The Age of Cities (7 page)

Delilah was agreeable. “I'm sure she did, Cameron. I think the School Board is looking for something more comprehensive and more, well, secular. Perhaps Mrs. Pitt was too admonitory.” As though buffeted by a sudden gust, she patted her blonde hairdo.

“And by that you mean?” McKay asked, stock still. He was testy; time and again, he'd explained that two-dollar words made his hackles rise.

“You know precisely what I mean, Cameron. We have been through this before. It's not a Sunday school lesson.” Winston recognized her pursed expression: it was all-purpose and he'd seen it manifest when students made atrocious excuses for not handing in homework assignments and in the face of inclement weather. Once, soured milk in the staff room refrigerator had brought it on.

At the door to the Chemistry classroom she stopped and withdrew a sheet of paper from her file folder. She cleared her throat and addressed the impromptu assembly:

“Here are the words we underlined in the report that the School Board sent to us—

moral standards
delinquency
social diseases
prevention
hygiene
family science
citizenship

 And let's not forget that there was the request, in italics no less, that ‘
girls and boys should receive scientific education about the origins of life, their responsibility for life, and social standards
.' It's these ideas we must sift through. Do you recall now, Cameron?”

“No hellfire, in other words,” Winston said, directing the conversation back to Mrs. Pitt's shortcomings. He felt thankful that he had steered clear of committee work. Enmity and groups always seemed to walk hand in hand.

Winston was familiar with the Board's goals. Weeks before, Delilah had spoken to him about her ideals for the unit: “the introduction of proper attitudes, high standards of moral conduct, the development of a healthy, sober, and moral attitude toward matters of sex”—she had pronounced the word gingerly—“in general.”

They sat around two lab tables near the open windows. The breeze that came in smelled of grass clippings and lilac. Delilah, the chairwoman of the committee, spoke once everyone had settled on his wooden bench seat. “We will strive to make our selection today, but before we begin my special guest Mr. Wilson will give us his summary of the materials already in our library.”

She clapped her hands in welcome and then turned to Winston. “As you are aware, Winston, our concern is with obtaining modern books that have no undue salaciousness. We are going to be teaching teenage boys and girls who take anything the wrong way. What do you have for us?”

“Well, the library's locked-up material really doesn't add up to a mountain. It's barely a molehill. A few volumes are relics from the reign of King George V. I can assure you that they're just curiosities.”

He held up a tattered brown book and passed it to Delilah. “Still, there is
Healthy Living: Principles of Personal and Community Hygiene.
It dates from nearly four decades ago, but it's interesting and discusses everything except the kitchen sink: from caring for baby to preventing hookworm. And it has useful homework questions at the end of each chapter: ‘Why is picking the nose a dangerous as well as an unpleasant habit?,' for instance.” Guffaws were followed by colourful anecdotes about poor student hygiene.

“The author is from the Yale School of Medicine. He does go on a bit, though. And it's two volumes as well. That could get expensive. The book could be out of print, even. I rather enjoy this one particular volume because some aspiring Browning has included her verse in big loopy letters—

 

Fall into the river from
off the deck,
Fall down stairs and break
your neck.
Let the glittering stars
fall from above,
But never, never fall
in love.

 

“Awfully cynical for one so young, I'd say, but it might be the best sort of principle for students here in the Bend. Caveat emptor.”

“
Principles of Personal and Community Hygiene.
Sounds socialistic,” McKay offered. No one answered his challenge.

“Let's see, what else is there?
Growing Up Emotionally
and
Facts of Life and Love for Teen-Agers
were written specifically for young people, and feature the kinds of questions a juvenile would supposedly ask. They're pamphlets, really, and a tad basic.

“Some things—I am not at all certain how they found their way into our high-minded library—are too detailed and racy. Published in Germany,
The Key to Love and Sex
(in Eight Volumes), for instance, has explicit content. It does come in eight volumes, though, some more salacious than others, and they're thin and modestly priced. There's
They Stand Apart,
which is only about perversion from a legalistic perspective.” Winston was surprised when a picture of Leo Mantha hanging from the gallows coalesced before his eyes like a dream image. It lasted for the briefest of moments. “For both, I imagine parents would complain about the permissive attitude. In addition, the details might open a can of worms for inquisitive minds.” He handed Volume 4,
The Abnormal Aspects of Sex,
to Delilah and Volume 2,
Historical Attitudes Toward Love and Sex
, to the English and Western Civ teacher, Mary Westburn.

“Both
Attaining Manhood: A Doctor Talks To Boys About Sex
and the
Attaining Womanhood
companion volume are matter of fact and informative. There is not too much technical terminology, but it is scientific. There's nothing salacious at all. Nor socialistic.” He smiled toward Delilah. “And they are illustrated.” He gave both slim grey books to Cameron McKay.

