The Progress of Love (34 page)

Instead she called back to him, “Dane! Dane, I wasn’t expecting you! Come and have coffee with us!”

She introduced him to the two people in the kitchen, a man and wife. The Tebbutts. The man was standing by the counter and the woman was sitting in the breakfast nook. Dane knew the man by sight. Wyck Tebbutt, who sold insurance. He was supposed to have been a professional baseball player, but that would have been a long time ago. He was a trim, small, courteous man, always rather nattily dressed, with a deft athlete’s modest confidence.

Violet didn’t ask Dane anything about his exam, but went on fussing about getting the coffee ready. First she got out breakfast cups, then rejected them and got down her good china. She spread a cloth on the breakfast-nook table. There was a faint scorch mark on it from the iron.

“Well, I’m mortified!” said Violet laughing.

Wyck Tebbutt laughed, too. “So you should be, so you should be!” he said.

Violet’s nervous laugh, and her ignoring him, displeased Dane considerably. She had been in town for several years now, and she had made several changes in herself, which he seemed to be just now noticing all together. Her hair was not done up in a roll anymore; it was short and curled. And its dark-brown color was not the same as it used to be. Now it had a rich, dull look, like chocolate fudge. Her lipstick was too heavy, too bright a red, and the grain of her skin had coarsened. Also, she had put on a lot of weight, especially around the hips. The harmony of her figure was spoiled—it almost looked as if she was wearing some kind of cage or contraption under her skirt.

As soon as his coffee was poured, Wyck Tebbutt said that he would just take his cup down into the yard, because he wanted to see how those new rosebushes were getting on.

“Oh, I think they’ve got some kind of a bug!” said Violet, as if the fact delighted her. “I’m afraid they have, Wyck!”

All this time, the wife was talking, and she went right on, hardly noticing that her husband had left. She talked to Violet and even to Dane, but she was really just talking into the air. She talked about her appointments with the doctor, and the chiropractor. She said that she had a headache that was like red-hot irons being clamped on her temples. And she had another kind of shooting pain down the side of her neck that was like hundreds of needles being driven into her flesh. She wouldn’t allow a break; she was like a helpless little talking machine set up in a corner of the breakfast nook, her large sad eyes going blank as soon as they fixed on you.

This was the sort of person, this was the sort of talk, that Violet was so good at imitating.

And now she was deferring. She was listening, or pretending to listen, to this woman with an interest the woman didn’t even notice or need. Was it because the husband had walked out? Was Violet feeling a concern about his rudeness to his wife? She did keep glancing down into the back yard.

“I just have to see what Wyck thinks about that bug,” she
said, and she was off, down the back steps, at what seemed like a heavy and undignified trot.

“All they are interested in is their money,” the wife said.

Dane got up to get himself more coffee. He stood at the stove and lifted the coffeepot inquiringly while she talked.

“I shouldn’t have drunk the amount I already have,” she said. “Ninety percent of my stomach is scar tissue.”

Dane looked down at her husband and Violet, who were leaning together over the young rosebushes. No doubt they were talking about the roses, and bugs, and bug killer and blight. Nothing so crude as a touch would occur. Wyck, holding his coffee cup, delicately lifted one leaf, then another, with his foot. Violet’s look travelled down obediently to the leaf held against his polished shoe.

It would be wrong to say that Dane understood anything right then. But he forgot the woman who was talking and the coffeepot he was holding. He felt a secret, a breath of others’ intimacy. Something he didn’t want to know about, but would have to.

Not so long afterward, he was with his father on the street, and he saw Wyck coming toward them. His father said, “Hello, Wyck,” in a certain calm, respectful voice men use to greet other men they don’t know—or perhaps don’t want to know—too well. Dane had veered off to look into the hardware store window.

“Don’t you know Wyck Tebbutt?” his father said. “I thought you might’ve run into him at Violet’s.”

Then Dane felt it again—the breath he hated. He hated it more now, because it was all around him. It was all around him if even his father knew.

He didn’t want to understand the extent of Violet’s treachery. He already knew that he would never forgive her.

