Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Part 19

"Mystery," he said. And again, "Well."

That was a word that I used to hear fairly often, said in that same tone of voice, when I was a child. A bridge between one thing and another, or a conclusion, or a way of saying something that couldn't be any more fully said, or thought.

"A well is a hole in the ground." That was the joking answer.

The storm had brought an end to the swimming-pool party. Too many people had been there for everybody to crowd into the house, and those with children had mostly chosen to go home.

While we were driving back, Mike and I had both noticed, and spoken about, a p.r.i.c.kling, an itch or burning, on our bare forearms, the backs of our hands, and around our ankles. Places that had not been protected by our clothing when we crouched in the weeds. I remembered the nettles.

Sitting in Sunny's farmhouse kitchen, wearing dry clothes, we told about our adventure and revealed our rashes.

Sunny knew what to do for us. Yesterday's trip with Claire, to the emergency room of the local hospital, had not been this family's first visit. On an earlier weekend the boys had gone down into the weedy mud-bottomed field behind the barn and come back covered with welts and blotches. The doctor said they must have got into some nettles. Must have been rolling in them, was what he said. Cold compresses were prescribed, an antihistamine lotion, and pills. There was still part of a bottle of lotion unused, and there were some pills too, because Mark and Gregory had recovered quickly.

We said no to the pills-our case seemed not serious enough.

Sunny said that she had talked to the woman out on the highway, who put gas in her car, and this woman had said there was a plant whose leaves made the best poultice you could have, for nettle rash. You don't need all them pills and junk, the woman said. The name of the plant was something like calf 's - 184*

foot. Coldfoot? The woman had told her she could find it in a certain road cut, by a bridge.

"I could go and ask her to tell me again, exactly. I could go and get some."

She was eager to do that, she liked the idea of a folklore remedy. We had to point out that the lotion was already there, and paid for.

Sunny enjoyed ministering to us. In fact, our plight put the whole family into a good humor, brought them out of the doldrums of the drenched day and cancelled plans. The fact that we had chosen to go off together and that we had this adventure-an adventure that left its evidence on our bodies- seemed to rouse in Sunny and Johnston a teasing excitement.

Droll looks from him, a bright solicitousness from her. If we had brought back evidence of real misdoing-welts on the b.u.t.tocks, red splashes on the thighs and belly-they would not of course have been so charmed and forgiving.

The children thought it was funny to see us sitting there with our feet in basins, our arms and hands clumsy with their wrappings of thick cloths. Claire especially was delighted with the sight of our naked, foolish, adult feet. Mike wriggled his long toes for her, and she broke into fits of alarmed giggles.

Well. It would be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn't. Love that was not usable, that knew its place. (Some would say not real, because it would never risk getting its neck wrung, or turning into a bad joke, or sadly wearing out.) Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal.

I never asked Sunny for news of him, or got any, during all the years of our dwindling friendship.

Those plants with the big pinkish-purple flowers are not nettles.

I have discovered that they are called joe-pye weed. The stinging - 185*

nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow.

- 186*

Post and Beam Lionel told them how his mother had died.

She had asked for her makeup. Lionel held the mirror.

"This will take about an hour," she said.

Foundation cream, face powder, eyebrow pencil, mascara, lip-liner, lipstick, blusher. She was slow and shaky, but it wasn't a bad job.

"That didn't take you an hour," Lionel said.

She said, no, she hadn't meant that.

She had meant, to die.

He had asked her if she wanted him to call his father. His father, her husband, her minister.

She said, What for.

She was only about five minutes out, in her prediction.

They were sitting behind the house-Lorna and Brendan's house-on a little terrace that looked across at Burrard Inlet and the lights of Point Grey. Brendan got up to move the sprinkler to another patch of gra.s.s.

