The Love of a Good Woman (33 page)

It isn’t that they’ve abdicated or aren’t trying. But everything is complicated. They send out the laundry, which is sensible, rather than having Mrs. B. still do it, but then my father can’t remember which day it’s due back and there’s this unholy fuss about will there be enough smocks etc. And Mrs. B. actually believes the laundry is cheating her and taking the time to rip off the name tapes and sew them onto inferior articles. So she argues with the deliveryman and says he comes here last on purpose and he probably does.

Then the eaves need to be cleaned and Mrs. B.’s nephew is
supposed to come and clean them, but he has put his back out so his son is coming. But his son has had to take over so many jobs that he’s behind etc., etc.

My father calls this nephew’s son by the nephew’s name. He does this with everybody. He refers to stores and businesses in town by the name of the previous owner or even the owner before that. This is more than a simple lapse of memory; it’s something like arrogance. Putting himself beyond the need to keep such things straight. The need to notice changes. Or individuals.

I asked what color of paint he’d like on the waiting-room walls. Light green, I said, or light yellow? He said, Who’s going to paint them?

“I am.”

“I never knew you were a painter.”

“I’ve painted places I’ve lived in.”

“Maybe so. But I haven’t seen them. What are you going to do about my patients while you’re painting?”

“I’ll do it on a Sunday.”

“Some of them wouldn’t care for that when they heard about it.”

“Are you kidding? In this day and age?”

“It may not be quite the same day and age you think it is. Not around here.”

Then I said I could do it at night, but he said the smell the next day would upset too many stomachs. All I was allowed to do in the end was throw out the
Reader’s Digests
and put out some copies of
Maclean’s
and
Chatelaine
and
Time
and
Saturday Night.
And then he mentioned there’d been complaints. People missed looking up the jokes they remembered in the
Reader’s Digests.
And some of them didn’t like modern writers. Like Pierre Berton.

“Too bad,” I said, and I couldn’t believe that my voice was shaking.

Then I tackled the filing cabinet in the dining room. I thought it was probably full of the files of patients who were long dead and if I could clear those files out I could fill it up with the files from the cardboard boxes, and move the whole thing back to the office where it belonged.

Mrs. B. saw what I was doing and went and got my father. Not a word to me.

He said, “Who told you you could go poking around in there? I didn’t.”

R. The days you were here Mrs. B. was off for Christmas with her family. (She has a husband who has been sick with emphysema it seems for half his life, and no children, but a horde of nieces and nephews and connections.) I don’t think you saw her at all. But she saw you. She said to me yesterday, “Where’s that Mr. So-and-so you were supposed to be engaged to?” She’d seen of course that I wasn’t wearing my ring.

“I imagine in Toronto,” I said.

“I was up at my niece’s last Christmas and we seen you and him walking up by the standpipe and my niece said, ‘I wonder where them two are off to?’” This is exactly how she talks and it already sounds quite normal to me except when I write it down. I guess the implication is that we were going somewhere to carry on, but there was a deep freeze on, if you remember, and we were just walking to get away from the house. No. We were getting outside so we could continue our fight, which could only be bottled up for so long.

Mrs. B. started to work for my father about the same time I went away to school. Before that we had some young women I liked, but they left to get married, or to work in war plants. When I was nine or ten and had been to some of my school
friends’ houses, I said to my father, “Why does our maid have to eat with us? Other people’s maids don’t eat with them.”

My father said, “You call Mrs. Barrie Mrs. Barrie. And if you don’t like to eat with her you can go and eat in the woodshed.”

Then I took to hanging around and getting her to talk. Often she wouldn’t. But when she did, it could be rewarding. I had a fine time imitating her at school.

(Me) Your hair is really black, Mrs. Barrie.

(Mrs. B.) Everyone in my family is got black hair. They all got black hair and it never ever gets gray. That’s on my mother’s side. It stays black in their coffin. When my grandpa died they kept him in the place in the cemetery all winter while the ground was froze and come spring they was going to put him in the ground and one or other us says, “Let’s take a look see how he made it through the winter.” So we got the fellow to lift the lid and there he was looking fine with his face not dark or caved in or anything and his hair was black. Black.

I could even do the little laughs she does, little laughs or barks, not to indicate that anything is funny but as a kind of punctuation.

By the time I met you I’d got sick of myself doing this.

After Mrs. B. told me all that about her hair I met her one day coming out of the upstairs bathroom. She was hurrying to answer the phone, which I wasn’t allowed to answer. Her hair was bundled up in a towel and a dark trickle was running down the side of her face. A dark purplish trickle, and my thought was that she was bleeding.

As if her blood could be eccentric and dark with malevolence as her nature sometimes seemed to be.

“Your head’s bleeding,” I said, and she said, “Oh, get out of my road,” and scrambled past to get the phone. I went on into the bathroom and saw purple streaks in the basin and the hair dye on the shelf. Not a word was said about this, and she continued to talk
about how everybody on her mother’s side of the family had black hair in their coffins and she would, too.

M
Y
father had an odd way of noticing me in those years. He might be passing through a room where I was, and he’d say as if he hadn’t seen me there,

And sometimes he’d speak to me in a theatrically growly voice.

“Hello little girl. Would you like a piece of candy?”

I had learned to answer in a wheedling baby-girl voice. “Oh yes sir.”

“Wahl.” Some fancy drawing out of the a. “Wahl. You cahn’t have one.”

And:

“‘Solomon Grundy, born on Monday—’” He’d jab a finger at me to take it up.

“‘Christened on Tuesday—’”

“‘Married on Wednesday—’”

“‘Sick on Thursday—’”

“‘Worse on Friday—’”

“‘Died on Saturday—’”

“‘Buried on Sunday—’”

Then both together, thunderously. “‘And that was the end of Solomon Grundy!’”

