Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Part 12

What had happened with him and Alfrida might have been simply one of the changes, the wearing-out of old attachments, that I understood so well in my own life but did not expect to happen in the lives of older people-particularly, as I would have said, in the lives of people at home.

My stepmother died just a little while before my father. After their short, happy marriage they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners. Before either of those deaths Alfrida had moved back to the city. She didn't sell the house, she just went away and left it. My father wrote to me, "That's a pretty funny way of doing things."

There were a lot of people at my father's funeral, a lot of people I didn't know. A woman came across the gra.s.s in the cemetery to speak to me-I thought at first she must be a friend of my stepmother's. Then I saw that the woman was only a few years past my own age. The stocky figure and crown of gray-blond curls and floral-patterned jacket made her look older.

"I recognized you by your picture," she said. "Alfrida used to always be bragging about you."

I said, "Alfrida's not dead?"

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"Oh, no," the woman said, and went on to tell me that Alfrida was in a nursing home in a town just north of Toronto.

"I moved her down there so's I could keep an eye on her."

Now it was easy to tell-even by her voice-that she was somebody of my own generation, and it came to me that she must be one of the other family, a half sister of Alfrida's, born when Alfrida was almost grown up.

She told me her name, and it was of course not the same as Alfrida's-she must have married. And I couldn't recall Alfrida's ever mentioning any of her half family by their first names.

I asked how Alfrida was, and the woman said her own eyesight was so bad that she was legally blind. And she had a serious kidney problem, which meant that she had to be on dialysis twice a week.

"Other than that-?" she said, and laughed. I thought, yes, a sister, because I could hear something of Alfrida in that reckless, tossed laugh.

"So she doesn't travel too good," she said. "Or else I would've brought her. She still gets the paper from here and I read it to her sometimes. That's where I saw about your dad."

I wondered out loud, impulsively, if I should go to visit, at the nursing home. The emotions of the funeral-all the warm and relieved and reconciled feelings opened up in me by the death of my father at a reasonable age-prompted this suggestion. It would have been hard to carry out. My husband-my second husband-and I had only two days here before we were flying to Europe on an already delayed holiday.

"I don't know if you'd get so much out of it," the woman said. "She has her good days. Then she has her bad days. You never know. Sometimes I think she 's putting it on. Like, she 'll sit there all day and whatever anybody says to her, she 'll just say the same thing. Fit as a fiddle and ready for love. That's what she 'll say all day long. Fit-as-a-fiddle-and-ready-for-love. She 'll drive you crazy. Then other days she can answer all right."

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Again, her voice and laugh-this time half submerged- reminded me of Alfrida, and I said, "You know I must have met you, I remember once when Alfrida's stepmother and her father dropped in, or maybe it was only her father and some of the children-"

"Oh, that's not who I am," the woman said. "You thought I was Alfrida's sister? Glory. I must be looking my age."

I started to say that I could not see her very well, and it was true. In October the afternoon sun was low, and it was coming straight into my eyes. The woman was standing against the light, so that it was hard to make out her features or her expression.

She twitched her shoulders nervously and importantly. She said, "Alfrida was my birth mom."

Mawm. Mother.

Then she told me, at not too great length, the story that she must have told often, because it was about an emphatic event in her life and an adventure she had embarked on alone. She had been adopted by a family in eastern Ontario; they were the only family she had ever known ("and I love them dearly"), and she had married and had her children, who were grown up before she got the urge to find out who her own mother was. It wasn't too easy, because of the way records used to be kept, and the secrecy ("It was kept one hundred percent secret that she had me"), but a few years ago she had tracked down Alfrida.

"Just in time too," she said. "I mean, it was time somebody came along to look after her. As much as I can."

I said, "I never knew."

"No. Those days, I don't suppose too many did. They warn you, when you start out to do this, it could be a shock when you show up. Older people, it's still heavy-duty. However. I don't think she minded. Earlier on, maybe she would have."

