Friend of My Youth (28 page)

“How could she?” says Joan. “Of all the stupid things to do.”

“Well. She was young,” says Morris, with a trace of stubbornness or discomfort in his voice.

“I don’t mean
that
. I mean coming back.”

“Well, she had her mother,” Morris says, apparently without irony. “I guess she didn’t have anybody else.”

Looming above Joan, with his dark-lensed eye, and the suit laid like a body over his arms, he looks gloomy and troubled. His face and neck are unevenly flushed, mottled. His chin trembles slightly and he bites down on his lower lip. Does he know how his looks give him away? When he starts to talk again, it’s in a reasonable, explanatory tone. He says that he guesses it didn’t much matter to Matilda where she lived. In a way, according to her, her life was over. And that was where he, Morris, came into the picture. Because every once in a while Matilda had to go to functions. Political banquets. Retirement banquets. Functions. It was a part of her job, and it would be awkward if she didn’t go. But it was also awkward for her to go alone—she needed an escort. And she couldn’t go with a man who might get ideas, not understanding how things stood. Not understanding that Matilda’s life, or a certain part of Matilda’s life, was over. She needed somebody who understood the whole business and didn’t need explanations. “Which is me,” says Morris.

“Why does she think that way?” says Joan. “She’s not so old. I bet she’s still good-looking. It wasn’t her fault. Is she still in love with him?”

“I don’t think it’s my place to ask her any questions.”

“Oh, Morris!” Joan says, in a fond dismissive voice that surprises her, it sounds so much like her mother’s. “I bet she is. In love with him still.”

Morris goes off to hang his evening clothes in a closet in the apartment, where they can wait for his next summons to be Matilda’s escort.

In bed that night, lying awake, looking out at the street light shining through the fresh leaves on the square, squat tower of the Baptist church, Joan has something to think about besides her own plight. (She thinks of that, too, of course.) She thinks of Morris and Matilda dancing. She sees them in Holiday Inn
ballrooms, on golf-club dance floors, wherever it is that the functions are held. In their unfashionable formal clothes, Matilda’s hair in a perfect sprayed bouffant, Morris’s face glistening with the sweat of courteous effort. But it probably isn’t an effort; they probably dance very well together. They are so terribly, perfectly balanced, each with stubbornly preserved and wholeheartedly accepted flaws. Flaws they could quite easily disregard or repair. But they would never do that. Morris in love with Matilda—in that stern, unfulfilled, lifelong way—and she in love with her bigamist, stubbornly obsessed with her own mistake and disgrace. They dance in Joan’s mind’s eye—sedate and absurd, romantic. Who but Morris after all, with his head full of mortgages and contracts, could turn out to be such a romantic?

She envies him. She envies them.

She has been in the habit of putting herself to sleep with a memory of John Brolier’s voice—his hasty, lowered voice when he said, “I want to, very much.” Or she pictured his face; it was a medieval face, she thought—long and pale and bony, with the smile she dismissed as tactical, the sober, glowing, not dismissible dark eyes. Her imagining won’t work tonight; it won’t open the gates for her into foggy, tender territory. She isn’t able to place herself anywhere but here, on the hard single bed in Morris’s apartment—in her real and apparent life. And nothing that works for Morris and Matilda is going to work for her. Not self-denial, the exaltation of balked desires, no kind of high-flown helplessness. She is not to be so satisfied.

She knows that, and she knows what she will have to do. She casts her mind ahead—inadmissibly, shamefully, she casts her mind ahead, fumbling for the shape of the next lover.

That won’t be necessary.

What Joan has forgotten altogether is that mail comes to small-town post offices on Saturday. Saturday isn’t a mailless day here. Morris has gone to see what’s in his box; he hands her the letter. The letter sets up a time and place. It is very brief, and
signed only with John Brolier’s initials. This is wise, of course. Such brevity, such caution, is not altogether pleasing to Joan, but in her relief, her transformation, she doesn’t dwell on it.

She tells Morris the story she meant to tell him had the letter come earlier. She has been summoned by her college friend, who got word that she was here. While she washes her hair and packs her things, Morris takes her car to the cut-rate gas bar north of town and fills up the tank.