Lorna had met Lionel's mother just a few months ago. A pretty little white-haired woman with a valiant charm, who had - 187*

come down to Vancouver from a town in the Rocky Mountains, to see the touring Comedie Francaise. Lionel had asked Lorna to go with them. After the performance, while Lionel was holding open her blue velvet cloak, the mother had said to Lorna, "I am so happy to meet my son's belle-amie. "

"Let us not overdo it with the French," said Lionel.

Lorna was not even sure what that meant. Belle-amie.

Beautiful friend? Mistress?

Lionel had raised his eyebrows at her, over his mother's head.

As if to say, whatever she 's come up with, it's no fault of mine.

Lionel had once been Brendan's student at the university. A raw prodigy, sixteen years old. The brightest mathematical mind Brendan had ever seen. Lorna wondered if Brendan was dramatizing this, in hindsight, because of his unusual generosity towards gifted students. Also because of the way things had turned out. Brendan had turned his back on the whole Irish package-his family and his Church and the sentimental songs-but he had a weakness for a tragic tale. And sure enough, after his blazing start, Lionel had suffered some sort of breakdown, had to be hospitalized, dropped out of sight. Until Brendan had met him in the supermarket and discovered that he was living within a mile of their house, here in North Vancouver.

He had given up mathematics entirely and worked in the publishing office of the Anglican Church.

"Come and see us," Brendan had said. Lionel looked a bit seedy to him, and lonely. "Come and meet my wife."

He was glad to have a home now, to ask people to.

"So I didn't know what you'd be like," Lionel said when he reported this to Lorna. "I considered you might be awful."

"Oh," said Lorna. "Why?"

"I don't know. Wives."

He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life-the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying about - 188*

on the gra.s.s, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic-all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel's tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face. There had to be a pause then, a shifting back to the level of worthwhile human contact. Once he sang very softly, to the tune of "O Tannenbaum," "O married life, o married life. " He smiled slightly, or Lorna thought he did, in the dark. This smile seemed to her like the smile of her four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, when she whispered some mildly outrageous observation to her mother in a public place. A secret little smile, gratified, somewhat alarmed.

Lionel rode up the hill on his high, old-fashioned bicycle- this at a time when hardly anybody but children rode bicycles.

He would not have changed out of his workday outfit. Dark trousers, a white shirt that always looked grubby and worn around the cuffs and collar, a nondescript tie. When they had gone to see the Comedie Francaise he had added to this a tweed jacket that was too wide across the shoulders and too short in the sleeves. Perhaps he did not own any other clothes.

"I labor for a pittance," he said. "And not even in the vineyards of the Lord. In the Diocese of the Archbishop."

And, "Sometimes I think I'm in a d.i.c.kens novel. And the funny thing is, I don't even go for d.i.c.kens."

He talked with his head on one side, usually, his gaze on something slightly beyond Lorna's head. His voice was light and quick, sometimes squeaky with a kind of nervous exhilaration.

He told everything in a slightly astonished way. He told about the office where he worked, in the building behind the Cathedral.

The small high Gothic windows and varnished woodwork (to give things a churchy feeling), the hat rack and umbrella stand (which for some reason filled him with deep melancholy), the typist, Janine, and the Editor of Church News, Mrs. Penfound.

The occasionally appearing, spectral, and distracted Archbishop.

There was an unresolved battle over teabags, between Janine, - 189*

who favored them, and Mrs. Penfound, who did not. Everybody munched on secret eats and never shared. With Janine it was caramels, and Lionel himself favored sugared almonds. What Mrs. Penfound's secret pleasure was he and Janine had not discovered, because Mrs. Penfound did not put the wrappers in the wastepaper basket. But her jaws were always surrept.i.tiously busy.

He mentioned the hospital where he had been a patient for a while and spoke of the ways it resembled the office, in regard to secret eats. Secrets generally. But the difference was that every once in a while in the hospital they came and bound you up and took you off and plugged you in, as he said, to the light socket.

"That was pretty interesting. In fact it was excruciating. But I can't describe it. That is the weird part. I can remember it but not describe it."

