The Age of Hope (26 page)

She went home and pondered on these things for several days and then she sat down one morning and wrote a letter to Ms. Charlotte Means, her ex-daughter-in-law.

Dear Charlotte,

It is me, Hope. I imagine this is not a letter you want to receive, or even read, but please bear with me. I have been thinking much about relationships these days (I have time to think), and I want to say that I am no longer angry with you. I am too old for bitterness and anger. I have discovered a new country, a place where brooks babble and birds flit from tree to tree. I find myself in the midst of that bucolic setting and I feel peace. And feeling that peace, which has arrived completely unbidden, unwilled, I want to say that I am sorry for whatever grief I have caused you. I cannot speak for my son, Conner, who has his own road to walk, but in my case, please know that I am sorry. I have tried, over these past years, to hold the memory of Rudi and Ilke, but I find lately that my recollection is failing. I hope they are well, and thriving. Please, if you can, tell them that I still love them and that I think of them constantly. That day, when I saw you in the Bay and I was so rude, I simply lost it. I threw a stone that I could not take back, and that stone, I am sure, hurt you. I am sorry. About my life, I am well. As well as I can be for a woman who is turning seventy. I pray for your family. I pray for Rudi and Ilke. Thank you for listening.

Hope Koop

She kept the letter for a week, and then finally mailed it, walking up to the post office in Osborne Village, where she stood in line behind a girl with pink hair and tattered black stockings. She had imagined she had no expectations regarding the letter. It was an act of bravery and clemency, for herself only.

And she was correct to believe that nothing would come of it. Even though she waited with faint anticipation for a response, it never came.

And then Emily’s Paul died. In fact, killed himself. Hope was sure of it, because Emily was so sure of it. Paul had driven his car, a Belair sold to him by Roy when he still had the business, into the back of a parked tractor-trailer on the Trans-Canada Highway. He had had no business driving on the shoulder at a hundred kilometres an hour. Broad daylight, perfect weather, warning triangles posted, and still Paul had hit the tanker and the car had spun into the ditch, engine smoking, leaving Paul himself a tattered mess of flesh and irretrievable organs. Emily and Paul, after all the years of living apart, were still married. At the funeral, held in Eden, Emily was held in suspicion by those, many of them mere acquaintances, who saw her as a betrayer and a wayward woman. She had lived a selfish life.

Hope helped Emily clear out the house. Emily had recently had double knee replacements and was just barely becoming mobile, and so she sat in the middle of the house while Hope trotted about, noting the contents. Pieces of furniture that Paul had built were everywhere, stacked on end in the basement, the living room, overflowing the workshop. There was hardly room to walk. In total, there were fifty-five end tables, all made of cherry. Hope did not take any of the pieces, even though she was offered whatever she liked. She had gone modern, she said, glass and steel, and this was true. She had bought a new dining set at Design Manitoba. Leather and steel chairs, glass-topped dining table—something Roy would have found pretentious. Later in the day, drinking wine and sitting in the backyard on oak folding chairs that Paul had built, Emily surveyed the house and said, “It might be best to simply make a bonfire and burn everything.”

Alone and driving back to the city, Hope wondered if that wasn’t the difference between her and Emily. Emily’s answer to trouble was to set fire to the strife, and in doing so, to make it disappear, whereas Hope held trouble close to her chest, as if she might suffocate the difficulty or worry it into submission. Emily, after several glasses of wine, said that she should have been more vigilant. She had spoken with Paul once a month, and their last conversation had been disjointed. “He kept repeating the word ‘disarray.’ He was trying a different medication, and it wasn’t working. Without me he was desolate and lonely.”

“But Emily, he was desolate and lonely when you were still living with him,” Hope said.

“Was he?”

“Yes. You told me that. I remember when you left him, you told me that you would die if you stayed.”

“I was young. And desperate. I felt hemmed in. Funny thing, I still feel hemmed in. Maybe more so.”

“When Roy died, I was terribly lonely. Inconsolable. Still, there was suddenly all this space around me and though at first it was overwhelming, I grew to like it. Quite quickly. Shamefully.”

