Small Ceremonies (16 page)

I pushed the parcel back at him, but he placed it all the more firmly in my hand, speaking faster and more agitatedly than before. “Come on, Judith,” Martin called to me. So clutching my suitcase again as well as the parcel, I followed Martin and the children out into the thin sunshine where we flagged a taxi and drove the mile or two to the Spaldings' flat.

The parcel was forgotten for an hour or more; then someone remembered it. I opened it slowly while the children watched. Inside was a box of stationery. Letter paper. About twenty sheets of it in a not very fresh shade of pale green. There was some sort of pinkish flower at the top of each sheet, and at the bottom of the box there were piles of slightly faded looking envelopes.

For a day or two we speculated on what it could mean. We examined every sheet of paper and looked the box over carefully for identifying marks; we tried to recall the man's appearance and the sound of his voice. “He must have thought you'd left it on the seat in the train,” Martin said, and in the end we all agreed that that was the most likely answer, the only sensible conclusion really. But it didn't seem quite enough. The little man had been running on the platform. He had searched the crowd, or so I believed, and for some reason he had selected me. And he had run away, again in a state of great excitement. We never thought for a moment that the parcel might have been dangerous since this occurred before the invention of letter bombs, but Richard did suggest we run a hot iron over the sheets of paper in the hope of discovering messages written in invisible ink.

Those first few days in England were so filled with novelty, with odd occurrences and curious sights, that this tiny incident, bizarre as it was, seemed no more than a portion of that larger strangeness, and we soon ceased to talk about it. I even used the writing paper for my first letters home, and when it was all gone I forgot about it. Or almost.

For if it seemed a commonplace enough adventure at the time, it grows more strange, more mysterious as time passes. This afternoon, telling Nancy about it, it seemed really quite wonderful in a way, utterly unique in fact, as though we had accidentally brushed with the supernatural.

And the two of us, stirring sugar into our cups of coffee at the Prince Lodge, smiled. It was after three; the businessmen had crept away without our noticing, back to their conference rooms, to their teak desks and in-trays. Here in the restaurant two waiters fluttered darkly by a sideboard, and in all that space I felt myself lifted to a new perspective: far away it seemed, I could see two women at a table; they are neither happy nor unhappy, but are suspended somewhere in between, caught in a thin, clear, expensive jelly, and they are both smiling, smiling across the table, across the room, smiling past the dark stained paneling, out through the tiny-paned window to the parking lot which is slowly, slowly, filling up with snow, changing all the world to a wide, white void.

“It's over. I just heard it on the news,” Richard yells. “While I was getting dressed. It's all settled.”

“What's settled?” It's early, eight o'clock, and I'm pouring out glasses of orange juice, not quite awake.

“The postal strike.”

“The postal strike?”

“You know. In the U.K. Don't you remember?”

“Oh, yes, that's right. Heavens, that's been going on a long time.”

“Three weeks.”

“Really? Where does the time go?”

He sits down at the table and cuts the top off his boiled egg. Joy makes him violent, and the slice of egg shell skitters to the floor. He leans over to pick it up. “Man, it'll be a real pileup. Three weeks of mail!"

I pour my coffee and sit beside him. “It'll take a while to sort it all out.”

“I know.”

“I mean, you mustn't expect any mail for a while.”

“I know. I know.”

“It may be several days. A week even.”

“Is there any honey?”

“In the cupboard.”

“Say about six days. Today's Tuesday. I should be getting something by next Monday.”

“Hmmmmm.”

“What do you think? Tuesday at the latest?”

“Maybe, but don't count on it.”

“Don't worry about me.”

He managed to get through the week, casting no more than a casual eye at the hall table under the piece of red granite where I keep the mail. Over the weekend we all went skiing, and time passed quickly.

But when he came home from school at noon on Monday, I could tell how disappointed he was. He spooned his soup around in circles, and picked at his sandwich, and for the first time I noticed how pale he looked: On Tuesday, because again there was no mail for him, I made him waffles for lunch. But even that failed to cheer him.