“Finally, there are some movie reels:
Social-Sex Attitudes in Adolescence, The Meaning of Adolescence,
and
Physical Aspects of Puberty.
I didn't look at them, but I'd hazard that the last is more perfunctory than the others. Obviously, they should be secondary or supplementary.”

“Oh, yes. Mrs. Partridge must have heard about this meeting because she stopped by and gave me a copy of her Home Economics textbook.” He held up the last of the books in his stack. “This brand new
Junior Homemaking
is fine, but it is really just a textbook designed to help girls become good housewives—if ‘How Pretty Can You Be?' and ‘Are You a Household Treasure?' are chapter titles we can judge by. It ought to remain in Home Ec.”

He handed that heavy volume to Mrs. Pratt, who flipped through the pages intently. An instant later she snapped her fingers. “Perhaps we could comb through the books and type up our own booklet, one that's suited to our needs here. It would certainly not be costly. And that way there'd be no extraneous material.”

“Are you volunteering your time?” At that moment, it was obvious to Winston that Cameron McKay joined committees because he was a bully. His natural prey were sheepish do-gooders like Delilah and Betty Pratt, gentle women, he imagined, who wouldn't put up much of a fight.

“If we worked together, it'd be done in no time,” was her spirited reply.

Delilah thanked Winston for his efforts. She spoke to the others and then told him that they had some decisions to make. “Now's when the fun begins, Winston. Naturally, you may stay if you like, but I have the feeling that we will be burning the midnight oil.” Her face pinched for an instant as she settled her eyes on Cameron McKay. She'd give Winston the inside story during her recess in the morning, he could guess.

“As much as I'd welcome the chance,” he said, sliding from the bench, “I should get home, check in on Mother. I'll get those books back from you tomorrow. There's no rush, though, if you'd like to keep them a while longer. Good luck.”

J[une 19]59

In the first week following his visit, Winston was a dedicated student of the specialist's thumb press technique. Arriving home from school each afternoon, he'd eagerly take off his shoes and socks filled with the hope—ridiculous, and he knew it—that the doctor's hazy prognostication would correspond to some visible change: mind over matter. When that fleshly material proved resistant, he decided that as a diagnosis
Time heals all wounds
was sketchy enough to become the byword for turbaned clairvoyants at midways near and far; they could adopt it as a handy alternative to “A loved one is concerned about you.” Really, what was the use of saying it? Death would drain his foot, no doubt. And that was only a matter of
time
. Anything and everything was a matter of time.

After that one obstinate foot failed to obey his will, he began to give the pair of them a nominal inspection in the morning. Practical choice won over speculative hand-wringing: he'd discovered that he could avoid discomfort altogether by wearing his usual black wool sock on the normal foot and a silky one, thin as onion skin, on the other. Weeks later, daffodils and narcissus having bloomed and wilted, the difference between the two remained exactly the same, ropy and skeletal on the left, bloated as a drowned man on the right. The doctor had said in so many words that what he saw was barely worth fretting over, and now Winston resigned himself to that learned opinion. There were many worse problems in the world, he lectured to himself. This one was peanuts. He felt relief when he thought how different it would be if he had woken up with a face that was half inflated. Or suffering from a blinding headache that kept him secluded in a sunless room.

Winston dutifully swabbed on pungent salves until Alberta became resigned as well. She tried out a few new combinations—an odd ingredient like catnip or fish roe swirled in with the standard dollop of mustard—and then snorted at her fruitless determination: “Ha! What's next, prayer? A visit to a faith healer?”

It was a perplexing condition, but her mirthful fancies about it induced a bout of laughter. While rifling through her herb drawer—you really ought to organize this godawful jumble of envelopes, jars, and paper scraps, she repeated the resolution for what might be the hundredth time—on a May morning filled with the threat of a scorching summer, she poked fun at the idea of them making some Old Testament-style pilgrimage to a wind-whipped canvas tent. Her vision relocated them to an endless dry grass field in the Prairies rather than a desert in the Levant, and arriving by bus.

She piled up the details: they'd have to wait in a long queue and talk to other travel-cramped desperadoes—a tired, lank-haired woman with a heavy-set, simpleton daughter; a recently married couple whose only child had been paralyzed by polio—about their pain and anguish and pretend to have faith in their capricious God, who had first stricken them and then offered up an unlikely map back to health that had led them to a scorched plain in the middle of nowhere. She'd have to hold her tongue, she imagined, yet she'd be granted the rare opportunity to watch her son being forced to pass the time in dreary talk with complete strangers. Chewing the fat. Crops, weather, sickness, and God: Oh, how he'd squirm.