“You’re too hard on yourself. I envy you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There is nothing to envy.”

“See? This is exactly what I mean.”

But Hope hadn’t seen. What did Emily mean?

She recalled the lilac bush in Eden, beyond the kitchen window, which bloomed briefly for one week every spring, and then became just another shrub with green leaves, indistinguishable from every other shrub. What was the point? She had told Penny one afternoon, as they drank tea on Penny’s front porch, that she believed in heaven, though she wasn’t sure about hell. “Actually, I don’t believe in hell. And truth be told, I’m no longer sure about heaven either.” She said this with a certain amount of glee, as if tasting rebellion for the first time.

It was on this same day that Penny announced it was time to move beyond the short story and write a novel. She was going to take a leave from the hospital. The novel would be about a woman born in 1930 whose existence was both minor and major.

Hope was wary. She smelled a rat. “What do you mean, ‘major’?”

“She is a woman. And what is there about the life of a woman that is worth exploring? A woman does not fight in wars, does not invent, does not make something out of nothing, except for the exceptional woman, like Madame Curie or Jane Austen. Most women your age had children and raised them, and then what did the children do? They took the mother for granted.” Penny sighed. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured out the major part yet, though it has to be there. Doesn’t it?”

“I was born in 1930.”

“You were.”

“Oh, why write such nonsense?” And then, pleased, she said, “Leave out the unfortunate parts.” And then, “If you must tell the truth, be kind.”

“It’s not about
you,
Mom. You might recognize bits and pieces, but it
is
a novel.”

“I was not perfect. Never perfect. I was the furthest from perfect. But then that was not my intent.”

She was amazed that her middle daughter showed any interest in her. All of a sudden. And then she realized one day that the interest was ultimately selfish. Penny needed a story, was incapable of making something out of nothing. She called her up one day and said, “It will be too episodic. You’ll need some backbone to the story. A plot. My life was plotless.” And she pictured her existence printed out on several hundred pages, formless and wilting in a drawer somewhere. “No one will want …” She struggled to conclude the sentence.

Another time she called Penny and said, “You might think twice about using my life. But if you go ahead, please leave out certain things I have told you. Paul’s kiss, the abortion, I don’t believe it would benefit anyone to know that, the bankruptcy, my work for Merry Maid, humiliating, the hotel room scene, whatever sex talk I have let slip, my weakness for sweets. You could wait till I am dead. And failing that, try to lie a little. Also, at all costs, avoid sentimentality.”

Penny laughed. “Mom, this is fiction. If you want the facts, write a memoir.”

“Don’t. I’m not even sure this is working, so you can forget about it, okay? Probably nothing will come of it.”

“Oh.” This was disappointing. For a month now Hope had discovered that the space she occupied had grown slightly. She imagined herself a minor player in a drama that was self-contained. Somewhere out there a box was being built for her, and the box itself would not allow for spillage or chaos, or if chaos did present itself, the moment of disorder would be brief. The narrative of her life would be clean and unsuspecting, with tiny bumps like potholes on the road. She had, in a self-deprecating though ultimately hubristic manner, told Emily about Penny’s novel. She had sensed that Emily might have been slightly miffed, and it made sense. What was so important about Hope Koop? Emily, in every way, had lived a more
interesting
life.

The next time Hope saw Penny, she said, “You know, Emily Shroeder is a fascinating person. She’s incredibly well read and has lived a bustling, dare I say, almost dangerous life. For a time she had a lover who was a chef. Her daughter lives in New York, where Emily lives for months at a time as well. Even Paul, her husband, died in a tragic way, from a suicide.” She heard herself, and paused. Waved her hands in the air and said, “I would think the voice is most important. Don’t you?”

Within a few months, perhaps because Penny stopped mentioning her novel, the subject was shunted off to the side, and in every way this was a relief to Hope, who was finding it difficult to live both her real life and the projected other life. She settled down and gradually let go the idea of immortality. Who did she think she was?

