Object of Your Love (18 page)

He grimaced apologetically. “I have to, Mom.”

“Franklin, I can drive you to your hockey practices.”

“But you don't understand the game.”

“What is there to understand? There's a puck and a net—”

“Mom,” he interrupted sadly, “it's a lot more complicated than that.”

“Franklin, I need you here. I need your cheerful outlook on life.”

He laid a comforting hand on my shoulder. He seemed suddenly very old and wise. “I'll call you, Mom. We can talk on the phone. All the kids do that. Nobody has married parents any more.”

*   *   *

The next day I went out in the morning and walked along the canal, where skaters were stroking smoothly by, oblivious to my grief, selfishly happy. I came to the river and followed that along too, into a neighbourhood of quiet streets and turn-of-the-century clapboard houses with restored gingerbread trim and weathervanes and picket fences. Soon I came to Harlan's school, an ancient brick building with an old-fashioned bell on top. I went inside.

It was a school very much like the one I attended as a child, in a continuous but comfortable state of historic decay, built on a spacious nineteenth-century scale, when the world was evidently a larger place. Milk-glass lights hung by long chains from high, leafy plaster ceilings, the wide staircases were lit by big, ill-fitting windows, above the tall narrow classroom doors, open transoms delivered to me the voices of teachers, voices of children. Somewhere in the building a piano accompanied the singing of a choir. There is always a feeling, in these large, old, overheated schools of dignity, asylum, continuity. And maybe this is what bothered me that day more than anything else, that idea of
continuity.
It crushed me, the sense of something solid and important and timeless going on here, for Harlan, for Irmgard, and me on the outside, not a part of it.

I moved quickly along the hall. A janitor passed by with his mop, but did not ask me what my business was there. Teachers' name-plates fixed to every door helped me find Irmgard's classroom easily enough, in a corner on the first floor. I listened for a moment, heard soft movements, small voices on the other side of the door. The piano music on the second floor ceased. The choir voices faded. Far away a gym teacher's whistle blew. A telephone rang in the nearby office. Somewhere a door opened and closed with a bang, ringing up and down the empty halls. I looked down at my hand, trembling on the doorknob, one part of me astonished to see it there, to find myself standing at all in these foreign, echoing halls, and another part feeling that I'd been on a journey to this destination all my life.

I opened Irmgard's door, threw it open actually. The knob struck the wall, sending down a shower of plaster. There before me was Irmgard leaning over a large low table, administering one of her famous snacks, pouring juice into small paper cups. At similar tables all around, her little charges were reaching for rice cakes, almonds, raisins heaped in bowls. Irmgard looked up and seemed to know me instantly. All the little golden heads turned my way, their faces smooth with surprise. A glorious light flooded the room. Around the walls, finger paintings showed me impossible suns, gay bobbing sailboats, apple trees sagging with fruit, stick figures running, skipping, swinging. The room fell silent.

“Do you know what you've done?” I shouted at Irmgard. “Do you have any idea of the wreckage? You have trapped my husband. You have brainwashed my daughter into loving you. Even my lovely son has defected and joined the great crowd of your admirers. Do you think you have a licence to go around casually destroying things that are whole and beautiful and meant to stay that way?”

Irmgard put down the juice pitcher and took a step, not back, but forward, rocking on the bad hip, her body lurching a little. The great shoe on the end of her wooden leg came down, cumbersome and heavy as a flatiron on the linoleum floor. On that side of her body, her shoulder, her hip drooped noticeably. She looked at me, unblinking, as one might brace themself for the approach of a powerful wind. Perhaps once you've lost a limb, you are able to face anything.

I heard my own hysterical voice flooding out into the hall behind me and I didn't care. For the first time in my life I understood something about Art, his desire to break the rules, to crack things open, to defy, to set himself free. I wanted to blow the whole school wide open, destroy Irmgard and Harlan if I could. Out in the hallway, doors were opening, other teachers wondering what the ruckus was. All around the classroom, at the happy little tables, Irmgard's pupils looked at me, their lower lips quivering, their faces splitting open like young fruit. Some of them began to cry, raisins pinched like insects between their soft fingers. Some spilled their apple juice. Others rose from their chairs and ran to Irmgard, who held out her arms and gathered them in like a shepherdess protecting her flock.