Now Dane is a broad-shouldered ruddy man with the worn outlines of a teddy bear and a beard that is almost entirely gray. He has grown to look more and more like his mother. He is an architect. He went away from home to college, and for a long time he lived and worked in other places, but he came back several years ago, and is kept busy now restoring the churches and town halls and
business blocks and houses that were considered eyesores at the time he left. He lives in the house he grew up in, the house his father was born and died in, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old stone house that he and Theo have gradually brought back to something like its original style.

He lives with Theo, who is a social worker.

When Dane first told Wyck and Violet (he has forgiven her—them—long ago) that somebody named Theo was moving in with him, Wyck said, “I take that to mean you finally turned up a serious girlfriend.”

Violet didn’t say anything.

“A man friend,” Dane said gently. “It isn’t easy to tell, from the name.”

“Well. That’s him’s and your business,” Wyck said affably. The only sign he gave that he might be shaken was in saying “him’s” and not noticing.

“Theo. Yes,” said Violet. “That is hard to tell.”

This was in the little two-bedroom house on the edge of town that Violet moved to after she retired from the phone company. Wyck had moved in with her after his wife died and they were able to marry. The house was one of a row of very similar houses strung out along a country road in front of a cornfield. Wyck’s things were moved in on top of Violet’s, and the low-ceilinged rooms seemed crowded, the arrangement temporary and haphazard. The moss-green sofa looked bulky and old-fashioned under an afghan made by Wyck’s wife. A large black velvet painting, belonging to Wyck, took up most of one living-room wall. It depicted a bull and a bullfighter. Wyck’s old sporting trophies and the silver tray presented to him by the insurance company sat on the mantel beside Violet’s old shell and tippling Scotsman.

All those old dust catchers, Violet calls them.

But she kept Wyck’s things there even after Wyck himself was gone. He died during the Grey Cap game, at the end of November. Violet phoned Dane, who listened to her at first with his eyes on the television screen.

“I went down to the church,” Violet said. “I took some things down for the rummage sale, and then I went and got us a bottle of whiskey, and when I got back, as soon as I opened the door, I said, ‘Wyck,’ and he didn’t answer. I saw the back of his head in a funny position. It was bent towards the arm of his chair. I went around in front of him and turned off the television.”

“What do you mean?” said Dane. “Aunt Violet? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, he’s dead,” said Violet, as if Dane had been questioning it. “He would have to be dead to let me turn off the football game.” She spoke in a loud, emphatic voice with an unnatural joviality—as if she was covering up some embarrassment.

When he drove into town, he found her sitting on the front step.

“I’m a fool,” she said. “I can’t go inside. What an idiot I am, Dane.” Her voice was still jarring, loud and bright.

Theo said later that many old people were like that when someone close to them died. “They get past grief,” he said. “Or it’s a different kind.”

All winter, Violet seemed to be all right, driving her car when the weather permitted, going to church, going to the senior citizens’ club to play cards. Then, just when the hot months were starting and you’d think she would most enjoy getting out, she announced to Dane that she didn’t intend to drive anymore.

He thought the trouble might be with her eyesight. He suggested an appointment to see if she needed stronger glasses.

“I see well enough,” she said. “My trouble is not being sure of what I see.”

What did she mean by that?

“I see things I know aren’t there.”

How did she know they were not there?

“Because I still have enough sense that I can tell. My brain gets the message through and tells me that’s ridiculous. But what if it doesn’t get through all the time? How am I going to know? I can get my groceries delivered. Most old people get their groceries delivered. I am an old person. They are not going to miss me that much at the A.&P.”

But Dane knew how much she enjoyed going to the A.&P., and he thought that he or Theo would have to try to get her there once a week. That was where she got the special strong coffee that Wyck had drunk, and she usually liked to look at the smoked meats and back bacon—both favorite things of Wyck’s—though she seldom bought any.

“For instance,” said Violet. “The other morning, I saw King Billy.”

“You saw my granddaddy?” Dane said, laughing. “Well. How was he?”

“I saw King Billy the horse,” said Violet shortly. “I came out of my room and there he was poking his head in at the dining-room window.”

She said she had known him right away. His familiar, foolish, dapple-gray head. She told him to go on, get out of there, and he lifted his head over the sill and moved off in a leisurely kind of way. Violet went on into the kitchen to start her breakfast, and then several things occurred to her.

