The Equations of Love (24 page)

“I’m going,” she said, and turned.

“Hey! Are you crazy! You get up here! I’m not going to drive back and leave you walking. Have my wife hearing crazy talk! Like hell … Why,” he stammered, roused and resentful, “what’d you take me for, acting like that?”

“I want to walk by myself a little ways,” said Lilly piteously. “I want to walk a little ways and you come along and stop and I’ll get in. Honest I will.”

“O-
kay
,” he growled. He lit a cigarette, collected himself a little and looked out furiously over the dreaming landscape which he no longer saw.

Lilly walked on, hurrying away. She stumbled as she hurried. Oh, Baby, Baby, it’d be the finish of you. Nothing
stops right there. Everything goes on. She was still trembling and was still afraid of herself. She heard at last the truck, coming up behind her and stood aside humbly, waiting. She got in with something that seemed like composure, and Paddy drove on in angry silence.

Often, now, Lilly cried out in her sleep. One night she called “Police, police!” as she had cried out so long ago. Eleanor, beside her, half awakened from deep sleep, said drowsily “Mummy, what is it … you said police …”

“Nothing, Baby,” said her mother in the dark as to a little girl. She overflowed with a sad compassion both blind and dumb for Eleanor and for herself and then, as with discovery and a melancholy surprise, for anyone anywhere who might suffer or be lonely as she was lonely. “I guess it was a bad dream. Go to sleep, honey.”

“All right … just a bad dream …” and Eleanor trailed off into sleep again. They were so close, yet an invisible world lay between them. Lilly, half rising and turning, put out her hand and gently felt the girl’s mop of feathery curls. And my girl doesn’t even know enough about the world to be scared of it, she thought, and she took comfort from this.

It was some time before the Matron noticed that her housekeeper and the handy man seemed, actually, to dislike each other. Strange I never noticed before, she thought, but she said nothing.

Lilly’s poor love affair, like a sickness, passed, and was over.

E
leanor was a little thing, slim and brown. Lilly did not know that her daughter’s face was enchanting. With her Martha-like care she gave Eleanor always a quick glance to see if her face were clean, if she had been putting powder on again, if the upspringing short brown curls were combed, brushed and shining, if her hands and nails were well-kept, if her dress and shoes were neat and in order.

“Other girls can paint up their nails if they like, but not you. When you’re grown and earning you do what you like I guess but not now. While you’re a girl all you got to do is to keep yourself neat and clean … no … not even for the party you can’t.”

There was a potential maturity in the girl that Lilly would never know. When that maturity would arrive, Lilly would only dimly discern it. The little girl who accepted her mother as embodied authority and love, grew into the girl who knew that her mother was limited and fallible. Lilly could not keep pace with her child, nor enter into her child’s world.

“Mummy, see the smoke curling up the hillside and all those white dogwoods against the dark green fir trees! Dogwood
looks prettier against forest than by itself doesn’t it. O Mummy, what a heavenly heavenly day!”

“Yes. I guess I better get your winter coat on the line and put it away. There’s no room for spare coats in that cupboard if they’re not being used.”

And, “Listen to this, Mummy, it’s when Mr. Collins proposed to Elizabeth!
How
did Jane Austen make it so serious and so funny!”

“I haven’t got time, not now. And you be careful of that book, if it’s Matron’s.”

And, “Oh, I wish I could learn the piano! Mrs. Sample said I could practise on theirs!”

“Well, some things you can do, and some things you can’t, and we can’t be beholden to Samples like that. And any ways, I don’t want Bobby Sample walking home with you every afternoon when you’ve been playing on the piano.”

“Oh, Mummy, Bobby’s
lovely!
”

“So you say.”

Eleanor’s sense of the ridiculous would send her flying into the cottage with her eyes shining, to tell her mother of some funny encounter.

“Well, I guess it was pretty impertinent all right.”

“But don’t you
see
, Mummy, don’t you
see
, when he said Mrs. Sample was as common as an old shoe,
he
meant it for a compliment!”

“Funny kind of compliment.”