There was some sense of triumph about her, which wasn't hard to understand. If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you've told it, and it has done so, there has - 115*

to be a balmy moment of power. In this case it was so complete that she felt a need to apologize.

"Excuse me talking all about myself and not saying how sorry I am about your dad."

I thanked her.

"You know Alfrida told me that your dad and her were walking home from school one day, this was in high school.

They couldn't walk all the way together because, you know, in those days, a boy and a girl, they would just get teased something terrible. So if he got out first he 'd wait just where their road went off the main road, outside of town, and if she got out first she would do the same, wait for him. And one day they were walking together and they heard all the bells starting to ring and you know what that was? It was the end of the First World War."

I said that I had heard that story too.

"Only I thought they were just children."

"Then how could they be coming home from high school, if they were just children?"

I said that I had thought they were out playing in the fields.

"They had my father's dog with them. He was called Mack."

"Maybe they had the dog all right. Maybe he came to meet them. I wouldn't think she 'd get mixed up on what she was telling me. She was pretty good on remembering anything involved your dad."

Now I was aware of two things. First, that my father was born in 1902, and that Alfrida was close to the same age. So it was much more likely that they were walking home from high school than that they were playing in the fields, and it was odd that I had never thought of that before. Maybe they had said they were in the fields, that is, walking home across the fields. Maybe they had never said "playing."

Also, that the feeling of apology or friendliness, the harmless-ness that I had felt in this woman a little while before, was not there now.

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I said, "Things get changed around."

"That's right," the woman said. "People change things around. You want to know what Alfrida said about you?"

Now. I knew it was coming now.

"What?"

"She said you were smart, but you weren't ever quite as smart as you thought you were."

I made myself keep looking into the dark face against the light.

Smart, too smart, not smart enough.

I said, "Is that all?"

"She said you were kind of a cold fish. That's her talking, not me. I haven't got anything against you."

That Sunday, after the noon dinner at Alfrida's, I set out to walk all the way back to my rooming house. If I walked both ways, I reckoned that I would have covered about ten miles, which ought to offset the effects of the meal I had eaten. I felt overfull, not just of food but of everything that I had seen and sensed in the apartment. The crowded, old-fashioned furnishings. Bill's silences. Alfrida's love, stubborn as sludge, and inappropriate, and hopeless-as far as I could see-on the grounds of age alone.

After I had walked for a while, my stomach did not feel so heavy. I made a vow not to eat anything for the next twenty-four hours. I walked north and west, north and west, on the streets of the tidily rectangular small city. On a Sunday afternoon there was hardly any traffic, except on the main thoroughfares.

Sometimes my route coincided with a bus route for a few blocks.

A bus might go by with only two or three people in it. People I did not know and who did not know me. What a blessing.

I had lied, I was not meeting any friends. My friends had mostly all gone home to wherever they lived. My fiance would be away until the next day-he was visiting his parents, in - 117*

Cobourg, on the way home from Ottawa. There would be n.o.body in the rooming house when I got there-n.o.body I had to bother talking to or listening to. I had nothing to do.

When I had walked for over an hour, I saw a drugstore that was open. I went in and had a cup of coffee. The coffee was reheated, black and bitter-its taste was medicinal, exactly what I needed. I was already feeling relieved, and now I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late-afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows. To hear from the back of the shop the sounds of the ball game that the man who had served me was listening to on the radio. I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida-not of that in particular- but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows.

Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman a.s.sent and lamentation.

This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.

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Comfort Nina had been playing tennis in the late afternoon, on the high-school courts. After Lewis had left his job at the school she had boycotted the courts for a while, but that was nearly a year ago, and her friend Margaret-another retired teacher, whose departure had been routine and ceremonious, unlike Lewis's- had talked her into playing there again.

"Better get out a bit while you still can."