King Billy the horse had been dead for about sixty-five years.

That couldn’t have been the milkman’s horse, either, because milkmen hadn’t driven horses since around 1950. They drove trucks.

No. They didn’t drive anything, because milk was not delivered anymore. It didn’t even come in bottles. You picked it up at the store in cartons or in plastic bags.

There was glass in the dining-room window that had not been broken.

“I was never especially fond of that horse, either,” said Violet. “I was never
un-fond
of it, but if I had my choice of anything or anyone I wanted to see that’s gone, it wouldn’t be that horse.”

“What would it be?” said Dane, trying to keep the conversation on a light level, though he wasn’t at all happy about what he heard. “What would be your choice?”

But Violet made an unpleasant sound—a balky sort of grunt,
annhh
—as if his question angered and exasperated her. A look of deliberate, even ill-natured stupidity—the visual equivalent of that grunt—passed over her face.

It happened that a few nights later Dane was watching a television
program about people in South America—mostly women—who believe themselves to be invaded and possessed, from time to time and in special circumstances, by spirits. The look on their faces reminded him of that look on Violet’s. The difference was that they courted this possession, and he was sure Violet didn’t. Nothing in her wanted to be overtaken by a helpless and distracted, dull and stubborn old woman, with a memory or imagination out of control, bulging at random through the present scene. Trying to keep that old woman in check was bound to make her short-tempered. In fact, he had seen her—now he remembered, he had seen her tilt her head to the side and give it a quick slap, as people do to get rid of a buzzing, unwelcome presence.

A week or so further into the summer, she phoned him. “Dane. Did I tell you about this pair I see, going by my house?”

“Pair of what, Aunt Violet?”

“Girls. I think so. Boys don’t have long hair anymore, do they? They’re dressed in army clothes, it looks like, but I don’t know whether that means anything. One is short and one is tall. I see them go by this house and look at it. They walk out the road and back.”

“Maybe they’re collecting bottles. People do.”

“They don’t have anything to put bottles in. It’s this house. They have some interest in it.”

“Aunt Violet? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I know, I ask myself, too. But they’re not anybody I’ve ever known. They’re not anybody I know that’s dead. That’s something.”

He thought he should get around to see her, find out what was going on. But before he got there, she phoned again.

“Dane. I just wanted to tell you. About those girls I noticed walking by the house. They are girls. They’re just dressed up in army outfits. They came and knocked on my door. They said they were looking for a Violet Thoms. I said there was no such person living here, and they looked very downcast. Then I said there was a Violet Tebbutt, and would she do?”

She seemed in high spirits. Dane was busy; he had a meeting
with some town councillors in half an hour. He also had a toothache. But he said, “You were right, then. So who are they?”

“That’s the surprise,” said Violet. “They are not just any girls. One of them is your cousin. I mean, the daughter of your cousin. Donna Collard’s daughter. Do you know who I’m talking about? Your cousin Donna Collard? Her married name is McNie.”

“No,” said Dane.

“Your Aunt Bonnie Hope, out in Edmonton, she was married to a man named Collard, Roy Collard, and she had three daughters. Elinor and Ruth and Donna. Now do you know who I mean?”

“I never met them,” he said.

“No. Well, Donna Collard married a McNie, I forget his first name, and they live in Prince George, British Columbia, and this is their daughter. Heather. This is their daughter Heather that has been walking past my house. The other girl is her friend. Gillian.”

Dane didn’t say anything for a minute, and Violet said, “Dane? I hope you don’t think that I’m confused about this?”

He laughed. He said, “I’ll have to come around and see them.”

“They are very polite and good-hearted,” said Violet, “in spite of how they might look.”

He was fairly sure that these girls were real, but everything was slightly out of focus to him at the time. (He had a low-grade fever, though he didn’t know it yet, and eventually would have to have a root-canal job done on his tooth.) He actually thought that he should ask around town to find out if anybody else had seen them. When he did get around to doing this, sometime later, he found out that a couple of girls of that description had been staying at the hotel, that they owned a beat-up blue Datsun but walked a lot, in town and out, and were generally thought to be woman’s libbers. People didn’t think much of their outfits, but they didn’t cause any trouble, except for getting into some sort of argument with the exotic dancer at the hotel.