Over the past year Hope had been taking day trips out to Altona to visit her cousin Frida. George, her husband, disliked Frida having too much fun, and so their coffee times usually took place in Frida’s kitchen while George hovered nearby. Frida had no access to money, wasn’t allowed to answer the phone, rarely saw anyone, save Hope, and was beginning to talk of death, as if she had some premonition of her own demise. Hope was worried.

Over the last while, when they had moments of privacy, talk had turned to escape. At first, because it was a touchy subject and Frida was a fearful woman, the word “escape” was not used. Instead, Hope talked about what was normal and abnormal. She told Frida that it was not normal that she did not have money. And it was not normal to be disallowed use of the telephone. “It’s a basic right, Frida. You should be able to pick up the phone and call your friends. You should be able to answer the phone and not have George screen your calls.”

“He doesn’t like you, Hope. He thinks you’re putting thoughts in my head.”

“The thoughts are already there, Frida. I could be anyone.” She did not tell Frida that the feeling was mutual. She did not like George. He was a sweet talker in public, a man with two faces.

“Well, he doesn’t think you’re a positive influence.”

“That makes sense, doesn’t it? That he would think that? He’s afraid.”

“He is?”

“Oh yes, and fear can make a person do crazy things.” Hope thought this was true, simply because she had been afraid at certain points in her own life and had acted in an unwell manner. “He’s afraid that you will leave him.”

“Oh, no, I’m not planning to leave him. Where would I go?”

“Well, there is Irmie.”

Frida had a daughter, Irmie, living in Ottawa who refused to speak to her father. Irmie made it known that Frida lived in a prison, but she did little to help her mother. She didn’t come home for visits, and she talked with Frida by phone only once a month, though she had told her one time that if she needed a place to live, she could come to Ottawa.

Hope was a patient woman, and for a year, as Frida flip-flopped between leaving George and staying, she neither encouraged her, nor tried to dissuade her. She merely asked questions. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, as George napped in the bedroom, she and Frida talked in whispers about various scenarios and images of freedom. These were other women, nameless and faceless, who had lived in situations that were very similar to Frida’s.

“Penny told me just last week of a friend, let’s call her Jane, who took her three young children and moved into an apartment. The husband had gambled away the mortgage, the car, the cottage. Nothing was left. Jane didn’t even write a note. She just packed up the kids and left.”

“George doesn’t gamble. And our house is paid for. He insists on doing the grocery shopping. I can make lists, but he doesn’t always follow them.”

“Has he hurt you? Physically?”

“Oh, no. Never.”

“He doesn’t touch you, then?”

“Only when we lie together. Once a week.”

“Do you want that?”

She shook her head. Nodded. “It doesn’t hurt.” Then she said that she was embarrassed. Sex talk made her nervous.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

“What about Roy?” Frida asked one time. “Did you ever want to leave him?”

“There were moments,” Hope said. “And to give Roy credit, he would have said, ‘You can go.’ A marriage is a balancing act of giving and taking.”

“But you didn’t have to leave. Roy died.” And as she said this, Frida put a hand over her mouth as if she had overstepped some moral boundary. “I’m sorry.”

“And it might be that you wish George were dead.”

“Oh, no. I don’t. Do I?”

And then, one afternoon after an especially difficult week, Frida said, “I want to leave.” Immediately she looked horrified. Her hands shook.

Hope touched her elbow and said, “Are you sure?”

Frida nodded.

“Okay,” Hope said, all business. “This is what we will do.”

She had, in preparation, called a women’s shelter and they had been very specific about protection and having a plan and making sure that Frida had a safe place to stay. One time the word “violence” was used and Hope had been adamant that George was not violent. He had never been violent.

Over the next weeks, whenever Hope visited, she collected some of Frida’s clothes and her personal effects, taking them home with her, preparing a suitcase for the trip. She purchased a flight to Ottawa, using her own money. She called Irmie in Ottawa and said that Frida was planning to leave George. The date was set. Frida would be arriving in Ottawa on an afternoon flight.

“Are you sure this is what she wants?” Irmie asked. “I mean, it’s about time, but I can’t quite believe it. My mother has never chosen for herself. It’s always about Dad.”