Because of those events in the hospital, he said, he was rather short of memories. Short of details. He liked to have Lorna tell him hers.

She told him about her life before she married Brendan.

About the two houses exactly alike, standing side by side in the town where she grew up. In front of them was a deep ditch called Dye Creek because it used to run water colored by the dye from the knitting factory. Behind them was a wild meadow where girls were not supposed to go. One house was where she lived with her father-in the other lived her grandmother and her Aunt Beatrice and her cousin Polly.

Polly had no father. That was what they said and what Lorna had once truly believed. Polly had no father, in the way that a Manx cat had no tail.

In the grandmother's front room was a map of the Holy Land, worked in many shades of wool, showing Biblical locations. It was left in her will to the United Church Sunday School. Aunt Beatrice had had no social life involving a man, since the time of her blotted-out disgrace, and she was so finicky, so desperate about the conduct of life that it really was easy to - 190*

think of Polly's conception as immaculate. The only thing that Lorna had ever learned from Aunt Beatrice was that you must always press a seam from the side, not wide open, so that the mark of the iron would not show, and that no sheer blouse should be worn without its slip to hide your bra.s.siere straps.

"Oh, yes. Yes," said Lionel. He stretched out his legs as if appreciation had reached his very toes. "Now Polly. Out of this benighted household, what is Polly like?"

Polly was fine, Lorna said. Full of energy and sociability, kind-hearted, confident.

"Oh," said Lionel. "Tell me again about the kitchen."

"Which kitchen?"

"The one without the canary."

"Ours." She described how she rubbed the kitchen range with waxed bread-wrappers to make it shine, the blackened shelves behind it that held the frying pans, the sink and the small mirror above it, with the triangular piece of gla.s.s gone from one corner, and the little tin trough beneath it-made by her father-in which there was always a comb, an old cup-handle, a tiny pot of dry rouge that must have once been her mother's.

She told him her only memory of her mother. She was downtown, with her mother, on a winter day. There was snow between the sidewalk and the street. She had just learned how to tell time, and she looked up at the Post Office clock and saw that the moment had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to every day on the radio. She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening. It was more than concern she felt, it was horror, to think of the way things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance.

And even in that memory, her mother was only a hip and a shoulder, in a heavy coat.

- 191*

Lionel said that he could hardly get more of a sense of his father than that, though his father was still alive. A swish of a surplice? Lionel and his mother used to make bets on how long his father could go without speaking to them. He had asked his mother once what made his father so mad, and she had answered that she really didn't know.

"I think perhaps he doesn't like his job," she said.

Lionel said, "Why doesn't he get another job?"

"Perhaps he can't think of one he 'd like."

Lionel had then remembered that when she had taken him to the museum he had been frightened of the mummies, and that she had told him they were not really dead, but could get out of their cases when everybody went home. So he said, "Couldn't he be a mummy?" His mother confused mummy with mommy, and later repeated this story as a joke, and he had been too discouraged, really, to correct her. Too discouraged, at his early age, about the whole mighty problem of communication.

This was one of the few memories that had stayed with him.

Brendan laughed-he laughed at this story more than Lorna or Lionel did. Brendan would sit down with them for a while, saying, "What are you two gabbling about?" and then with some relief, as if he had paid his dues for the time being, he would get up, saying that he had some work to deal with, and go into the house. As if he was happy about their friendship, had in a way foreseen it and brought it about-but their conversation made him restless.

"It's good for him to come up here and be normal for a while instead of sitting in his room," he said to Lorna. "Of course he l.u.s.ts after you. Poor b.u.g.g.e.r."

He liked to say that men l.u.s.ted after Lorna. Particularly when they'd been to a department party, and she had been the youngest wife there. She would have been embarra.s.sed to have anybody hear him say that, lest they think it a wishful and foolish exaggeration. But sometimes, especially if she was a little drunk, it roused her as well as Brendan, to think that she might be so - 192*

universally appealing. In Lionel's case, though, she was pretty sure that it was not true, and she hoped very much that Brendan would never hint at such a thing in front of him. She remembered the look that he had given her over his mother's head. A disavowal there, a mild warning.

