The Difference

by Marina Endicott

  Yarmouth

  Some nights Kay dreamed she was still on the Morning Light—in the tilting corridor, mahogany doors shut tight in a long row, searching for Aren or Mr. Brimner. Standing in the shifting, swaying darkness, wondering which door to open. If she could see up the companionway to the small lamp burning to light the stairs, she could go back to sleep. But often she was all in darkness, uncertain which way was fore or aft, adrift below decks, trying door after door.

  She dreamed it again, coming back from Olive Wetmore’s wedding in Bar Harbor. In her thrumming bunk on the Prince Arthur, a wide-bellied steamer that pitched slightly, stiffly, on the late spring tide, she woke in the dark to the smell of old vomit on old metal. Not right.

  Still night. She lay with eyes open, nothing to see but the dim glow of the porthole. Teak, spice, wet canvas: that’s what she wanted. Nothing was right. The hard metal edge of her bunk had pressed her arm to sleep. It tingled into life again.

  Francis had the next cabin—you couldn’t call them cabins, just boltholes in steel. She heard no snoring. Perhaps he was lying awake too; sad to be a sailor home from the sea, ferried in a tub like this.

  She lay for a long time trying to return to the dreaming world, which so often seemed more real than this world. Even when they were bad dreams, she often wanted to stay there, in the place she felt at home in, more than anywhere else. Where did that world go when she woke?

  The next time she opened her eyes, it was lighter. Sitting up, she looked out the round, yellowish porthole, in case they’d entered the narrows already. Not yet. Grey seas, grey skies, grey paint cracked around the porthole’s edge. Morning, anyhow.

  The snack bar would be open. She brushed her teeth at the little steel sink with the nice red toothbrush she had got in Boston. Then she quickly dressed, tidied and locked her case, and went to look for a cup of tea.

  She was standing mist-damp at the rail in the fish smell, in the gull scream, when they docked with a clanking clunk that shook the whole ship into shudders. The Halifax train was waiting, and most of the Prince Arthur passengers streamed onto it.

  Shouting a farewell up to Cocker, the first mate, who had been bosun on the Morning Light, Francis took his suitcase and shouldered Kay’s golf bag with his own. She had only her small dressing case otherwise, and could manage that herself. They bulled through the crowd, and found that the pony trap had not come.

  Crossing the tracks, they trudged up the wharf to the cotton mill office, where Francis got onto the telephone. After shouting quietly into it for some time, he said the cart would be out directly; Thea had mistaken the day. He looked very tired, and Kay did not ask anything more, but set her case on a rickety chair by the window looking down onto the factory floor.

  The noise was ferocious. Looms racketing back and forth, belts and levers shaking as they were pulled and shoved, girls in white smocks standing at the ready to grab for discard. Seven in the morning and all those girls looked worn out, more tired than Francis. Boys too, of course, and men—inspecting spindles, checking the warp. Roland Spinney from her high school class was assistant floor manager now; there he went, long and dark, running down the aisle beneath the flying strands of thread. Clouds of feathery dust choked in Kay’s throat; she did not know how Francis had stood it, when he was managing the mill last year. She went to join him at the open back door where he stood in foggy sun, talking to Abel Muise, the mill foreman, who had also sailed on the Morning Light. Back in their real life.

  Then the trap came and they climbed up and Jerry Melanson clicked to old Blackie, who strained his poor thin spine and jigged along, not home to Elm Street, but out toward Lake Milo. The grass verges were green and springing, dirt bright and damp with the night’s rain. A pleasant place in springtime, everybody always said.

  * * *

  —

  Finding no one she could bear to talk to in the house, Kay went to the woods. Spring-dressed branches parted to let her through with the sharp-rotted nose of wood that never dries, fresh shoots, clear brown water, crushed moss—dead leaves revealed from snow, waiting to fall into leafmeal in the usual pattern of seasons.

  Kay walked along the worn paths wanting the not-difference, the seasonless Pacific cycle of never-ending growth, dry sand, wood that crumbles in hot salt air, the transparency of water. Eleuthera, Tonga, Fiji—even Singapore or Manila, though she’d wilted in that unchanging weight of heat.

  Funny to see Cocker on the Prince Arthur, grey-headed but sturdy, doing well for himself. What ship was Liu Jiacheng on now, reading his ancient book, smoke from his thin pipe rising thinner? He could not have died, he was catgut, indestructible. Or Seaton—but Seaton must be dead by now, he had teetered on the brink even then. From her present great age, twenty-two, she wondered if he might have been only forty or so, back then.

