Open Secrets (7 page)

But these Mennonite settlings are a blessing. The plop of behinds on chairs, the crackling of the candy bag, the meditative sucking and soft conversations. Without looking at Louisa, a little girl holds out the bag, and Louisa accepts a butterscotch mint. She is surprised to be able to hold it in her hand, to have her lips shape thank-you, then to discover in her mouth just the taste that she expected. She sucks on it as they do on theirs, not in any hurry, and allows that taste to promise her some reasonable continuance.

Lights have come on, though it isn’t yet evening. In the trees above the wooden chairs someone has strung lines of little colored bulbs that she did not notice until now. They make her think of festivities. Carnivals. Boats of singers on the lake.

“What place is this?” she said to the woman beside her.

On the day of Miss Tamblyn’s death it happened that Louisa was staying in the Commercial Hotel. She was a traveller then for a company that sold hats, ribbons, handkerchiefs and trimmings, and ladies’ underwear to retail stores. She heard the
talk in the hotel, and it occurred to her that the town would soon need a new Librarian. She was getting very tired of lugging her sample cases on and off trains, and showing her wares in hotels, packing and unpacking. She went at once and talked to the people in charge of the Library. A Mr. Doud and a Mr. Macleod. They sounded like a vaudeville team but did not look it. The pay was poor, but she had not been doing so well on commission, either. She told them that she had finished high school, in Toronto, and had worked in Eaton’s Book Department before she switched to travelling. She did not think it necessary to tell them that she had only worked there five months when she was discovered to have t.b., and that she had then spent four years in a sanitorium. The t.b. was cured, anyway, her spots were dry.

The hotel moved her to one of the rooms for permanent guests, on the third floor. She could see the snow-covered hills over the rooftops. The town of Carstairs was in a river valley. It had three or four thousand people and a long main street that ran downhill, over the river, and uphill again. There was a piano and organ factory.

The houses were built for lifetimes and the yards were wide and the streets were lined with mature elm and maple trees. She had never been here when the leaves were on the trees. It must make a great difference. So much that lay open now would be concealed.

She was glad of a fresh start, her spirits were hushed and grateful. She had made fresh starts before and things had not turned out as she had hoped, but she believed in the swift decision, the unforeseen intervention, the uniqueness of her fate.

The town was full of the smell of horses. As evening came on, big blinkered horses with feathered hooves pulled the sleighs across the bridge, past the hotel, beyond the streetlights, down the dark side roads. Somewhere out in the country they would lose the sound of each other’s bells.

A man came along and fell in love with Dorrie Beck. At least, he wanted to marry her. It was true.

“If her brother was alive, she would never have needed to get married,” Millicent said. What did she mean? Not something shameful. And she didn’t mean money either. She meant that love had existed, kindness had created comfort, and in the poor, somewhat feckless life Dorrie and Albert lived together, loneliness had not been a threat. Millicent, who was shrewd and practical in some ways, was stubbornly sentimental in others. She believed always in the sweetness of affection that had eliminated sex.

She thought it was the way that Dorrie used her knife and fork that had captivated the man. Indeed, it was the same way as he used his. Dorrie kept her fork in her left hand and used the right only for cutting. She did not shift her fork continually
to the right hand to pick up her food. That was because she had been to Whitby Ladies College when she was young. A last spurt of the Becks’ money. Another thing she had learned there was a beautiful handwriting, and that might have been a factor as well, because after the first meeting the entire courtship appeared to have been conducted by letter. Millicent loved the sound of Whitby Ladies
College
, and it was her plan—not shared with anybody—that her own daughter would go there someday.

Millicent was not an uneducated person herself. She had taught school. She had rejected two serious boyfriends—one because she couldn’t stand his mother, one because he tried putting his tongue in her mouth—before she agreed to marry Porter, who was nineteen years older than she was. He owned three farms, and he promised her a bathroom within a year, plus a dining-room suite and a chesterfield and chairs. On their wedding night he said, “Now you’ve got to take what’s coming to you,” but she knew it was not unkindly meant.

This was in 1933.

