”

Really, this time she must make an extra effort to get along. Every time Frances comes to visit, June makes promises. This time, she regularly pledges, there'll be no nagging, no old and new resentments bubbling up. This time she won't tell Frances to sit up straight and cross her legs properly; she won't ask if any of the men Frances knows is serious; she won't say, “Surely you have time to come to church with me, you never do, and people would like to see you.” She'll also try not to sit in church wondering what Frances and Aggie may be talking about while she's out: what secrets may be spilling, or what judgments being made.

Every time she makes these promises, and every time they break down. Friday night is usually all right: Frances comes in on a roll of city energy; enthusiasm gets them through. Saturday morning when they get up, things are a little saggy. Frances is usually grumpy, withdrawn, just wanting her coffee and a cigarette. By afternoon she is really getting on June's nerves, because, after all, how hard can it be for her to make the effort to sit straight and cross her legs at the ankles, even at the knees if she must, but not fling them around, sticking them up on tables or over the arms of chairs or tucking them underneath herself. How hard could it be to get through a weekend without swearing or smoking or taking a drink?

June always winds up aggrieved, Frances impatient and sometimes angry. “For God's sake, Mother,” she cries, “can't you let me alone for just one weekend? Do you know how old I am? Can't you let me be?”

Sometimes when she leaves she looks sullen, sometimes only tired. Any animation will have come from the tales she tells of her life away. Whatever possessed her to take up such an occupation, going out of her way to find out things it's better not to know? Just knowing certain information must be corrupting, June thinks.

And it didn't have to be that way; might not have been, if Aggie hadn't stuck her oar in on June's and Frances's argument over university or teachers' college. Still, she must admit it might not have been comfortable, having Frances teaching here. June would have felt responsible, and even back then Frances had a way of going off on tangents. First thing June knew, Frances would probably have been out organizing demonstrations — against war, for women, all this and that she's been involved in. What a mystery it is: a daughter so righteous about her causes, and so unrighteous in her lack of faith.

She supposes it's not entirely Aggie's fault. She must herself have lacked her father's story-telling gifts, so that she never could grip Frances with his stories or his lessons. She never was able to impress on Frances the importance of sacrifice or duty.

“Your grandfather, my father, was a lovely man,” she tried to tell her. “It's a shame you couldn't have known him.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like me, I guess. Or I look like him. He was gentle and quiet. He used to tell me about growing up in England and how his parents saved up and did without so he could have an education. He was so brave, coming here all on his own.”

“I don't think he was very nice to Grandma,” Frances ventured.

Nice to Grandma! “Let me tell you, young lady, Grandma wasn't exactly nice to him.”

“How come?”

“Well, she had no education. She had no idea what it meant, being a teacher's wife. And then she always thought she knew better. She brought him down in the world.”

“You guys,” Frances said, “you guys,” shaking her head, “sure tell things differently.”

June knows that Frances has, in fact, finished any number of projects: university, stories, buying a house and decorating it. But nevertheless she has a picture in her mind of a Frances who gets tired of things, disinterested in the middle of them, putting them down uncompleted and going on to the next.

This is not someone to depend on.

Even Aggie now apparently realizes that.

But how would June feel if she were the one having accidents in her bed, and Frances was coming to find out? She would rather die.

Settling Aggie in the front-room chair for the day before she leaves for school, June glances at her with startled pity. This will be the worst thing Frances could find out about her grandmother.

What would be the worst thing she could find out about June?

Oh, how could she have been so stupid? Startled, she almost trips on an uneven piece of sidewalk. What if she died? What if Frances came home and, as she would have to in those circumstances, began sorting through June's possessions? All those things collected over the years, all of them inoffensive and innocent, except for one.

That brown envelope, with the letters and documents from Herb's lawyer. And the final divorce decree — where on earth did she put it? Surely she didn't stick it in the attic, did she, with all the other accumulated this and that she and Aggie have tucked away over the years? Whatever they didn't want to throw out, but had no particular use for any more?

She imagines Frances coming across that envelope, and idly opening it, without any particular interest, and finding out. “Oh God,” she prays, “don't let anything happen to me until I can find that and get rid of it. Let me get through this day and I'll take care of it tonight.” She must destroy it, because it's impossible now to tell Aggie and Frances about it. “Why on earth didn't you say?” they'd ask.

Well, why didn't she? It ought to have been reasonably simple, the day the first warning of Herb's intentions came in the mail, oh, years ago, to mention it over supper: to say, “Guess what I got today? Herb's getting a divorce. Apparently there's nothing I can do about it.” Something like that, dealt with briskly, as if it didn't matter.