I said, “Do you know how much power I have over you now? I could make this affair public. I could take it to the school board. Have you hauled up for breach of ethics. Immoral conduct. You're not fit to be around young children!” But even as I said this, I saw the innocent children clustered around her seeking shelter from my storm and I knew that all need, all good, would flow forever toward Irmgard. Out in the hall, footsteps approached, coming at a run. A man in a suit appeared.

He said, “Madam, I don't know what you think you're doing, I don't know who you are—”

I said, “I am Mrs. Harlan Nash who are you?”

“I'm the principal and I'm afraid I must ask you to leave the school at once.”

“You can ask till you're blue in the face, but I won't go.” I stepped out into the hallway. “Harlan!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, my voice echoing as in a barn. “Harlan, come out and show your face if you've got the nerve!”

The principal ran back to the office. I heard him speaking excitedly to the secretary. When he returned, he said, “I have summoned the police.”

Then at the end of the hall, the firedoors at the bottom of a wide staircase swung open and Harlan appeared. He stepped lightly toward us, so at home in that place of learning, with its drafty corridors and rattling windows and high, steadfast ceilings. He came along, dressed in a soft red sweater vest and loose flannel pants, his beard fanning out on his chest like a broom, looking not much older, really, than the student who'd walked into that diner so many years before. There are people who seem to pass through life unscathed, time leaves them alone, maybe because they are floating along on a higher plain, and Harlan was one of those.

And I thought: All these years I haven't taken much notice of what he valued or stood for, but, oh, Lord, now didn't I want to understand so much my insides ached from it? I wished I'd been kinder to this man who had once found it so easy to love me. I wished I'd paid more attention to his qualities instead of mocking him long ago to my friends behind the diner counter.

Just as Harlan reached us, so did the policeman, who had entered the school through the front door and come along the hall with his badge flashing under the milky lights. Harlan didn't even look in my direction. He spoke to the policeman, and I can tell you what he said shocked me so much that I wasn't able to utter another word.

He said, “Could you get her out of here, Officer? She needs psychiatric help. I'm her husband. I should know. I've had to live with her insanity all my life but now I'm finished. I will assist the kindergarten teacher in laying charges. The school board will want her confined as well. We have to keep these dangerous people away from defenceless children. Please take her away.”

I went out quietly then with the policeman and got into the patrol car. We hadn't driven more than half a block before I saw Tara coming along the snowy sidewalk, arriving at the school for her coop afternoon. The wind lifted her raven hair from her face and she looked so beautiful and so full of that fresh and youthful despair one sees on teenagers zealous to find their place in this world. I had forgotten that innocence is lost so young. She was sixteen and adrift and now Irmgard was going to be her anchor, when I, her mother, had been near at hand, wanting all the time to reach out and steady her if she would let me. But we don't look, do we, at the help that lives right around us?

I believed the policeman was going to take me down to the station and I thought, Oh, wouldn't Art love to see that? Wouldn't he welcome the opportunity to come down and rescue big sister who has been preaching all these years about his criminality? But a few blocks down the street the policeman made a turn and stopped the car at the edge of a park.

He said, “There's a bench over there. Let's go and look at the river.” He was in his late fifties, a hefty but fit, rather attractive greying man with a moustache and a sensitive face. We went and sat on the bench.

He said, “It's been a mild winter. We can at least be grateful for that. The river won't have to be blasted this year. It'll break up on its own. See where the ice is turning blue? That's the first sign of melt.”

I didn't know what he was talking about. I was going to say, I don't want to hear about the damned river and how would you know, anyway, and what makes you so sure of everything? but I held my tongue. The river flowed from here to the falls only a few blocks away and I thought, I suppose I could go along there and throw myself over the cataract.