She had three children, fairly quickly, and after the third baby she developed some problems. Porter was decent—mostly, after that, he left her alone.

The Beck house was on Porter’s land, but he wasn’t the one who had bought the Becks out. He bought Albert and Dorrie’s place from the man who had bought it from them. So, technically, they were renting their old house back from Porter. But money did not enter the picture. When Albert was alive, he would show up and work for a day when important jobs were undertaken—when they were pouring the cement floor in the barn or putting the hay in the mow. Dorrie had come along on those occasions, and also when Millicent had a new baby, or was housecleaning. She had remarkable strength for lugging furniture about and could do a man’s job, like putting up the storm windows. At the start of a hard
job—such as ripping the wallpaper off a whole room—she would settle back her shoulders and draw a deep, happy breath. She glowed with resolution. She was a big, firm woman with heavy legs, chestnut-brown hair, a broad bashful face, and dark freckles like dots of velvet. A man in the area had named a horse after her.

In spite of Dorrie’s enjoyment of housecleaning, she did not do a lot of it at home. The house that she and Albert had lived in—that she lived in alone, after his death—was large and handsomely laid out but practically without furniture. Furniture would come up in Dome’s conversation—the oak sideboard, Mother’s wardrobe, the spool bed—but tacked onto this mention was always the phrase “that went at the Auction.” The Auction sounded like a natural disaster, something like a flood and windstorm together, about which it would be pointless to complain. No carpets remained, either, and no pictures. There was just the calendar from Nunn’s Grocery, which Albert used to work for. Absences of such customary things—and the presence of others, such as Dorrie’s traps and guns and the boards for stretching rabbit and muskrat skins—had made the rooms lose their designations, made the notion of cleaning them seem frivolous. Once, in the summer, Millicent saw a pile of dog dirt at the head of the stairs. She didn’t see it while it was fresh, but it was fresh enough to seem an offense. Through the summer it changed, from brown to gray. It became stony, dignified, stable—and strangely, Millicent herself found less and less need to see it as anything but something that had a right to be there.

Delilah was the dog responsible. She was black, part Labrador. She chased cars, and eventually this was how she was going to get herself killed. After Albert’s death, both she and Dorrie may have come a little unhinged. But this was not something anybody could spot right away. At first, it was just that there was no man coming home and so no set time to get
supper. There were no men’s clothes to wash—cutting out the ideas of regular washing. Nobody to talk to, so Dorrie talked more to Millicent or to both Millicent and Porter. She talked about Albert and his job, which had been driving Nunn’s Grocery Wagon, later their truck, all over the countryside. He had gone to college, he was no dunce, but when he came home from the Great War he was not very well, and he thought it best to be out-of-doors, so he got the job driving for Nunn’s and kept it until he died. He was a man of inexhaustible sociability and did more than simply deliver groceries. He gave people a lift to town. He brought patients home from the hospital. He had a crazy woman on his route, and once when he was getting her groceries out of the truck, he had a compulsion to turn around. There she stood with a hatchet, about to brain him. In fact her swing had already begun, and when he slipped out of range she had to continue, chopping neatly into the box of groceries and cleaving a pound of butter. He continued to deliver to her, not having the heart to turn her over to the authorities, who would take her to the asylum. She never took up the hatchet again but gave him cupcakes sprinkled with evil-looking seeds, which he threw into the grass at the end of the lane. Other women—more than one—had appeared to him naked. One of them arose out of a tub of bathwater in the middle of the kitchen floor, and Albert bowed low and set the groceries at her feet. “Aren’t some people amazing?” said Dorrie. And she told further about a bachelor whose house was overrun by rats, so that he had to keep his food slung in a sack from the kitchen beams. But the rats ran out along the beams and leaped upon the sack and clawed it apart, and eventually the fellow was obliged to take all his food into bed with him.

“Albert always said people living alone are to be pitied,” said Dorrie—as if she did not understand that she was now one of them. Albert’s heart had given out—he had only had
time to pull to the side of the road and stop the truck. He died in a lovely spot, where black oaks grew in a bottomland, and a sweet clear creek ran beside the road.