Margaret had already been gone when Lewis's trouble occurred. She had written a letter from Scotland in support of him. But she was a person of such wide sympathies, such open understanding and far-reaching friendships, that the letter perhaps did not carry much weight. More of Margaret's good-heartedness.

"How is Lewis?" she said, when Nina drove her home that afternoon.

Nina said, "Coasting."

The sun had already dropped nearly to the rim of the lake.

Some trees that still held their leaves were flares of gold, but the summer warmth of the afternoon had been s.n.a.t.c.hed away. The shrubs in front of Margaret's house were all bundled up in sacking like mummies.

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This moment of the day made Nina think of the walks she and Lewis used to take after school and before supper. Short walks, of necessity as the days got dark, along out-of-town lanes and old railway embankments. But crowded with all that specific observation, spoken or not spoken, that she had learned or absorbed from Lewis. Bugs, grubs, snails, mosses, reeds in the ditch and s.h.a.ggy-manes in the gra.s.s, animal tracks, nannyberries, cranberries-a deep mix stirred up a little differently every day. And every day a new step towards winter, an increased frugality, a withering.

The house Nina and Lewis lived in had been built in the 1840s, close up to the sidewalk in the style of that time. If you were in the living room or dining room you could hear not only footsteps but conversations outside. Nina expected that Lewis would have heard the car door close.

She entered whistling, as well as she could. See the conquering hero comes.

"I won. I won. h.e.l.lo?"

But while she was out, Lewis had been dying. In fact, he had been killing himself. On the bedside table lay four little plastic packets, backed with foil. Each had contained two potent painkillers. Two extra packets lay beside these, inviolate, the white capsules still plumping up the plastic cover. When Nina picked these up, later, she would see that one of them had a mark on the foil, as if he had started to dig in, with a fingernail, then had given up as if he 'd decided he had already had enough, or had at that moment been drawn into unconsciousness.

His drinking gla.s.s was nearly empty. No water spilled.

This was a thing they had talked about. The plan had been agreed to, but always as a thing that could happen-would happen-in the future. Nina had a.s.sumed that she would be present and that there would be some ceremonial recognition.

Music. The pillows arranged and a chair drawn up so that she - 120*

could hold his hand. Two things she had not thought of-his extreme dislike of ceremony of any sort, and the burden such partic.i.p.ation would put on her. The questions asked, the opinions pa.s.sed, her jeopardy as a party to the act.

In doing it this way he had given her as little as possible that was worth covering up.

She looked for a note. What did she think it would say? She didn't need instructions. She certainly did not need an explanation, let alone an apology. There was nothing a note could tell her that she didn't know already. Even the question, Why so soon? was one she could figure out the answer for by herself. They had talked-or he had-about the threshold of intolerable helplessness or pain or self-disgust, and how it was important to recognize that threshold, not slide over it. Sooner, rather than later.

Just the same, it seemed impossible that he would not still have something to say to her. She looked first on the floor, thinking that he might have swiped the paper off the bedside table with his pajama sleeve when he set the water gla.s.s down for the last time. Or he could have taken special care not to do that-she looked under the base of the lamp. Then in the drawer of the table. Then under, and in, his slippers. She picked up and shook loose the pages of the book he had lately been reading, a paleontology book about what she believed was called the Cambrian explosion of multi-celled life-forms.

Nothing there.

She began rifling through the bedclothes. She stripped off the duvet, then the top sheet. There he lay, in the dark-blue silk pajamas which she had bought for him a couple of weeks ago. He had complained of feeling cold-he who had never been cold in bed before-so she went out and bought the most expensive pajamas in the store. She bought them because silk was both light and warm, and because all the other pajamas she saw-with their stripes, and their whimsical or naughty messages-made her think of old men, or comic-strip husbands, defeated shufflers.

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These were almost the same color as the sheets, so that little of him was revealed to her. Feet, ankles, shins. Hands, wrists, neck, head. He lay on his side, facing away from her. Still intent on the note, she moved the pillow, dragged it roughly away from under his head.

