Friend of My Youth (25 page)

What is harder for Joan to understand is why Morris himself has never done anything. Morris has plenty of money now. And it wouldn’t even be a question of money anymore. Morris pays his premiums on the government health-insurance plan, just the way everybody else does. He has what seem to Joan very right-wing notions about mollycoddling and individual responsibility and the impropriety of most taxes, but he pays. Wouldn’t it make sense to him to try to get something back? A neater job on the eyelid? One of those new, realistic artificial eyes, whose magic sensitivity enables them to move in unison with the other, real eye? All that would entail is a trip to a clinic, a bit of inconvenience, some fussing and fiddling.

All it would entail is Morris’s admission that he’d like a change. That it isn’t shameful, to try to turn in the badge misfortune has hung on you.

Their mother and her friend are drinking rum-and-Coke. There is a laxity in the house that might surprise most people Joan and Morris go to school with. Their mother smokes, and drinks rum-and-Coke on hot summer days, and she allows Morris to smoke and to drive the car by the time he’s twelve years old. (He doesn’t like rum.) Their mother doesn’t mention misfortune. She tells about the tramp and the rake, but Morris’s eye now might as well be some special decoration. She does give them the idea of being part of something special. Not because their grandfather started the lumberyard—she laughs at that, she says he was just a woodcutter who got lucky, and she herself
was nobody, she came to town as a bank clerk—and not because of their large, cold, unmanageable house, but because of something private, enclosed, in their small family. It has to do with the way they joke, and talk about people. They have private names—their mother has made up most of them—for almost everybody in town. And she knows a lot of poetry, from school or somewhere. She will fix a couple of lines on somebody, summing them up in an absurd and unforgettable way. She looks out the window and says a bit of poetry and they know who has gone by. Sometimes she comes out with it as she stirs the porridge they eat now and then for supper as well as for breakfast, because it is cheap.

Morris’s jokes are puns. He is dogged and sly-faced about this, and their mother pretends to be driven crazy. Once, she told him that if he didn’t stop she would empty the sugar bowl over his mashed potatoes. He didn’t, and she did.

There is a smell in the Fordyce house, and it comes from the plaster and wallpaper in the rooms that have been shut off, and the dead birds in the unused chimneys, or the mice whose seed-like turds they find in the linen cupboard. The wooden doors in the archway between the dining room and living room are closed, and only the dining room is used. A cheap partition shuts off the side hall from the front hall. They don’t buy coal or repair the ailing furnace. They heat the rooms they live in with two stoves, burning ends from the lumberyard. None of this is important, none of their privations and difficulties and economies are important. What is important? Jokes and luck. They are lucky to be the products of a marriage whose happiness lasted for five years and proclaimed itself at parties and dances and on wonderful escapades. Reminders are all around—gramophone records, and fragile, shapeless dresses made of such materials as apricot georgette and emerald silk moiré, and a picnic hamper with a silver flask. Such happiness was not of the quiet kind; it entailed lots of drinking, and dressing up, with friends—mostly from other places, even from Toronto—who have now faded away, many of
them, too, smitten by tragedy, the sudden poverty of those years, the complications.

They hear the knocker banging on the front door, the way no caller with decent manners would bang it.

“I know, I know who that’ll be,” says their mother. “It’ll be Mrs. Loony Buttler, what do you want to bet?” She slips out of her canvas shoes and slides the archway doors open carefully, without a creak. She tiptoes to the front window of the no longer used living room, from which she can squint through the shutters and see the front veranda. “Oh, shoot,” she says. “It is.”

Mrs. Buttler lives in one of the three cement-block houses across the road. She is a tenant. She has white hair, but she pushes it up under a turban made of different-colored pieces of velvet. She wears a long black coat. She has a habit of stopping children on the street and asking them things. Are you just getting home from school now—did you have to stay in? Does your mother know you chew gum? Did you throw bottle caps in my yard?

“Oh, shoot,” their mother says. “There isn’t anybody I’d sooner not see.”

Mrs. Buttler isn’t a constant visitor. She arrives irregularly, with some long rigmarole of complaint, some urgent awful news. Many lies. Then, for the next several weeks, she passes the house without a glance, with the long quick strides and forward-thrust head that take away all the dignity of her black outfit. She is preoccupied and affronted, muttering to herself.