As Alberta widened the vision's scope, its mugging vaudeville callousness faded; she concluded they'd be on the first bus to Reverend Whatshisname if her son became sick and no one could help him. It was a mother's right. Why wouldn't she? Chiding herself for such mawkishness, she thought, I've grown into a weepy old woman. She blanched when she pictured herself as one of those fussy Orange Pekoe-sipping ladies who spend their long days looking with wistful, tear-brimmed eyes at old photographs and whispering of war and fateful, misery-bringing letters from the government. Stuck so deep in the mud of the past, she huffed.

Alberta abandoned her brewing of remedies and talk of shoring up her store of knowledge. There was a time when you stopped darning holes in a sock, after all, and threw it in the bin. And, besides, there was nothing left to use in that musty drawer. No alchemical combination. She held fast to her conviction that a cure was out there, hanging on to that certainty without qualm, and spoke to Winston now and again of holding a pow-wow with the Indians who sold bargain salmon at shadowy cottonwood groves along the river's bank. It was just that there were better ways for her to spend her mornings than fretting about proportions and herbs. With her gardens, for instance.

Besides, it wasn't as though her son's malady was any more serious than the various aches and swellings that afflicted her each and every season. She had long since given up on remedying her patches of scaly skin—even after valiantly trying grandfather Wong's remedy of abstaining from potatoes for two entire months, during winter. (“Too much heat” was his slow-coming explanation.) Now she would do the same with a swollen foot. Oh well, what can a soul do but try? It didn't warrant all her doting—she believed that living through children like some kind of leech was no better than staring mournfully at dusty old photographs. The whole she-bang was in fact easy to forget about: he didn't limp or complain and was not in the habit of parading around barefooted.

“
C'est
tout
,” she said to Winston one morning when he asked about the contents of her latest concoction. “I'm about to make a batch of cheddar scones, so it's flour in the bowl this time. I thought I'd make your coffee first. That okay?” Winston was surprised that Alberta would admit defeat so soon. He thought to feel slighted—his own mother giving up on him, was nothing sacred?—but reminded himself that he had no real faith in her brand of medicine.

“I wonder when,” he muttered. He crossed the room and ran an index finger along the days of the kitchen calendar. Having finished percolating Winston's coffee, Alberta was measuring leaves for her morning pot of tea. Grendel was stretched out at her feet; Alberta had dropped him a few dried catnip leaves, and after a spasm of activity the cat had settled into a euphoric slumber.

Winston spoke to her from across the room. “Mother, this is going to be another permanent feature on me, like weak eyesight or dandruff in winter. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't change, it's simply there. Nevertheless.”

“That's what I said when my hair began to thin out. ‘It's just there,' or not there in my case, I suppose. Anyway, you'll always notice it,” Alberta held up an imaginary hand mirror and squinted. “I'm just a Gorgon without the snakes.”

“Oh, Mother.”

“You're going to take another trip to the city?”

“I may make a weekend of it. See a show or two. Get you some more of that Lapsang Souchung, even though I can't fathom why you drink the noxious smoky stuff. Say, why don't you come along?
We
can make a weekend of it.”

“Now there's an idea, though it's spring and I've made the switch out of Lapsang. Of course.” Her tone was snappish, suggesting that Winston was dumb as an auk. “But you're right, we could make a weekend of it. It's been too long since this old girl has done anything except slave at the stove.” Winston thought his mother was tart and vinegary this overcast morning.

With lips pursed and arms crossed, he turned to her. “You poor so and so. Well, I hereby grant you manumission. For one weekend only, mind you. Today's your lucky day.” Winston realized that it had been years in fact since he and Alberta had spent a frivolous weekend away from the Bend. They talked of packing their luggage and taking a train or bus somewhere, but the actual trip never seemed to materialize.

Alberta improvised an African genuflection. “O massuh, you da bestest massuh evuh.”

Fully grinning, he returned his attention to the calendar. “I'll have to make a long distance call to the hotel and doctor this time. Let's hope there's a space in his appointment book.”

She walked to the sink and stared out the window. She exclaimed, “Well, I'm going to have to air out my glad-rags. At the very least. They've been stuffed in a corner of my closet so long they are as wrinkled as all get out—I don't even have to look. Let's hope there's no mould and that the moths haven't had a field day.”

 

 

“You're turning into quite the city slicker.” He looked up to see Delilah at the library's front door.

Delilah's being finished earlier than him was a rarity. She arranged regular meetings with students in order to keep up to date with their progress. It added an extra half-hour to her daily schedule, which Winston usually reminded her of when he was leaving for home. Today, he'd needed to spend some extra time on book orders. The restrictions of the budget had him feeling tetchy.

