Mystical Rose (10 page)

So intense, so serious. With his cap pulled down and the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he looked just like a recruiting poster. My Robbie. He knew what he was. He knew what he had to do. I understood the pull of a uniform. Girls like a man with confidence. I reached my arm around him and gave him a hug. He looked down, startled. Not used to this kind of display from me. Then he put his arm around me, and we walked on, arm in arm, alone in our own fears.

Not afraid of fire, or being buried alive. Not afraid of accident or sickness, or falling from a height. Not afraid of bullets, not even after last year. Maybe a bit. I’d never seen a pistol before. So disappointing and small. And the poor youngster holding it, shaking in his shaking hand, a baby really, for all the terrible language, I could tell by the need in his face. And the tears that came when I said, Oh you poor thing. Anticlimax, both the weapon and the wielder, except that they can kill you.

Not afraid of ropes or dark places, or snakes. Not afraid of blindness or going crazy — which is probably just as well.

Not afraid of anger. Lady Margaret Rolyoke stood in the doorway of the ugly summer mansion I knew so well, a bubbling cauldron of hurt and disappointment and rage. She didn’t speak to me, of course. Why did you come? she demanded of her son.

This was my other visit back to Cobourg, a warm day in early summer. A new servant at the screen door behind Lady Margaret, pretty, gaping at us. I knew the face but not her name. She recognized me all right. Everyone knew me, I discovered when I got off the train. I was the local girl who ran off with the Rolyoke boy. The station master’s son called me ma’am, which pleased and shocked me. He was my age.

A horse and cart waiting behind us, with enough luggage to last a few nights. Light rain falling from a sky of pewter. A crying baby, a standing horse, a best dress which I could get into again, now that the baby was a year old. All these imperatives.

The familiar grounds looked beautiful. The flower beds were well forward — hard work by Adam. I couldn’t help noticing daffodil and elder blossom —
compassion
and
regard
, supposedly.

Harriet wiggling. Robbie standing still. A look in his eyes I didn’t recognize at the time, but remembered later. Tense, troubled, decisive. Robbie saying, I thought you’d like to see your granddaughter. She can walk now.

Lady Margaret not looking. Not looking at the baby I held in my arms. Not looking in my direction. Staring at her son with eyes of flint. That woman cannot come into my house, she said and then, turning finally to face me,
You
— virulent harpy, spitting with the force of her words, cheeks mottled like a rare seashell, pointing her finger with deadlier intent than the poor mugger did his pistol —
you cannot come into my house
.

Back to her son. That woman — me, you understand — is evil! she said, sounding like Jimmy Sunday. She cannot enter here.

Robbie’s face slammed shut like a door in a gale, but he didn’t move for a long time, while the servant looked on in horrified fascination. It takes a while to say goodbye, doesn’t it. At least I
assume that’s what Robbie would have been doing — saying goodbye.

I didn’t know what he felt. Back in the cart, his face was slack and shut. I suppose he’d thought the grandchild would change his mother’s feelings. Are they expecting us? I’d asked, before we left. He strapped up a suitcase and told me not to worry.

I didn’t know what he felt now. You want to know someone, to understand what drives them, what they’re worried about, where they go when they go away. Easy enough with the mugger, what was his name again, Jack, Joe, something like that. Not Jack. It seems a long time ago, for all it was just last week — last year, I mean. Robbie has been dead for over half a century and yet it’s like he just died yesterday.

Joe, the mugger, was in pain. All the time, in the shock of a criminal action, in the tension of the moment, inside himself, pain. I saw it clear as television. Maybe because I was an older woman, and in pain myself.

You poor thing, I told him, and he curled up like a flower at sunset. His gun drooped. I can’t give you any money, I told him, I don’t have any. Sorry, I said. Behind him the coloured lights flashing from the corner store, and the traffic passing, and the empty night.

I thought of Ruby, all the things I hadn’t done for her.

I live near here, I said. Would you like to come up for a cup of tea?

I’m sorry, I told Robbie. I’m sorry about your mother.