Never any introduction, no comment when these passages were over. For a joke I tried calling him Solomon Grundy. The fourth or fifth time he said, “That’s enough. That’s not my name. I’m your father.”

After that we probably didn’t do the rhyme anymore.

The first time I met you on the campus, and you were alone and I was alone, you looked as if you remembered me but weren’t sure about acknowledging it. You had just taught that one class, filling in when our regular man was sick and you had to do the lecture on logical positivism. You joked about its being a funny thing to bring somebody over from the Theological College to do.

You seemed to hesitate about saying hello, so I said, “The former King of France is bald.”

That was the example you’d given us, of a statement that makes no sense because the subject doesn’t exist. But you gave me a truly startled and cornered look that you then covered up with a professional smile. What did you think of me?

A smart aleck.

R. My stomach is still a little puffy. There are no marks on it, but I can bunch it up in my hands. Otherwise I’m okay, my weight is back to normal or a little below. I think I look older, though. I think I look older than twenty-four. My hair is still long and unfashionable, in fact a mess. Is this a memorial to you because you never liked me to cut it? I wouldn’t know.

Anyway I’ve started going on long walks around town, for exercise. I used to go off in the summers, anywhere I liked. I hadn’t any sense of what rules there might be, or different grades of people. That could have been because of never going to school in town or because of our house being out of town here where it is, down the long lane. Not properly belonging. I went to the horse barns by the racetrack where the men were horse owners or paid horse trainers and the other kids were boys. I didn’t know any names, but they all knew mine. They had to put up with me, in other words, because of whose daughter I was. We were allowed
to put down feed and muck out behind the horses. It seemed adventurous. I wore an old golf hat of my father’s and a pair of baggy shorts. We’d get up on the roof and they’d grapple and try to push each other off but me they left alone. The men would periodically tell us to get lost. They’d say to me, “Does your dad know you’re here?” Then the boys started teasing each other and the one teased would make a puking noise and I knew it was about me. So I quit going. I gave up the idea of being a Girl of the Golden West. I went down to the dock and looked at the lake boats, but I don’t think I went so far as dreaming of being taken on as a deckhand. Also I didn’t fool them into thinking I was anything but a girl. A man leaned over and yelled down to me:

“Hey. You got any hair on it yet?”

I almost said, “Pardon?” I wasn’t frightened or humiliated so much as mystified. That a grown-up man with responsible work should be interested in the patchy itchy sprouting in between my legs. Should bother to be disgusted by it, as his voice surely indicated that he was.

The horse barns have been torn down. The road down to the harbor is not so steep. There is a new grain elevator. And new suburbs that could be suburbs anywhere, which is what everybody likes about them. Nobody walks now; everybody drives. The suburbs don’t have sidewalks, and the sidewalks along the old backstreets are unused and cracked and uptilted by frost and disappearing under earth and grass. The long dirt path under the pine trees along our lane is lost now under drifts of pine needles and rogue saplings and wild raspberry canes. People have walked up that path for decades to see the doctor. Out from town on a special short extension of sidewalk along the highway (the only other extension was to the cemetery) and then between the double row of pines on that side of the lane. Because there’s been a doctor living in this house since the end of the last century.

All sorts of noisy grubby patients, children and mothers and old people, all afternoon, and quieter patients coming singly in the evenings. I used to sit out where there was a pear tree trapped in a clump of lilac bushes, and I’d spy on them, because young girls like to spy. That whole clump is gone now, cleaned out to make things easier for Mrs. B.’s nephew’s son on the power mower. I used to spy on ladies who got dressed up, at that time, for a visit to the doctor. I remember the clothes from soon after the war. Long full skirts and cinch belts and puffed-up blouses and sometimes short white gloves, for gloves were worn then in summer and not just to church. Hats not just to church either. Pastel straw hats that framed the face. A dress with light summer flounces, a ruffle on the shoulders like a little cape, a sash like a ribbon round the waist. The cape-ruffle could lift in the breeze, and the lady would raise her hand in a crocheted glove to brush it away from her face. This gesture was like a symbol to me of unattainable feminine loveliness. The wisp of cobweb cloth against the perfect velvet mouth. Not having a mother may have had something to do with how I felt. But I didn’t know anybody who had a mother that looked the way they did. I’d crouch under the bushes eating the spotty yellow pears and worshipping.

One of our teachers had got us reading old ballads like “Patrick Spens” and “The Twa Corbies,” and there’d been a rash of ballad making at school.

Ballads really tumbled you along into rhymes before you had a chance to think what anything meant. So with my mouth full of mushy pear I made them up.

When the wasps started bothering me too much I went into the house. Mrs. Barrie would be in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio, until my father called her. She stayed till the last patient had left and the place had been tidied up. If there was a yelp from the office she might give her own little yelping laugh and say, “Go ahead and holler.” I never bothered describing to her the clothes or the looks of the women I’d seen because I knew she’d never admire anybody for being beautiful or well dressed. Any more than she’d admire them for knowing something nobody needed to know, like a foreign language. Good card players she admired, and fast knitters—that was about all. Many people she had no use for. My father said that too. He had no use. That made me want to ask, If they did have a use, what would the use be? But I knew neither one would tell me. Instead they’d tell me not to be so smart.

If I decided to send all this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It’s too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don’t know where, is worse.

•    •    •

D
EAR
R., Dear Robin, How do you think I didn’t know? It was right in front of my eyes all the time. If I had gone to school here, I’d surely have known. If I’d had friends. There’s no way one of the high-school girls, one of the older girls, wouldn’t have made sure I knew.