She did not tell Brendan about the poems. Once a week or so a poem arrived quite properly sealed and posted, in the mail.

These were not anonymous-Lionel signed them. His signature was just a squiggle, quite difficult to make out-but then so was every word of every poem. Fortunately, there were never many words-sometimes only a dozen or two in all-and they made a curious path across the page, like uncertain bird tracks. At first glance Lorna could never make out anything at all. She found that it was best not to try too hard, just to hold the page in front of her and look at it long and steadily as if she had gone into a trance. Then, usually, words would appear. Not all of them- there were two or three in every poem that she never figured out-but that did not matter much. There was no punctuation but dashes. The words were mostly nouns. Lorna was not a person unfamiliar with poetry, or a person who gave up easily on whatever she did not quickly understand. But she felt about these poems of Lionel's more or less as she did about, say, the Buddhist religion-that they were a resource she might be able to comprehend, to tap into, in the future, but that she couldn't do that just now.

After the first poem she agonized about what she should say.

Something appreciative, but not stupid. All she managed was, "Thank you for the poem"-when Brendan was well out of earshot. She kept herself from saying, "I enjoyed it." Lionel gave a jerky nod, and made a sound that sealed off the conversation.

Poems continued to arrive, and were not mentioned again. She began to think that she could regard them as offerings, not as messages. But not love-offerings-as Brendan, for instance, would a.s.sume. There was nothing in them about Lionel's feelings for her, nothing personal at all. They reminded her of - 193*

those faint impressions you can sometimes make out on the sidewalks in spring-shadows, left by wet leaves plastered there the year before.

There was something else, more urgent, that she did not speak about to Brendan. Or to Lionel. She did not say that Polly was coming to visit. Polly, her cousin, was coming from home.

Polly was five years older than Lorna and had worked, ever since she graduated from high school, in the local bank. She had saved up almost enough money for this trip once before, but decided to spend it on a sump pump instead. Now, however, she was on her way across the country by bus. To her it seemed the most natural and appropriate thing to do-to visit her cousin and her cousin's husband and her cousin's family. To Brendan it would seem almost certainly an intrusion, something n.o.body had any business doing unless invited. He was not averse to visitors-look at Lionel-but he wanted to do the choosing himself. Every day Lorna thought of how she must tell him.

Every day she put it off.

And this was not a thing she could talk about to Lionel. You could not speak to him about anything seen seriously as a problem. To speak of problems meant to search for, to hope for, solutions. And that was not interesting, it did not indicate an interesting att.i.tude towards life. Rather, a shallow and tiresome hopefulness. Ordinary anxieties, uncomplicated emotions, were not what he enjoyed hearing about. He preferred things to be utterly bewildering and past bearing, yet ironically, even merrily, borne.

One thing she had told him that might have been chancy. She told him how she had cried on her wedding day and during the actual wedding ceremony. But she was able to make a joke of that, because she could tell how she tried to pull her hand out of Brendan's grip to get her handkerchief, but he would not let go, so she had to keep on snuffling. And in fact she had not cried because she didn't want to be married, or didn't love Brendan.

She had cried because everything at home seemed suddenly so - 194*

precious to her-though she had always planned to leave-and the people there seemed closer to her than anyone else could ever be, though she had hidden all her private thoughts from them.

She cried because she and Polly had laughed as they cleaned the kitchen shelves and scrubbed the linoleum the day before, and she had pretended she was in a sentimental play and said goodbye, old linoleum, good-bye, crack in the teapot, good-bye, the place where I used to stick my gum under the table, good-bye.

Why don't you just tell him forget it, Polly had said. But of course she didn't mean that, she was proud, and Lorna herself was proud, eighteen years old and never had a real boyfriend, and here she was, marrying a good-looking thirty-year-old man, a professor.