Eleanor grew to reserve her fun and laughter for herself, or for the Matron or for her friends the Samples, and her love of beauty too, and her quickly spoken hopes and wishes. She was aware as time went on, without defining anything to herself, that her mother had little sense of humour and little of
beauty. There is a wild disorder of nature which is beauty. Eleanor could see it and feel it and Lilly could not feel it at all. Eleanor did not often think of the time before they came to the Valley, but sometimes she was led to remember the sand spit at Comox, with the wind blowing over, and the little headstones, and the bending grasses; she remembered the boat on a blue sea as still as glass, or tossing on grey white curling water, and she wanted to see the ocean again; she remembered a great cat in the sunlight in an open glade, and its green lambent eyes; she remembered the elegance of a china horse and a china dog; she remembered vaguely stories told and books read aloud by Mrs. Butler, some she had understood, some she had not understood, but she had listened. Mrs. Butler had taught her poetry which meant nothing at all to her but she learned the succession of words and it pleased Mrs. Butler. And now, only the other day, some of these words sprang to life, and she knew with pleasure of her very own discovery what the
Psalm of Life
meant, which had been but dead words. Her mind was opening.

A time came when Eleanor began to show some increasing top-lofty young impatience with her mother. The Matron, loving the girl, noticed. I must speak to her, she thought … no one else will. I must.

She walked one evening slowly along the road’s side with Eleanor. There was a remainder of yellow light still in the lower sky. Bats had begun to fly. Sometimes the headlights of a car approached. The car rushed past them, and lights and sound disappeared and all was still again. I must be careful, the Matron told herself, youth is easily stampeded. Eleanor thought She’s going to say something to me … I know it … how tactful she can be … and how easy it is to see her getting tactful! … Her defences were up.

“Your mother’s a very wonderful woman,” said the Matron at last. Eleanor did not reply. Meddle meddle. One should have the wisdom of God, the Matron thought. I must tread delicately. She went on.

“It’s struck me sometimes that now you’re regarding your mother not for the things she is, but for the things she isn’t … and you can’t change grown-up people, Eleanor. You know her history …” she paused “don’t you …?”

“Yes,” said Eleanor, and of course she did not.

“If your father had lived,” said the Matron in a very low voice (they followed slowly the dim curve of the hedge on the side of the road), “your mother – who was just a country-bred girl – would have had all the advantages of life with an educated man … like he was … and she was deprived of it all … and she so young … not many years older than you are … now …”

“Yes … yes …” said Eleanor. The girl’s world was dim and mysterious without and within.

The Matron had not tried to take the girl’s arm and ingratiate herself by physical contact but walked with her arms folded. “I’ve thought of your mother,” she continued as they went slowly along the road, “poor, yes, very poor, Eleanor, and ignorant – yes, you know it and I know it – fresh from the country, knowing nothing of the world, and friendless, with herself to support, and a small baby that was you, and no chance to think of herself and only her own health and courage to support you both … I’ve seen girls like that go out of the hospital, but they have friends … Forgive me, darling,” and here she took the girl’s arm and clasped her hand. The girl gave a sigh. “… Don’t mind that I said this, Eleanor, will you, but … well, your mother’s a puritan” (oh Yow oh Ranny) “and you’re a romantic – you don’t know half
what a romantic you are, my dear … so you have the imagination to see it all and understand more easily than she can … let’s cross over and turn back,” the night was darker now, “and I’ll tell you the word I’ve had from Vancouver. They’ll take you in the next nursing class but one.” But Eleanor did not seem to hear.

“Oh, Matron, Matron, I’m a beast,” she murmured.

“No, not a beast,” smiled the Matron in the dark, “just a little big for the boots …”

Eleanor crossed the hospital yard, stood, and looked through the window at the familiar figure of her mother sitting by the fire as she so often did at the end of the day’s work and turning the pages of the newspaper. It was true, her mother was a puritan. And she, Eleanor, was secretly glad and a little proud that Matron had called her a romantic although there seemed to be some kind of warning there. A faint new illumination in the girl’s mind showed her mother to her not as an adult person, not wise like Matron, not light of touch like Mrs. Sample, not even as clever as Eleanor, but as a puritan girl, grown old. Eleanor felt more experienced than her mother, but not so good, nor so true, nor so strong, nor so unselfish. She went in.