He nodded.

I wonder where your dad is? I asked.

He looked at me, and his eyes were empty. As if he wasn’t there at all. What’ll we do now, Rosie? he asked. A little boy who realizes that running away from home means not coming back. Where’ll we go? he asked.

I asked the cart driver to take us to the Arlington Hotel.

We rolled away with a jerk, and Robbie, sitting beside me, put his arm around my shoulders. His face, under the empty eyes, was a smiling mask. I wonder what mine looked like.

Does it hurt to have babies? I can’t tell you the number of times Harriet asked that. So interested, who could have foreseen she’d never have any? All right, who else? I wonder if she wanted them? I wonder if she tried to have one, and couldn’t? What are You frowning for? I’m her mother, don’t I … no, I suppose not. None of my business. I hate the word
barren
, though. So technical — makes a woman a piece of geography.

You’re still frowning. Why?

Well, look at Harriet, brought up with soup on the table and roller skates on her feet. Brought up with school for as long as she wanted. I would have given so much to be able to go to school until I was twenty-two. By the time she graduated I’d been working hard for I couldn’t say how long. And what had she done? Found out about Samoan aboriginals, and Arcturus, and played one of Beethoven’s symphonies in a concert filled with proud parents.

I’m sorry. I know I sound petty. It’s just that so much of my life seems to have been taken up with service to an unknown end.

Did Robbie love me? Did he? He seemed to. He said he did. But did he? There’s no one I can ask, nothing I can point to to say, yes, he did.

I don’t even know if I loved him.

I don’t understand, Dr. Wilson muttered.

What, is it? Is there a problem? I panted between contractions.

No problem. None at all. The doctor smiled at me.

Is the baby going to be all right? I asked.

Sure, the baby will be fine when he comes out. Or she. The doctor took a sip of cold tea.

Robbie came in again. He’d been coming and going for a while. I don’t like it, he said. She should be in the hospital.

Dr. Wilson looked embarrassed. Sorry, my boy, he said.

The doctor had privileges, that’s what he called them, at the General Hospital, and I should have been there, but Toronto was in the middle of an influenza outbreak, and there were no spare beds. Dr. Wilson offered to get me to another hospital, but he warned that he would not be able to attend the birth there. And it’ll be more expensive, he added. Robbie choked, said it didn’t matter, we’d pay anything to keep me out of danger.

Didn’t he say that? It would have been like him. It’s the way I remember it.

Dr. Wilson laughed and said I wasn’t in danger, and that if I went to hospital I’d probably end up catching influenza myself. Nasty places, hospitals, he said. Full of sick people, you know. My advice to all my patients is to stay healthy, he said. Stay away from hospitals.

And so I was born at home, Harriet would say with a sparkle in her eye, on a blustery spring morning, to save a fifty-dollar fee.

Now now, I’d say.

And I was a beautiful baby.

That you were, I’d say.

And bald.

Yes. A bright bouncing baby girl, with eyes the colour of a star-filled twilight, and dimples in your head from the doctor’s fingertips.

And my father was there.

He was, I’d say. Well, in the next room, drinking tea and smoking, and calling out every few minutes to ask if it was over.

I’m glad, Harriet would say, that I was born.

So am I.

Am I bleeding again? I asked the doctor, when it was all over.

No. He smiled down at me and the baby. The cleanest birth I’ve ever been at. You both did a marvellous job.

She was asleep on my stomach, little unnamed girl.

Then what was the bleeding before? I asked with a yawn.

If I didn’t know any better, Dr. Wilson began.

Hmmm?

Well, when I was examining you, to see if you were dilated. …

My eyes were closing. I tried to pay attention.

It was just a membrane, he said.

Membranes bleed? I wondered.

Oh yes, he said. When they’re broken. Rest now.

Hearing that we were in town, at the hotel — and news like that travels at the speed of sound — Mama invited us to dinner. She would have invited us to stay, she told me, but Bill’s brothers were visiting from the east coast.