The knocker sounds again, and their mother walks softly to the doorway into the front hall. There she stops. On one side of the big front door is a pane of colored glass with a design so intricate that it’s hard to see through, and on the other, where a pane of colored glass has been broken (one night when we partied a bit too hard, their mother has said), is a sheet of wood. Their mother stands in the doorway barking.
Yap-yap-yap
, she
barks, like an angry little dog shut up alone in the house. Mrs. Buttler’s turbanned head presses against the glass as she tries to see in. She can’t. The little dog barks louder. A frenzy of barking—angry excitement—into which their mother works the words
go away, go away, go away
. And
loony lady, loony lady, loony lady. Go away, loony lady, go away
.

Mrs. Buttler stands outside for some time in the white heat. She blocks the light through the glass.

On her next visit she says, “I never knew you had a dog.”

“We don’t,” their mother says. “We’ve never had a dog. Often I think I’d like a dog. But we’ve never had one.”

“Well, I came over here one day, and there was nobody home. Nobody came to the door, and, I could swear to it, I heard a dog barking.”

“It may be a disturbance in your inner ear, Mrs. Buttler,” their mother says next. “You should ask the doctor.”

“I think I could turn into a dog quite easily,” their mother says later. “I think my name would be Skippy.”

They got a name for Mrs. Buttler. Mrs. Buncler, Mrs. Buncle, and finally Mrs. Carbuncle. It suited. Without knowing exactly what a carbuncle was, Joan understood how the name fitted, attaching itself memorably to something knobby, deadened, awkward, intractable in their neighbor’s face and character.

Mrs. Carbuncle had a daughter, Matilda. No husband, just this daughter. When the Fordyces sat out on the side veranda after supper—their mother smoking and Morris smoking, too, like the man of the house—they might see Matilda going around the corner, on her way to the confectionery that stayed open late, or to get a book out of the library before it closed. She never had a friend with her. Who would bring a friend to a house ruled by Mrs. Carbuncle? But Matilda didn’t seem lonely or shy or unhappy. She was beautifully dressed. Mrs. Carbuncle could sew—in fact, that was how she made what money she made,
doing tailoring and alterations for Gillespie’s Ladies’ and Men’s Wear. She dressed Matilda in pale colors, often with long white stockings.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy gold hair,” their mother says softly, seeing Matilda pass by. “How can she be Mrs. Carbuncle’s daughter? You tell me!”

Their mother says there is something fishy. She wouldn’t be at all surprised—she wouldn’t be at
all
surprised—to find out that Matilda is really some rich girl’s child, or the child of some adulterous passion, whom Mrs. Carbuncle is being paid to raise. Perhaps, on the other hand, Matilda was kidnapped as a baby, and knows nothing about it. “Such things happen,” their mother says.

The beauty of Matilda, which prompted this talk, was truly of the captive-princess kind. It was the beauty of storybook illustrations. Long, waving, floating light-brown hair with golden lights in it, which was called blond hair in the days before there were any but the most brazen artificial blondes. Pink-and-white skin, large, mild blue eyes. “The milk of human kindness” was an expression that came mysteriously into Joan’s head when she thought of Matilda. And there was something milky about the blue of Matilda’s eyes, and her skin, and her looks altogether. Something milky and cool and kind—something stupid, possibly. Don’t all those storybook princesses have a tender blur, a veil of stupidity over their blond beauty, an air of unwitting sacrifice, helpless benevolence? All this appeared in Matilda at the age of twelve or thirteen. Morris’s age, in Morris’s room at school. But she did quite well there, so it seemed she wasn’t stupid at all. She was known as a champion speller.

Joan collected every piece of information about Matilda that she could find and became familiar with every outfit that Matilda wore. She schemed to meet her, and because they lived in the same block she often did. Faint with love, Joan noted every variation in Matilda’s appearance. Did her hair fall forward over her shoulders today or was it pushed back from her cheeks?
Had she put a clear polish on her fingernails? Was she wearing the pale-blue rayon blouse with the tiny edging of lace around the collar, which gave her a soft and whimsical look, or the starched white cotton shirt, which turned her into a dedicated student? Matilda owned a string of glass beads, clear pink, the sight of which, on Matilda’s white neck, caused a delicate sweat to break out along the insides of Joan’s arms.

