Home Schooling (12 page)

The way Julian pronounced those words —
blood, lust, infamy
— sent a delicious chill down her spine. It seemed he'd discovered,
through osmosis or divination, the precise, startling details of her unspeakable family history. But he didn't glance once in her direction. His voice was low, indistinct. Or maybe she just couldn't hear over the grandmother's lament:
We deserved better, Lydia. We deserved to live, all of us.

After class, she followed Julian as far as the car park. That morning he'd assigned “Stanzas on the Grand Chartreuse,” by Matthew Arnold.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.
She loved the poem and also the poet — his tender, abstemious mouth and lavish, frizzy sideburns — but mostly she loved the professor, his elegant, fawn-coloured leather jacket, the complicated knotting of his scarf. He set his briefcase down to unlock his car and when he turned to pick it up he must have seen her, but he gave no sign. Long after he'd gone she stood there, watching two black squirrels skittering around in the bushes beside the path. Her breath, visible on the still air, looked like small cartoonish pleas for help.

In December Lydia went home. She took the bus out to Horseshoe Bay, where she walked onto the ferry. There was a storm. The sky was black. A woman with three small children came and sat on the bench facing her. The two smaller children kept crying, or grizzling, as Lydia's grandmother would have said, and their mother, who had long curly hair and very large pale eyes, tried to mollify them with cans of pop and gummy bears. The oldest, a little girl of about five, planted herself in front of Lydia, keeping her balance in spite of the ship's fractiousness. She was wearing patent leather shoes with ankle straps, a short, flared skirt, like a figure skater. She looked like her mother, but with small, shrewd eyes. She began a long unvoiced indictment of Lydia's primary failings, admittedly legion: her introversion, her possessiveness, which concealed a gaping maw of insecurity, her willingness to live exclusively in the milieu of
disgruntled dreams. Lydia knew the little girl wasn't real. She was a vision, a device of the gods, put on earth to destroy the last shreds of Lydia's self-esteem.

The ship juddered and veered sideways. Navigation in a storm. What could be more invigorating, more receptive to risk? The little girl showed off for Lydia, standing on one leg, arms out. Lydia prayed for shipwreck. She wanted to grab the little girl's tatty unwashed hair and drag her down with her, down into the cold, uncharted recesses of the Georgia Strait.

In the end the ferry docked safely and Lydia took a taxi to her parents' home, arriving just as the rain let up and a few tinselly winter stars glittered overhead. Her parents were in the living room. On a side table there was an advent wreath, with one candle that had been lit and extinguished. Her father drowsed in his reclining chair, a tattered paperback copy of
Christian Believing
by Hans Küng open on his chest, while Lydia's mother knitted, her feet up on a hassock. The grandmother sat upright, ankles crossed. She was and was not the grandmother who had haunted Lydia's sleep. She got up and took Lydia's hand and said, Darling, darling girl, what a surprise!

Lydia's mother went into the kitchen and made a cold roast beef sandwich with Dijon mustard, a favourite of Lydia's, usually, but she was too wrought up to eat. She put the sandwich in the fridge, beside a triple-layer chocolate cake destined, no doubt, for a church bake sale or a Parish Council meeting. She stuck a finger in the icing and licked it clean, sugar flooding her brain like anaesthesia designed for a low-functioning, panicky lab rat. Her mother, in the living room, was saying things like: But it's the end of the term, she should be studying. I'm going to have a serious little word with her, right now.

Sit down, June, Lydia's father said.

Leave her be, the grandmother said. Just leave the child alone.

The grandmother had fine white hair she combed out and let lie flat against her head. Her bedroom slippers were threaded with gold, like ancient dancing shoes. Her name was Pauline. In the morning she came to Lydia's bedroom door. Since you're here, she said, you might as well get up and make us a cup of tea.