Robbie sat beside Mama, who was nervous and hyperexcited to be entertaining one of Cobourg’s famous imports in her own house. The rich Americans spent their summers in a kind of forbidden city, partying and dining among themselves, seldom venturing downtown, never attending local functions. And here was the scion of a rich Yankee family, one of the Cobourg four hundred — though actually I suppose there would have been about forty, don’t You think? Forty Families of Distinction — at her own dining table. She felt proud and inadequate, socially fulfilled and yet filled with doubt.

Robbie was nervous, distracted by the memory of his own mother’s anger, eager to please but unsure of what was expected of him. Of course, Mama kept saying, Philadelphia is more metropolitan than Cobourg. How happy we were to see you and your father there, at the wedding.

Robbie smiled mechanically, nodded, ate his meat with every appearence of enjoyment.

Of course this lamb is local — and yet I wonder if you can boast of such tenderness in Philadelphia high society, she said.

Robbie reminded her that we lived in Toronto now. But I do remember, he admitted, that the spring lamb we used to eat in Rittenhouse Square was not as fresh as what we got in Cobourg in the summer.

It was odd to hear him call Mama Mrs. Scanlon.

There, you see, dear. Mama flashed a wide smile down the table at me. I tried to return it. I was talking to one of Bill’s brothers. I can’t remember which. There were three brothers, and they had the habit of referring to each other by Christian name and nickname interchangeably. It was difficult to keep track of Moe and Peter and, was it Arthur? And Dog Face and Flat Top and, what was the other one, The Gord. Actually, poor Dog Face was easy to remember because he looked it. And he didn’t mind. Call me Dog Face, he told me, when I stumbled.

They called my stepfather Red. Of course by now he wasn’t Red any more, he was grey. But no one gets a nickname late in life. One moment on the playground you’re Frank, or whatever, and the next you’re Dog Face, and that’s it. Goodbye Board of Directors. Goodbye politics. No one’s going to elect Senator Dog Face, or Premier Dog Face. Even Commissioner Dog Face is going to be an uphill battle. Get into business for yourself, or move out of town as soon as you can. Live among strangers and start over.

So there we were around a hastily improvised festive board, Mama and Robbie and me, and the variously named brothers Scanlon. I felt like I was in the middle of a Russian novel — which is farther than I’ve ever got.

Bill was the youngest in his family, the only one who’d gone to university, gone into a profession instead of the family business, left the Maritimes. His brothers made all sorts of jokes about him, but there was affection too. They liked visiting the black sheep. Imagine baby Red having a granddaughter, they said, laughing heartily. Bill didn’t seem to mind. Looking back at Bill, dead I don’t know how long now, I don’t think he ever minded anything. His first words to me at my mother’s funeral were, How nice to see you, Rose. Isn’t it a lovely day? It’s not that he was oblivious, like poor Daddy, preoccupied with an insupportable evil. More stoic, determined to appreciate the present and bear the past without comment. Blind to complication, maybe, wearing glasses that filtered out the subtle shades of life. My mother looked queenly, slow moving and studied, ordering dessert as if she was opening parliament. The servant — yes, she had a servant, Bill said she shouldn’t have to be doing any heavy work at her time of life, and anyway they could afford it — was a local girl I remembered from years before. I tried to strike up a conversation with her but she got all reserved and shy.

They’re very good to me here, she said, very fast, head bent down to the floor. I get all I want to eat, can even take home some to my family.

How is the family, Janet? I asked. She had a brother and sister, a mother who worked hard and a dad who didn’t.

They’re fine, um, she said, unable to think what to call me.

All three of the visiting brothers — they were something to do with importing and exporting, had done very well at it until recently, nothing moving into or out of Halifax without them taking a cut, though trade was so slow these days — were nice to me. And why not? I was young and pretty, and it was spring. When
Harriet started to cry, one of them — Arthur or Moe, I can’t remember which one — came along. Kootchie kootchie, he called to the baby, tickling her under her chin. Harriet stopped crying and pulled his finger back and forth. Moe — I think that’s who it was — looked pleased.