At one time Joan invented other names for her. “Matilda” brought to mind dingy curtains, gray tent flaps, a slack-skinned old woman. How about Sharon? Lilliane? Elizabeth? Then, Joan didn’t know how, the name Matilda became transformed. It started shining like silver. The “il” in it was silver. But not metallic. In Joan’s mind the name gleamed now like a fold of satin.

The matter of greetings was intensely important, and a pulse fluttered in Joan’s neck as she waited. Matilda of course must speak first. She might say “Hi,” which was lighthearted, comradely, or “Hello,” which was gentler and more personal. Once in a while she said “Hello, Joan,” which indicated such special notice and teasing regard that it immediately filled Joan’s eyes with tears and laid on her a shameful, exquisite burden of happiness.

This love dwindled, of course. Like other trials and excitements, it passed away, and Joan’s interest in Matilda Buttler returned to normal. Matilda changed, too. By the time Joan was in high school, Matilda was already working. She got a job in a lawyer’s office; she was a junior clerk. Now that she was making her own money, and was partway out of her mother’s control—only partway, because she still lived at home—she changed her style. It seemed that she wanted to be much less of a princess and much more like everybody else. She got her hair cut short, and wore it in the trim fashion of the time. She started wearing makeup, bright-red lipstick that hardened the shape of her mouth. She dressed the way other girls did—in long, tight slit skirts, and
blouses with floppy bows at the neck, and ballerina shoes. She lost her pallor and aloofness. Joan, who was planning to get a scholarship and study art and archeology at the University of Toronto, greeted this Matilda with composure. And the last shred of her worship vanished when Matilda began appearing with a boyfriend.

The boyfriend was a good-looking man about ten years older than Matilda. He had thinning dark hair and a pencil mustache and a rather unfriendly, suspicious, determined expression. He was very tall, and he bent toward Matilda, with his arm around her waist, as they walked along the streets. They walked on the streets so much because Mrs. Carbuncle had taken a huge dislike to him and would not let him inside the house. At first he didn’t have a car. Later he did. He was said to be either an airplane pilot or a waiter in a posh restaurant, and it was not known where Matilda had met him. When they walked, his arm was actually below Matilda’s waist—his spread fingers rested securely on her hipbone. It seemed to Joan that this bold, settled hand had something to do with his gloomy and challenging expression.

But before this, before Matilda got a job, or cut her hair, something happened that showed Joan—by then long past being in love—an aspect, or effect, of Matilda’s beauty that she hadn’t suspected. She saw that such beauty marked you—in Logan, anyway—as a limp might, or a speech impediment. It isolated you—more severely, perhaps, than a mild deformity, because it could be seen as a reproach. After she realized that, it wasn’t so surprising to Joan, though it was still disappointing, to see that Matilda would do her best to get rid of or camouflage that beauty as soon as she could.

Mrs. Buttler, Mrs. Carbuncle, invading their kitchen as she does every so often, never removes her black coat and her multicolored velvet turban. That is to keep your hopes up, their mother says. Hopes that she’s about to leave, that you’re going to get free
of her in under three hours. Also to cover up whatever god-awful outfit she’s got on underneath. Because she’s got that coat, and is willing to wear it every day of the year, Mrs. Carbuncle never has to change her dress. A smell issues from her—camphorated, stuffy.

She arrives in mid-spiel, charging ahead in her talk—about something that has happened to her, some person who has outraged her, as if you were certain to know what it was or who. As if her life were on the news and you had just failed to catch the last couple of bulletins. Joan is always eager to listen to the first half hour or so of this report, or tirade, preferably from outside the room, so that she can slip away when things start getting repetitious. If you try to slip away from where Mrs. Carbuncle can see you, she’s apt to ask sarcastically where you’re off to in such a hurry, or accuse you of not believing her.

Joan is doing that—listening from the dining room, while pretending to practice her piano piece for the public-school Christmas concert. Joan is in her last year at the public grade school, and Matilda is in her last year at high school. (Morris will drop out, after Christmas, to take over the lumberyard.) It’s a Saturday morning in mid-December—gray sky and an iron frost. Tonight the high-school Christmas Dance, the only formal dance of the year, is to be held in the town armory.