No. No.

Shifted from pillow to mattress, the head made a certain sound, a sound that was heavier than she would have expected.

And it was that, as much as the blank expanse of the sheet, that seemed to be saying to her that the search was futile.

The pills would have put him to sleep, taken all his workings by stealth, so that there was no dead stare, no contortion. His mouth was slightly open, but dry. The last couple of months had altered him a great deal-it was really only now that she saw how much. When his eyes had been open, or even when he had been sleeping, some effort of his had kept up the illusion that the damage was temporary-that the face of a vigorous, always potentially aggressive sixty-two-year-old man was still there, under the folds of bluish skin, the stony vigilance of illness. It had never been bone structure that gave his face its fierce and lively character-it was all in the deep-set bright eyes and the twitchy mouth and the facility of expression, the fast-changing display of creases that effected his repertoire of mockery, disbelief, ironic patience, suffering disgust. A cla.s.sroom repertoire-and not always confined there.

No more. No more. Now within a couple of hours of death (for he must have got down to business as soon as she had left, not wanting to risk the job's not being finished when she returned), now it was plain that the wasting and crumbling had won out and his face was deeply shrunken. It was sealed, remote, aged and infantile-perhaps like the face of a baby born dead.

The disease had three styles of onset. One involved the hands and arms. The fingers grew numb and stupid, their clasp awkward and then impossible. Or it could be the legs that weakened first, and the feet that started stumbling, soon refusing - 122*

to lift themselves up steps or even over carpet edges. The third and probably the worst sort of attack was made on the throat and tongue. Swallowing became unreliable, fearful, a choking drama, and speech turned into a clotted flow of importunate syllables. It was the voluntary muscles that were affected, always, and at first that did indeed sound like a lesser evil. No misfirings in the heart or brain, no signals gone awry, no malicious rearrangements of the personality. Sight and hearing and taste and touch, and best of all intelligence, lively and strong as ever. The brain kept busy monitoring all the outlying shutdown, toting up the defaults and depletions. Wasn't that to be preferred?

Of course, Lewis had said. But only because of the chance it gives you, to take action.

His own problems had started with the muscles of his legs. He had enrolled in a Seniors Fitness cla.s.s (though he hated the idea) to see if strength could be bullied back into them. He thought it was working, for a week or two. But then came the lead feet, the shuffling and tripping, and before long, the diagnosis. As soon as they knew that much, they had talked about what would be done when the time came. Early in the summer, he was walking with two canes. By the end of summer he was not walking at all. But his hands could still turn the pages of a book and manage, with difficulty, a fork or spoon or pen. His speech seemed to Nina almost unaffected, though visitors had trouble with it. He had decided anyway that visitors should be banned. His diet had been changed, to make swallowing easier, and sometimes days pa.s.sed without any difficulty of that kind.

Nina had made inquiries about a wheelchair. He had not opposed this. They no longer talked about what they called the Big Shutdown. She had even wondered if they-or he-might be entering a phase she had read about, a change that came on people sometimes in the middle of a fatal illness. A measure of optimism struggling to the fore, not because it was warranted, but because the whole experience had become a reality and not - 123*

an abstraction, the ways of coping had become permanent, not a nuisance.

The end is not yet. Live for the present. Seize the day.

That kind of development seemed out of character for Lewis.

Nina would not have thought him capable of even the most useful self-deception. But she could never have imagined him overtaken by physical collapse, either. And now that one unlikely thing had happened, couldn't others? Was it not possible that the changes that happened with other people might occur with him too? The secret hopes, the turning aside, the sly bargains?

No.

She picked up the bedside phone book and looked for "Undertakers," which was a word that of course did not occur.

"Funeral Directors." The exasperation she felt at that was of the sort she usually shared with him. Undertakers, for G.o.d's sake, what's wrong with undertakers? She turned to him and saw how she had left him, helplessly uncovered. Before she rang the number she got the sheet and the duvet back on.