Waving goodbye to Morris, she doesn’t see any suspicion on his face. But perhaps a little disappointment. He has two days less to be with someone now, two days more to be alone. He wouldn’t admit to such a feeling. Maybe she imagines it. She imagines it because she has a feeling that she’s waving to her husband and her children as well, to everybody who knows her, except the man she’s going to meet. All so easily, flawlessly deceived. And she feels compunction, certainly. She is smitten by their innocence; she recognizes an irreparable tear in her life. This is genuine—her grief and guilt at this moment are genuine, and they’ll never altogether vanish. But they won’t get in her way, either. She is more than glad; she feels that she has no choice but to be going.

Ruth Ann Leatherby is going with Joan and Morris to the cemetery. Joan is a little surprised about this, but Morris and Ruth Ann seem to take it for granted. Ruth Ann is Morris’s bookkeeper. Joan has known of her for years, and may even have met her before. Ruth Ann is the sort of pleasant-looking, middle-sized, middle-aged woman whose looks you don’t remember. She lives now in one of the bachelor apartments in the basement of Morris’s building. She is married, but her husband hasn’t been around for a long time. She is a Catholic, so has not thought about getting a divorce. There is some tragedy in her
background—a house fire, a child?—but it has been thoroughly absorbed and is not mentioned.

It is Ruth Ann who got the hyacinth bulbs to plant on their parents’ graves. She had heard Morris say it would be nice to have something growing there, and when she saw the bulbs on sale at the supermarket she bought some. A wife-woman, thinks Joan, observing her. Wife-women are attentive yet self-possessed, they are dedicated but cool. What is it that they are dedicated to?

Joan lives in Toronto now. She has been divorced for twelve years. She has a job managing a bookstore that specializes in art books. It’s a pleasant job, though it doesn’t pay much; she has been lucky. She is also lucky (she knows that people say she is lucky, for a woman of her age) in having a lover, a friend-lover—Geoffrey. They don’t live together; they see each other on weekends and two or three times during the week. Geoffrey is an actor. He is talented, cheerful, adaptable, poor. One weekend a month he spends in Montreal with a woman he used to live with and their child. On these weekends, Joan goes to see her children, who are grown up and have forgiven her. Her son, too, is an actor—in fact, that’s how she met Geoffrey. Her daughter is a journalist, like her father. And what is there to forgive? Many parents got divorced, most of them shipwrecked by affairs, at about the same time. It seems that all sorts of marriages begun in the fifties without misgivings, or without misgivings that anybody could know about, blew up in the early seventies, with a lot of spectacular—and, it seems now, unnecessary, extravagant—complications. Joan thinks of her own history of love with no regret but some amazement. It’s as if she had once gone in for skydiving.

And sometimes she comes to see Morris. Sometimes she gets Morris to talk about the very things that used to seem incomprehensible and boring and sad to her. The peculiar structure of earnings and pensions and mortgages and loans and investments and legacies that Morris sees underlying every human
life—that interests her. It’s still more or less incomprehensible to her, but its existence no longer seems to be a sorry delusion. It reassures her in some way. She’s curious about how people believe in it.

This lucky woman, Joan, with her job and her lover and her striking looks—more remarked upon now than ever before in her life (she is as thin as she was at fourteen and has a wing, a foxtail, of silver white in her very short hair)—is aware of a new danger, a threat that she could not have imagined when she was younger. She couldn’t have imagined it even if somebody described it to her. And it’s hard to describe. The threat is of a change, but it’s not the sort of change one has been warned about. It’s just this—that suddenly, without warning, Joan is apt to think:
Rubble
. Rubble. You can look down a street, and you can see the shadows, the light, the brick walls, the truck parked under a tree, the dog lying on the sidewalk, the dark summer awning, or the grayed snowdrift—you can see all these things in their temporary separateness, all connected underneath in such a troubling, satisfying, necessary, indescribable way. Or you can see rubble. Passing states, a useless variety of passing states. Rubble.

Joan wants to keep this idea of rubble at bay. She pays attention now to all the ways in which people seem to do that. Acting is an excellent way—she has learned that from being with Geoffrey. Though there are gaps in acting. In Morris’s sort of life or way of looking at things, there seems to be less chance of gaps.

As they drive through the streets, she notices that many of the old houses are reëmerging; doors and porches that were sensible modern alterations fifteen or twenty years ago are giving way to traditional verandas and fanlights. A good thing, surely. Ruth Ann points out this feature and that, and Joan approves but thinks there is something here that is strained, meticulous.