Dorrie mentioned other things Albert had told her concerning the Becks in the early days. How they came up the river in a raft, two brothers, and started a mill at the Big Bend, where there was nothing but the wildwoods. And nothing now, either, but the ruins of their mill and dam. The farm was never a livelihood but a hobby, when they built the big house and brought out the furniture from Edinburgh. The bedsteads, the chairs, the carved chests that went in the Auction. They brought it round the Horn, Dorrie said, and up Lake Huron and so up the river. Oh, Dorrie, said Millicent, that is not possible, and she brought a school geography book she had kept, to point out the error. It must have been a canal, then, said Dorrie. I recall a canal. The Panama Canal? More likely it was the Erie Canal, said Millicent.

“Yes,” said Dorrie. “Round the Horn and into the Erie Canal.”

“Dorrie is a true lady, no matter what anybody says,” said Millicent to Porter, who did not argue. He was used to her absolute, personal judgments. “She is a hundred times more a lady than Muriel Snow,” said Millicent, naming the person who might be called her best friend. “I say that, and I love Muriel Snow dearly.”

Porter was used to hearing that too.

“I love Muriel Snow dearly and I would stick up for her no matter what,” Millicent would say. “I love Muriel Snow, but that does not mean I approve of everything she
does
.”

The smoking. And saying hot damn, Chrissakes,
poop. I nearly pooped my pants
.

Muriel Snow had not been Millicent’s first choice for best friend. In the early days of her marriage she had set her sights high. Mrs. Lawyer Nesbitt. Mrs. Dr. Finnegan. Mrs. Doud.
They let her take on a donkey’s load of work in the Women’s Auxiliary at the church, but they never asked her to their tea parties. She was never inside their houses, unless it was to a meeting. Porter was a farmer. No matter how many farms he owned, a farmer. She should have known.

She met Muriel when she decided that her daughter Betty Jean would take piano lessons. Muriel was the music teacher. She taught in the schools as well as privately. Times being what they were, she charged only twenty cents a lesson. She played the organ at the church, and directed various choirs, but some of that was for nothing. She and Millicent got on so well that soon she was in Millicent’s house as often as Dorrie was, though on a rather different footing.

Muriel was over thirty and had never been married. Getting married was something she talked about openly, jokingly, and plaintively, particularly when Porter was around. “Don’t you know any men, Porter?” she would say. “Can’t you dig up just one decent man for me?” Porter would say maybe he could, but maybe she wouldn’t think they were so decent. In the summers Muriel went to visit a sister in Montreal, and once she went to stay with some cousins she had never met, only written to, in Philadelphia. The first thing she reported on, when she got back, was the man situation.

“Terrible. They all get married young, they’re Catholics, and the wives never die—they’re too busy having babies.

“Oh, they had somebody lined up for me but I saw right away he would never pan out. He was one of those ones with the mothers.

“I did meet one, but he had an awful failing. He didn’t cut his toenails. Big yellow toenails. Well? Aren’t you going to ask me how I found out?”

Muriel was always dressed in some shade of blue. A woman should pick a color that really suits her and wear it all the time, she said. Like your perfume. It should be your signature.
Blue was widely thought to be a color for blondes, but that was incorrect. Blue often made a blonde look more washed-out than she was to start with. It suited best a warm-looking skin, like Muriel’s—skin that took a good tan and never entirely lost it. It suited brown hair and brown eyes, which were hers as well. She never skimped on clothes—it was a mistake to. Her fingernails were always painted—a rich and distracting color, apricot or blood-ruby or even gold. She was small and round, she did exercises to keep her tidy waistline. She had a dark mole on the front of her neck, like a jewel on an invisible chain, and another like a tear at the corner of one eye.

“The word for you is not pretty,” Millicent said one day, surprising herself. “It’s
bewitching.
” Then she flushed at her own tribute, knowing she sounded childish and excessive.

Muriel flushed a little too, but with pleasure. She drank in admiration, frankly courted it. Once, she dropped in on her way to a concert in Walley, which she hoped would yield rewards. She had an ice-blue dress on that shimmered.