Lydia got up. She got up, but her body remained on the bed, palms open like a mendicant. The trueness of it, the accusatory blankness, the blunt refusal to wish for more, more of everything: poetry, love, a real life. In the kitchen she filled the kettle and put it on the stove. Her parents left for work early, in separate cars. Her father ate breakfast at a café, where, he said, roughly the same people assembled at the same hour, every morning, like an unusually faithful and receptive congregation. Later, these same people made brief, luminous appearances in his sermons, which possessed the easeful veracity of parables: there was a blind man with a small brown dog; there was a retired pilot who'd developed a fear of heights; there was a woman who sang Janis Joplin songs to herself, in a rich and emphatic voice:
the blues ain't nothin' but a good man feelin' bad.
Her father loved the parade of life, the mishmash. Not Lydia. Even around the grandmother she felt shy. She thought regretfully of the campus silent beneath snow, the earth's soft wintry breathing. She thought of Julian. How lonely he'd seemed, and yet how self-sufficient and contained, as if he needed no one.

Her grandmother spread marmalade to the four corners of her toast. She sipped her tea. She said, We will take this one day at a time, Lydia.

How strange, Lydia thought, that each person was made up of innumerable past selves and these selves were hidden and unreachable. She could barely remember being three years old; she had no memory of her own infancy, and the grandmother across the table from her seemed completely unrelated to the grandmother she remembered from her childhood or even from a few years ago.
Somewhere there must exist, still, the Pauline who'd walked innocently toward a house in which a terrible crime had assembled its mysterious, transgressive elements. Pauline's mother and her sister and brother, what remained of them, had been in that house. Her father, the Reverend Elliot Saunders, had one day come home with a gun and had picked them off one by one, and then he'd gone outside and shot himself. When it was finished, no one but Pauline survived.

An old tragedy, but persistent, the sole narrative at the heart of Lydia's family. It made them what they were: good people, meek people.

That day, on her way home from the bank where she worked, Pauline had thought she glimpsed her father up ahead of her on the road. He was there, then he was gone. It was a Wednesday in October, a clear, cold day. She remembered birches ghostly against dark firs, leaves like gold coins strewn across the road. A sense of urgency gripped her and she'd started to run, but she got a stitch in her side and had to slow down. What came next? The truth was, she saw only so much. Outside her house a little knot of people had gathered. They stood around her and wouldn't let her pass. The police constable staggered out of the house and was sick on the ground. He wiped his mouth on his uniform sleeve. He ordered the others to take Pauline home with them and keep her there. Later he'd gone to see her, and had talked to her about what had happened and about how she felt. She'd said, Constable Morgan, I have no idea how I feel. He had smiled and told her to call him Henry. He became a good friend to her, she told Lydia. His sister, Jane, who was a professional photographer, with a studio of her own in Victoria, had been staying with Henry for a few weeks. The two of them had taken Pauline for meals at the hotel dining room. They'd made a trip out to the house for her, and brought back a few things she'd asked for: her sweater, her toothbrush, her mother's Bible.

Lydia remembered her own grandfather saying it could happen in the best of families, the
crime passionnel,
although in fact it didn't, not usually. His advice was: never turn your back on a Saunders. His little joke caused Lydia's parents to recoil. Lydia had recognized her grandfather's audaciousness as a bulwark, a reverse charm. She remembered him clearly: a tall man, gaunt, with unruly silver hair. In the
1940
s, he'd studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, in the Arizona desert, and something of that had stayed with him: an expansiveness, a warmth, a dry humour. When he'd died, after suffering a stroke, his widow had mourned like a vice-regent. She couldn't be left alone; she couldn't sleep. She sold her house in West Vancouver, the handsome, sprawling house with windows but no interior walls, or as few as possible, nothing to impede the line of sight. She'd moved in with Lydia's parents and then pronounced the rectory unliveable, an architectural nightmare with no view, nothing to look out at, unless you counted the asphalt in the church parking lot. She'd found a house more to her taste and had purchased it and turned the title over to Lydia's parents, and that was where they lived.