“I bet you've found some sweetheart,” she said with a false smile.

“Yes, you've figured it all out, Miss Marple. Congratulations. You'll be the first to get an invitation. We're thinking of a spring wedding.” She'll be a spinster in no time if she doesn't watch herself, he thought after she'd quietly shut the door. Exposure to city life might do her some good.

 

 

During April's trip to the city, Winston had scarcely looked up from
Memoirs of Hadrian
over the two hours the train took to reach the spectacular Pacific terminus. He'd known what lay beyond the coach's window; the salmonberry bushes, cow pasture, and muddy river water were as unremarkable as zucchini in August. And he'd encountered gossips like the pair of downtrodden scavengers who'd sat across from him often enough to appreciate the value of a book. It acted as a charm to ward off evil. He'd considered those women in their faded calico, and concluded that the hero of his novel really was a deity. Publius Aelius Hadrianus. Now there was someone with a story worth paying attention to. He'd thought it was sad that dignity and heroism were so easy to locate in literature and yet such a rarity in daily life.

Travelling with Alberta, though, he would not be given a chance to read anything, not even a newspaper. She said as much, the excitement seeping from her voice: “You're not going to read now, I hope?” They sat facing one another. Alberta had placed her bags and gloves on the adjoining seat; Winston's folded coat and hat were covering his. The novel rested on his lap; his index finger was wedged in where he'd left off.

“Since you made us trudge down to the station like hobos, planting myself here and relaxing strikes me as ideal. Sheesh, how many miles was that?” Winston fixed his attention on the book's cover.

“But there's so much to look at.”

“What do you mean? There's nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary.” He swept through the scene outside with a quick dismissive glance.

“Look at the trees. They're luminous, as green as they get. And the river is more swollen than your foot can ever be.” Alberta was speaking from memory apparently, because she was bent over removing her shoes.

“Yes, O Empress of the Wild. Maybe Princess Stop and Smell the Roses should spend less time with her Indian friends. Besides, there was plenty of nature in ancient Greece. Olive trees, grape arbours, and hemlock galore.” He waved the book at her. Winston could think of nothing he'd prefer at this instance. He'd moved on to
The King Must Die,
but was still finding Theseus a bit stagy. All those pages of Attic speechifying, it was hammy. The novel was bound to improve.

“To raise such a cynic of a child. What ever did I do wrong?” Having finished unfastening her shoes, Alberta's face remained fixed on the outdoor scene.

“You didn't keep me in your papoose long enough, I suppose, Mother Nature. We're going to be incinerated by the sunshine in about five minutes, so maybe we should just pull down the blind.” He stood and began to reach for the dangling cord.

“Don't you dare! So cheeky!” They were both smiling. The bantering was their comic routine—as old as any of their shared memories. They both relished it and exaggerated their differences for the sport.

“You know, whenever I'm on the train and it's level with the water and the water is leading toward the sea, I always imagine this place before we were here.” Having lost the contest of wills, Winston had already placed the book on his coat.

“The Wilson dynasty? Or are you referring to the time before Cook and Vancouver and grubby gold rush miners?”

“I mean when animals ruled the world. Nobody else. Well before the age of cities. It's something of a mix-up because a few mammoths are roaming as well as some dinosaurs—I have a peculiar fondness for the brontosaurus, so always throw in a few. No people, though, not a soul. It all seems majestic…” She stood up to get a better view of the scene outside the window. “…and awesome.”

“So much poetry and so early in the day, Mother.” He understood Alberta's point but did not feel it. “I'd rather see a painting of it, something by Emily Carr maybe. In an art museum. Anyway, Oscar Wilde said that art is an improvement on nature. If I were stranded beside you in your prehistoric wonderland, I'd be looking for the nearest exit out. There's something about wide-open spaces swarming with reptiles that has me craving art and craft—central heating, a cozy armchair, and a good novel.”

“Oh, you. Small wonder we never go camping. Biscuit?” She reached into her embroidery bag and began to unfold a waxed paper parcel. Their car rolled by vibrant stands of salmonberry and cottonwood.

Winston decided that it was Alberta's enthusiasm at leaving the Bend that had been the catalyst for her impromptu lecture about life before apes and civilization. It was a romantic, noble-savage diorama she drew for him, but minus even the savage. Truly, she had painted a big primitive pastureland, one with far more grazers than predators. Edenic—for a cud-chewer.

“And how do you imagine surviving in this place, Mother?” He tried out her idea; removing the links of log booms from the river, he imagined something like an Ogopogo heaving its sleek eel's head out of the muddy current.