“
Darling
… !” she said impetuously.

“Well, what?” said Lilly continuing to look at the New Westminster Sales advertisements.

“Just darling!” said Eleanor. She went down on her knees beside her mother and the firelight shone on her face.

Lilly turned from the newspaper. “Well, what is it?” she said.

Oh,
why
does she always have to be so matter of fact, thought the girl in irritation and something told her “Because she’s had to be. All these years she’s had to be.”

“Matron’s told me … They’re taking me at the Hospital!”

Lilly laid down the paper. “You glad?” she asked.

Eleanor nodded, her eyes shining. “Give me a kiss and tell me you’re glad too,” she demanded. “You’re awful stingy, aren’t you!”

Lilly smiled and embraced her daughter.

“We’ll have to see about your things,” she said.

“They love each other, this woman and this girl,” a wandering god would say passing near and stopping to look at these two clasped for a moment together, “and they are to part. Good. They will be much happier.”

I
n the second year of her hospital training in Vancouver, Eleanor wrote to tell her mother that she had become engaged to a young lawyer named Paul Lowry.

“Not finished her training!” exclaimed Lilly, at first displeased. Then she was glad. The letter telling of Eleanor’s engagement was almost perfunctory. She was struck silent by her love, and could not tell her mother about it. “I can’t tell you what I feel for Paul. You will know just a little by what you felt for my father. We are almost frighteningly happy.”

“Well …” said Lilly, looking at the letter. She read further. I’m glad his folks live in Montreal, she thought, and she felt some apprehension of this Paul.

Paul Lowry heard, little by little, about Eleanor’s handsome young father, who married a poor girl, broke with his family, went ranching, and was killed by a stallion before Eleanor was born. He heard of her mother’s courage, and how her mother – a country girl – had withdrawn farther and farther into herself. She could have married again, but she had been too devoted to the memory of Eleanor’s father.
She could hardly bring herself to speak his name. “She’s a very calm person. She won’t kiss you or goozle at you, Paul.”

“Thank God for that,” said Paul looking down at Eleanor, caring nothing for her relatives and all for her, as they sat side by side in the train, travelling up the Valley, wrapped in no ordinary magic. Nevertheless he prepared himself to see this consecrated woman and met with surprise the colourless dowdy and slender Lilly. His picture dissolved and then assembled itself again. Lilly was undecipherable. Out of her shyness and inexperience she saw him as in another place with which she was not familiar, and she stiffened in self-protection. Paul dismissed quickly his first disappointment in the mother of the incomparable Eleanor. A country girl … what she has done … what she has been through, all alone, he thought, reproaching himself. He smiled at her in his disarming way and Lilly warmed to him, but carefully.

She kissed Eleanor without demonstration, shook hands with Paul and said “I’m sure I’m pleased to meet you.” Looking at him she meditated rather grimly He’s got class. Eleanor’ll have class married to him. Mrs. Paul Lowry! I’m certainly glad his folks don’t live too handy. And she said “Come in to tea.”

Lilly seemed placid, but Paul thought that this was a woman who contained herself and was in charge of her feelings. When she took them to the small hospital to introduce Paul to the Matron and to a doctor who happened to be there, he saw her manner of deference and yet of authority. Plainly she was a person in her own right. Paul corrected a little his first impression of Mrs. Walter Hughes. In any case she was Eleanor’s mother and a woman to be respected, but it was clear that Eleanor must be her father’s child.

Today Eleanor made a present of her happiness to everyone. She was proud of her mother to Paul and proud of Paul
to her mother. She embraced the Matron and the nurses. The doctor kissed her. Everyone was happy.

Lilly heard with disapproval that Paul called her daughter Nora. This she resented as a descent from the Eleanor which (for some reason that she could not for the moment remember) had always seemed to her the highest honour that it had been in her slight power to bestow. And here was this composed young man with the grey eyes under tilted eyebrows, and the unwilling yet attractive smile, reducing the dignity of the name to an ordinary Nora. She would say nothing, but she did not like it.

“That’s a good-looking young man,” said the Matron after they had gone. “He’s clever, too, I should say. He’ll go far. You’re going to have a very distinguished son-in-law some day.”