Lydia had been twelve when her grandfather died. She'd adored him. He'd given her a dollar every time she saw him. He'd told her about working with Frank Lloyd Wright under a canopy of canvas, the desert sun rising in a conflagration, stark shadows of Saguaro cactus like pen strokes on the sand, mountains of folded silk, rose, and coral. One spring he took Pauline on a driving holiday through the American southwest, with a side trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he'd introduced her to the famous architect. They'd hit it off at once. They'd talked for hours, although neither was aware of the other's history, the chain of violent death and sudden inexplicable fires, although Frank Lloyd Wright, like one of those bright little desert lizards, had a knack for slithering out from under catastrophe. He was a visionary and a capitalist; he looked at the mountains and stars and did things with them, turned them to account. He didn't
let anything interfere with what he wanted out of life. Neither had Pauline. Nor should anyone, Lydia, her grandfather had said, touching a finger lightly to her nose. On Sunday afternoons, he took her to Queen Elizabeth Park and showed her a view of the gardens from a dizzying height, emerald lawns, spires of evergreens, etiolated broad-leafed shrubberies, winding arterial paths, a human world of beauty, harmonious, tamed, and yet still Lydia felt the delicious threat of letting go and falling.

Every day Lydia and her grandmother were alone in Lydia's parents' house on the east coast of Vancouver Island, where the air was fragrant, moist, palpable, somehow, and the mountains of the Coast Range were respectably distant, like a scene in an old travel brochure. In the afternoons Lydia read to the grandmother from a murder mystery, an unsuitable diversion, Lydia would have thought, considering her grandmother's history. And yet she could see how necessary death was to the story; how it moved things forward, how it had to happen the way it did, in ordinary rooms, in landscapes blurred with gentle mists. Without violent death, it seemed, there would be no genuine passion, only ill-tempered, unfulfilled individuals, full of anomie, grating on each other's nerves.

She thought of her Victorian Poets professor, Julian Schelling. There'd been a rumour he'd been married or living with a woman who'd killed herself with sleeping pills and a plastic bag over her head. There were rumours that Dr. Schelling was convinced it had been a case of murder, not suicide, and that someone was out to get him, as well. His paranoia, if that was what it was, had escalated to the point where, when a student gave him a box of chocolates, he'd put it on the floor outside his office and called the police, demanding they send in the bomb squad. Lydia only partly believed this. In her mind she saw Julian clearly. He had a way of tossing his hair and keeping his eyes focussed on the ground, as if crossing an engorged river on a rope. How she'd loved the defiant way he'd
read from “The Grande Chartreuse”:
Take me, cowled forms, and fence me round / Till I possess my soul again.
She knew she could be the steadfast presence he needed, the ameliorating influence.
Take me, cowled form and fence me round!
she'd wanted to misquote teasingly.

The worst thing — or second worst thing — she'd done was to phone his extension repeatedly, hanging up if he answered in person. On two occasions she'd lingered near his office until he'd emerged and walked past her in his quick, tense way. The moment was full of potential and then it was gone. Then, when she was turning in an assignment, she'd found in his mailbox a list of faculty addresses and home phone numbers. She'd copied Julian's address on a scrap of paper. No one witnessed this. The next day she took a bus out to Jericho Beach and quickly located Dr. Schelling's house, which was old and painted blue, with lots of small, shining windows casting unimpeachable, darting glances up at the sky. She walked around the block and discovered a narrow lane behind his house, with garages, walled gardens, hedges on either side. A small black-and-white cat jumped down from a fence and came and rubbed around her ankles, purring and butting her with its head. A car turned into the lane. She moved aside, but the driver, who she could see was Julian, had to stop for the cat. Here kitty, Lydia coaxed. She pretended the cat belonged to her. Bad cat, she admonished, clapping her hands. Shoo, she said. Shoo. The cat stalked off, its tail held high.

Julian pulled into his driveway. She heard him shutting his car door and running up a flight of stairs and then a house door banged shut. She walked quickly up and down the lane, to calm herself. It was a mild October day, but the lane seemed to have become colder, more arboreal. The trees cast their shade extravagantly on the ground, where it pooled in inky glacial streambeds she could slip into and drown, like Ophelia. She thought of the professor's erstwhile wife or lover. Had she died in this house? Lydia would bet
she had. She could feel the death, the cold injudicious engine of its arrival and then the follow-through, the trajectory, which, once set in motion, could not be averted. She could sense the whole event, as if it were just taking place.