The policeman said, “My wife left me a few years back. She was angry because I never got a promotion. I didn't want one. I was happy on the beat. I liked the contact with people. After she left I spent a lot of time wondering what I could have done differently to make things turn out. I suppose that's natural, but it's a waste of time. The first thing you've got to do is stop blaming yourself.”

He said, “That wasn't kind, what your husband said in there about you.”

“No, it wasn't.”

“He didn't mean it. You find out later they don't mean it. They do want to leave you but the words they use are stronger than what they intend. Time is a great healer. You watch, a year from now, two years, you and your husband will be friends.”

“I can't imagine that. I am not a person who forgives.”

He said, “I thought that might be the case. I thought by the look on your face.”

That made me angry, as my life and the way I looked were none of his business. I said, “Is this what they pay you for, to sit on your behind on a park bench in the middle of the afternoon?”

He cleared his throat then and got up rather awkwardly, his thick shadow falling across my body. “I guess not,” he said. He looked at me curiously. “I've been thinking all this time that you look familiar,” he said. “Are you any relation to someone named Art Smirlie? You look just like him.”

I said, very hostile, “He's my brother and I don't look like him at all.”

He said, “Maybe I'm wrong. But I thought there was a resemblance.”

After he'd gone away, I sat a while longer on the park bench. I thought about Tara walking along the street, looking so pure and untouchable. I thought back to the day Franklin was born and Tara came to visit me in the hospital. Until then she'd been the apple of my eye. I was holding Franklin in my arms when Tara came into the hospital room and I remember feeling like a big axe had descended and chopped my love for her in half so there'd be some available for Franklin, and nothing was ever the same again between me and Tara. I wondered if my mother felt the same thing about me when Art was born.

Thinking back to before Franklin came along, to when Tara was the only one, it was hard for me to grasp how a person could ever have been so wrapped up in a child as I was, so that I seemed to breathe with the same lungs as she did and think the same thoughts and have the same heart pushing the blood through both our bodies, like Siamese twins. I remembered sitting on the carpet with Tara in our first house, when she was eight months old, so small and light to carry, her resting on my knee and the sun shining through the window on us and me turning the pages of one of those board books showing her bright pictures of trains and clowns, and knowing that I was everything to her. How could something like that change so much? You wish you could go back and start all over.

I thought about Tara and Franklin living with Irmgard, becoming her children, and Harlan forming a fourth party, all of them drawing strength from her wooden leg. It wasn't fair. I pictured Harlan at night, tenderly, reverently unstrapping the leg, light and hollow as a baseball bat, storing it—where? On the bureau? Under the bed? In a closet? I saw him lying down like a healer beside Irmgard, pressing his body up against her asymmetry. And I wished I had a defect that could be so easily removed and hidden from sight.

I did not know what I'd done with my life since I met Harlan in that diner when I was only twenty. While Harlan was growing as a teacher and building a professional reputation for himself and developing an intellectual vocabulary, and while my own children were learning and turning into people I didn't understand—Tara into a young woman I'd somehow lost track of and Franklin into this wise, centred child—what was I doing all that time? I was brooding about Art, wasn't I?

All my married life I'd never questioned Harlan's reasons for picking me for a wife, even in my own mind, I was afraid to question them. I never thought about his reasons and maybe if I had I'd have tried to change myself a little into more the person he thought he'd married or the person he believed I could become.

I took the long walk home then, slowly retracing my steps of that morning. I arrived in our neighbourhood just after the schools let out. All the children were returning home between the high, square snowbanks and I thought: Franklin is not going to come walking up this street today.

Already dusk was falling. In the tall, narrow brick houses, lights were coming on. How many people, I asked myself as I passed these glowing windows, how many people in these houses are managing happiness? I wondered what they, my neighbours, would think, when they learned Harlan had left me, just as all along the street other wives and husbands too, depending on the case, had been abandoned. We take a twisted pleasure, don't we, in seeing life repeat certain painful patterns? We are fortified by the sad statistics of the heart.