But it did matter. She wouldn't have guessed how those papers would bring it back: the terrible failure of purpose, those desires she neither understood nor felt; and there was Herb out there making appointments with a lawyer, still drawing up her life on paper, no doubt still indulging his desires.

And there was the law, on his side: like some heathen Moslem man, able merely to say “I divorce thee” three times and it was so.

She didn't get a lawyer. There was, she understood, no way to oppose him, now that it was merely a matter of not being together for a certain period of time. He was neither offering money nor asking for anything to do with Frances, who in any case was almost grown up then, getting ready to leave. If he'd been interested in his daughter, he'd have shown it long before.

At least June was the one who picked up the mail, so no one else had an inkling.

When the final divorce decree came, she sat in her room reading it. Chilly words, legal talk and Latin — how to connect them with endurance and distance? How did they contain bearing a husband's body or a child? What did they have to do with hopes, or even walking down the street with an arm around the shoulder? Or planning a wedding, and a mother who sat up embroidering a secret nightgown? These stiff and foreign words had nothing to do with lying awake listening to silence or a husband snoring, or with washing floors and dishes and making meals, or being tapped on the bottom and told to make more sandwiches. They failed to mention liquor on the breath or hair cream on a pillow case or a steamed-up bathroom heavy with the humid scent of aftershave. Certainly they did not refer to the dizzy pain of ending, or the humiliation of starting again. If she'd said to Aggie or Frances then, “Herb's gotten a divorce,” she would have been afraid of not stopping there, of all these words and secrets bubbling out. So she said nothing and then, of course, it became impossible, since they would have said, “Oh? When did he do that?” and “Why didn't you say so at the time?”

None of this will matter in the long view: in heaven, where earthly remembrances will be cast aside (although surely there will be a recognition and reunion with her father: maybe only briefly, in some hazy period between world and heaven, when the boundaries are unclear). She recalls Aggie joking once about heaven, when they all would come together. “Even Herb eventually, and you and your father and I, and Frances and whoever she may take up with — can you imagine how awkward it's going to be? All the introductions?” Adding, however, “But perhaps you don't think we'll all get to heaven. It'll just be you good folk up there.”

All the good folk, June thinks, who, like her, have had to trail around behind events, cleaning up the messes.

There are still a few messes waiting to be cleaned up.

The first thing is to find that envelope, which will require going through those things in the attic. This could have, she realizes, a secondary effect: a sorting out, clearing away, a step toward shifting Aggie as well. She will go home tonight and say, “I'm going to get down all that stuff in the attic so we can go through it and get rid of a lot of it. Who knows what's up there, and most of it must be useless.” Starting small, with things, she will work up to something large, to Aggie. Who will see immediately what's going on, in case she's been under the impression June's forgotten her intentions.

The decisiveness of this cheers her and restores the briskness of her walk.

“We can keep out whatever Frances may want, and she can check it when she gets here,” June will say. “Then she can take anything she wants with her when she goes.”

June doubts that will include Aggie. Even on her visits, Frances just kisses them good night and skips off to her own bed. No help from her, getting Aggie's clothes off and her nightgown on. She said once, “I know Grandma needs help, but it feels wrong.” Does she think it feels right to June? If something has to be done, does it matter how it feels? These refinements, these little niceties, are all very well, but when things need doing, you put them aside.

Aggie praises Frances's independence, which is all very well, except that it has another side to it: that she turns her back too readily.

So what has she done to earn devotion?

It's not Frances, after all, who knows every ripple and curve and roll and hair and mole and freckle on Aggie's body. It's not Frances who knows all the places where it folds, or the way the nipples droop to touch those folds, or how the hair below has gotten grey and sparse. It's June who knows the flatness of Aggie's feet, from standing so many years in the bakery, and how the flesh of her arms and legs dimples like hammered silver. It's June who feels the warmth and surprising softness of Aggie's skin. It's June's shoulder on which she leans when she's stepping into her panties, and it's June who slips her dresses over her head. There are freckles on Aggie's thighs, and a mole above her right elbow. Frances has probably never even noticed.

June also knows the routes of the big purple, dangerous-looking veins in Aggie's legs, could trace them from memory, from thigh to calf. She knows that when Aggie is going upstairs, she has to rest on every second step to catch her breath; and that when she stands, the skin on her knees doubles over just like her stomach.