“Look, Richard,” I told him, “have you looked in the newspapers? Did you see that picture of all the unsorted mail. A mountain of it. It's going to take longer than we thought.”

“I guess so.”

He kept waiting. Watching him, I observed for the first time the simplicity of his life, the almost utilitarian unrelieved separation of his time: school, home, sleep. Endless repetition. He needed a letter desperately.

On the weekend we skied again, scattering our energies on the snow-covered hills and coming home in the late afternoon. Richard was so weighted with sleep that England must have seemed far away, indistinct and irrelevant, a point on a dream map.

But Monday morning he tells me he feels sick. His throat is sore, he says, and his head aches. I can hear an unfamiliar pitch of pleading in his voice, and know intuitively that he only wants to be here when the mail arrives. Martin is impatient and peers down his throat with a flashlight. “I can't see a thing,” he says. “And his temperature is normal.”

“He might as well stay home this morning,” I say, “just in case he's coming down with something.” (How expertly I carry off these small deceptions. And how instinctively I take the part of the deceiver.) Richard, listening to us debate his hypothetical sickness, looks at me gratefully. And humbly crawls back into bed to wait.      

The mail comes at half-past ten. There is quite a lot for a Monday. Bills mostly, a letter from Martin's parents, two or three magazines. And a letter from England. A tissue-thin blue air letter. But it is from a friend of Martin's, not from Anita Spalding.

I go up to Richard's room, a tall glass of orange juice in my hand and an aspirin, for I want to continue the fiction of illness long enough for him to recover with grace. “Take this, Rich,” I say. “You may even feel up to going to school this afternoon.”

“Maybe,” he says. “Any mail?”

“Nothing much,” I say, duplicating his nonchalance.

“Wonder if the mail's getting through from England,” he speculates as though this were no more than an abstract topic.

“I think it is, Richard,” I tell him quietly. “Dad got one this morning.”

“Oh.”

“But I suppose it will just trickle in at first.”

“Probably.”

“It may take another good week to clear it all.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel?”

“A little better,” he says.

“Good,” I say. “After lunch, how about if I drive you over to school?”

“Okay,” he says.

 

But there was no mail for him that week or the next. The month was slipping by, and I still had not confronted Furlong. I weighed it in my mind, rehearsed it; I fortified myself, gathered my strength, prepared my grievances. Soon.

But there are other things to think of. Meredith will be seventeen on February twenty-seventh, and Martin suggests we all go to Antonio's for dinner. I fret briefly about the cost, but listening to my own voice and hearing the terse economical echoes of my mother, I stop short.

“A good idea,” I say.

The day before her birthday I take the downtown bus and shop for a birthday present. This is a far different quest than shopping for my mother or for Lala; for them we can never think of anything to buy. But for Meredith, for a girl of seventeen, the shops are groaning with wonderful things. Things. It is the age for things, each of which would, I know, bring tears of delight rushing into her eyes. There are Greek bags woven in a shade of blue so subtle it defies description; chunks of stone, looking as though they were plucked from a strange planet, fastened into chains of palest silver; there are sweaters of unfathomable softness, belts in every color and width, jeans by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions. Things are everywhere. All I have to do is choose.

But I can't. Instead I buy too much. I spend far more money than I'd intended; it is irresistible; it is so easy to bring her happiness – it won't always be this easy – so easy to produce the charge plate, to tuck yet another little bag away. But finally the parcels weight me down; my arms are filled, and I think it must be time for me to catch my bus. But first a cup of coffee.

In the corner of Christy's Coffee Shop I sink into a chair. The tables here are small, and the tile floor is awash with tracked-in snow; there is hardly room for me to stow my parcels under the table. At all the other little tables are shoppers, and like me they are weary. The February sales are on, and many of these women are guarding treasures they have spent the day pursuing. Waitresses bring them solace: cups of coffee, green pots of tea, doughnuts or toasted Danish buns, bran muffins with pats of butter. Outside it's already dark. Only four-thirty and the day is ending for these exhausted, sore-footed women. All of them are women, I notice.