Morris stops the car at an intersection. An old woman
crosses the street in the middle of the block ahead of them. She strides across the street diagonally, not looking to see if there’s anything coming. A determined, oblivious, even contemptuous stride, in some way familiar. The old woman is not in any danger; there is not another car on the street, and nobody else walking, just a couple of young girls on bicycles. The old woman is not so old, really. Joan is constantly revising her impressions these days of whether people are old or not so old. This woman has white hair down to her shoulders and is wearing a loose shirt and gray slacks. Hardly enough for the day, which is bright but cold.

“There goes Matilda,” says Ruth Ann. The way that she says “Matilda”—without a surname, in a tolerant, amused, and distant tone—announces that Matilda is a character.

“Matilda!” says Joan, turning toward Morris. “Is that Matilda? What ever happened to her?”

It’s Ruth Ann who answers, from the back seat. “She just started getting weird. When was it? A couple of years ago? She started dressing sloppy, and she thought people were taking things off her desk at work, and you’d say something perfectly decent to her and she’d be rude back. It could have been in her makeup.”

“Her makeup?” says Joan.

“Heredity,” Morris says, and they laugh.

“That’s what I meant,” says Ruth Ann. “Her mother was across the street in the nursing home for years before she died—she was completely out of it. And even before she went in there, you’d see her lurking around the yard—she looked like Halloween. Anyway, Matilda got a little pension when they let her go at the courthouse. She just walks around. Sometimes she talks to you as friendly as anything, other times not a word. And she never fixes up. She used to look so nice.”

Joan shouldn’t be so surprised, so taken aback. People change. They disappear, and they don’t all die to do it. Some die—John Brolier has died. When Joan heard that, several months after the fact, she felt a pang, but not so sharp a pang as
when she once heard a woman say at a party, “Oh, John Brolier, yes. Wasn’t he the one who was always trying to seduce you by dragging you out to look at some natural marvel? God, it was uncomfortable!”

“She owns her house,” Morris says. “I sold it to her about five years ago. And she’s got that bit of pension. If she can hold on till she’s sixty-five, she’ll be O.K.”

Morris digs up the earth in front of the headstone; Joan and Ruth Ann plant the bulbs. The earth is cold, but there hasn’t been a frost. Long bars of sunlight fall between the clipped cedar trees and the rustling poplars, which still hold many gold leaves, on the rich green grass.

“Listen to that,” says Joan, looking up at the leaves. “It’s like water.”

“People like it,” says Morris. “Very pop’lar sound.”

Joan and Ruth Ann groan together, and Joan says, “I didn’t know you still did that, Morris.”

Ruth Ann says, “He never stops.”

They wash their hands at an outdoor tap and read a few names on the stones.

“Rose Matilda,” Morris says.

For a moment Joan thinks that’s another name he’s read; then she realizes he’s still thinking of Matilda Buttler.

“That poem Mother used to say about her,” he says. “Rose Matilda.”

“Rapunzel,” Joan says. “That was what Mother used to call her. ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy gold hair.’ ”

“I know she used to say that. She said ‘Rose Matilda,’ too. It was the start of a poem.”

“It sounds like a lotion,” Ruth Ann says. “Isn’t that a skin lotion? Rose Emulsion?”

“ ‘Oh, what avails,’ ” says Morris firmly. “That was the start of it. ‘Oh, what avails.’ ”

“Of course, I don’t know hardly any poems,” says Ruth
Ann, versatile and unabashed. She says to Joan, “Does it ring a bell with you?”

She has really pretty eyes, Joan thinks—brown eyes that can look soft and shrewd at once.

“It does,” says Joan. “But I can’t think what comes next.”

Morris has cheated them all a little bit, these three women. Joan, Ruth Ann, Matilda. Morris isn’t habitually dishonest—he’s not foolish that way—but he will cut a corner now and then. He cheated Joan a long time ago, when the house was sold. She got about a thousand dollars less out of that than she should have. He thought she would make it up in the things she chose to take back to her house in Ottawa. Then she didn’t choose anything. Later on, when she and her husband had parted, and she was on her own, Morris considered sending her a check, with an explanation that there had been a mistake. But she got a job, she didn’t seem short of money. She has very little idea of what to do with money anyway—how to make it work. He let the idea drop.