Or almost all. There is one man at a table in the back of the room. Only one. Oddly enough, he looks familiar; the bulk of his body reminds me of someone I know. I do know him. I recognize the tweed overcoat. Of course. It's Furlong Eberhardt. With a cup of tea raised to his lips.

And who's that with him? Two women. Students? Probably. I peer over the sea of teased hairdos and crushed wool hats. Who is it?

One of them looks like Ruthie. What would Ruthie be doing here with Furlong? Impossible. But it is Ruthie. She is pouring herself a cup of tea, tipping the pot almost upside-down to get the last drop. She is lifting a sliver of lemon and squeezing it in. The small dark face, Latin-looking. It is Ruthie.

And who is that other girl? I can't believe it. But the navy blue coat thrown over the back of the chair is familiar. Its plaid lining is conclusive. The slender neck, the lift of dark brown hair. I am certain now. It is – yes –
it's Meredith!

Every day I work for two or three hours on the Susanna Moodie biography. What I am looking for is the precise event which altered her from a rather priggish, faintly blue-stockinged but ardent young girl into a heavy, conventional, distressed, perpetually disapproving and sorrowing woman. And although I've been over all the resource material thoroughly, I'm unable to find the line of demarcation. It seems to be unrecorded, lodged perhaps in the years between her books, or else – and this seems more likely – willfully suppressed, deliberately withheld.

There are traumatic events in her life to be sure. Illness. The drowning of a son which she mentions only in passing. Poverty. And the failure of her husband to assume direction. Perhaps that's it – her husband, John W. Dunbar Moodie.

There's a clue in an essay he wrote as an old man. It is a sort of summary of his life in which he lists the primary events as being, one, getting stepped on by an elephant as a young man in South Africa, two, the breaking of a knee in middle life and, three, painful arthritis in old age. He was, it would seem, a man who measured his life by episodes of pain, a negative personality who might easily have extinguished the fire of love in Susanna.

But despite her various calamities she survived, and it seems to have been her sense of irony that kept her afloat when everything else failed. Over the years she had abandoned the sharp divisions between good and evil which had troubled her as a young woman; the two qualities became bridged with a fibrous rib of irony. Sharp on the tongue, it became her trademark.

Irony, it seems to me, is a curious quality, a sour pleasure. Observation which is acid-edged with knowledge. A double vision which allows pain to exist on the reverse side of pleasure. Neither vice nor virtue, it annihilated the dichotomy of her existence. Smoothed out the contradictions. Forstalled ennui and permitted survival. An anesthetic for the frontier, but at the same time a drug to dull exhilaration.

For example, when Susanna was a middle-aged woman and ailing from unmentionable disorders, she took a cruise to see Niagara Falls. It was, she says, what she had dreamed of all her life.

The imagined sight of that mountain of water had sustained her through her tragic years, and now at last the boat carried her closer and closer to the majestic sight.

She can hear the thunder of water before she can see it, and her whole body tenses for pleasure. But when she actually stands in the presence of the torrent, she loses the capacity for rhapsody. She has exhausted it in anticipation.

But irony rescues her from a pitiable vacuum. Turning from the scenery, she observes the human activity around her, and, paragraph by paragraph, she describes the reactions of her fellow tourists. Their multiple presence forms particles through which she can see, as through a prism, the glorious and legendary spectacle of Niagara Falls. Once again she finds her own way out.

I easily recognize the nuances of irony because, lying sleepless in bed on this last night in February, I too am rescued; I too do my balancing act between humor and desperation.

It seems I've always had a knack for it. Perhaps I was born with it; maybe it came sealed in the invisible skin of a chromosome, ready to accompany me for the rest of my life. I can feel it: a tough-as-a-tendon cord which stretches from the top of my head to my toes, a sort of auxiliary brain, ready as a knuckle to carry me through.

All through my endless barren childhood I had my special and privileged observation platform. My parents did not succeed in souring me as they did my sister Charleen who writes and publishes poems of terrifying bitterness. My sad lank father and my sad nervous mother have faded to snapshot proportions. They have not twisted or warped me or shaped me into a mocking image of themselves. There may be warnings in the blood, but, at least, there are no nightmares.