  She must answer Mr. Brimner’s last letter, four months old already when it arrived in April. She had it in her coat pocket, meaning to answer it from Bar Harbor. His two years of mission had stretched into ten, his friend Prior’s manuscript was still not sent to the publisher—she imagined drafts accumulating, curling poems pinned to the wood round the door of his bure to weather until he might be satisfied that he had read the true intent of his dead friend; a careful file of black-bordered letters from Prior’s mother, agreeing or disagreeing with an editorial note, open on the desk; and Mr. Brimner busy at his ink pot, teasing out the golden thread from all those drafts.

  Or else he had lost impetus, lost his compass bearing. But he was not as feeble-spirited as she was. And he had real work to do, which she lacked. Some peace could be found in a long walk alone round the golf course, moving there with an easy rhythm she could never find on a dance floor. No satisfaction at all in company, in the society of one’s peers.

  She had no peers here, if peers meant people who knew the things she knew. Only Aren knew those things. And things she did not know, too. Kay put out her hand to touch a young birch’s paper-flimsy bark, the thickness of a white petal, already beginning to peel. She peeled more, slowly, slowly, to make a page to write to Mr. Brimner on. Destroying it as if it was her stupid discontent. She wished she could talk to Aren. She could go and visit him in Halifax, she supposed. If he would talk to her.

  Coming back along the creek to the old orchard, still frilled and scented with late blossom, she heard a quiet call: “Too-wheee!”

  There was Roddy, up in the king apple tree, hidden except for his boots. The oldest tree: their refuge and their hiding place, whenever she and Aren were sent to stay at Lake Milo. She knew the branches like a spiral staircase at the trunk, and the wind-ruffled swaying of the crow’s-nest branches at the top. In the last slow weeks of summer you could read up there all day, reaching for an apple when you were hungry.

  Roddy’s narrow elf-face moved through the new leaves, behind a tattered haze of cloud-pink petals. “There you are!” he called.

  “Here I am,” Kay answered, cheerful as she could be. “We thought you’d gone with Thea.”

  “I ran away when she said we must go visiting. I did not want to go when you were coming home.” Roddy stopped on a branch to cough—he needed his belladonna drops. “Did Cousin Olive get married off?” he asked, wheezing.

  “She did. She is Mrs. Braydon Dawlish now.”

  “She was pretty old, to be married.”

  Kay remembered Olive saying that about Thea marrying Francis: quite an old spinster to be new-married, and how sad that she wasted her youth raising Kay. “Not so very old, really.” Not that she had any desire to defend Olive. “Your mama did not marry till she was twenty-nine, and Olive was only thirty-two.”

  “She was lucky anyone wanted to marry her.”

  Kay laughed, but could not disagree. “He is a little older, I think, but Dawlish seems to like her pretty well. Francis says she deserves some happiness after dealing with her mother for so long.”

 
; “Did you win the hotel tournament?”

  “I did. A nice silver cup. They said it’s worth fifty American dollars. I’d rather have the cash, but nobody offered to buy it.”

  “If they had given you the money, though, you could not be an amateur champion,” he said. “You are good enough to be.”

  She laughed. “I’m not. Alexa Stirling was there, she won the ladies’ amateur cup last year, you know. She said if I went touring, we should chum around. But it was just for fun, or for advertising, because Dawlish owns the golf course.”

  “Olive will have to play with her, then. She will be terrible at it, I think.” He was busy sliding down the tree. One skinny calf came into view, smeared green as an apple from new bark, apple-sap-green. Lena Hubbard would be angry with him, but it was Thea who had knit the stocking, after all.

  On the ground, he dusted bark off his rump and carefully folded his knife before stowing it away in a pocket.

  “You’d better watch that, you’ll cut yourself,” she said.

  “Sharp enough to cut a hair on water, sharp as sharp,” he boasted. “I sharpened it on Jerry Melanson’s whetstone, he showed me how.”

  “It would be a good mariner’s knife, to match your marlinspike.”

  He took her arm—at nine, already as tall as she was—and they walked down the aisle of trees, their feet scuffing the gentle petal dust.

  Thea saw them coming over the meadow. The grass had been mown down by sheep over the last month, but now the lambs had been moved to pasture, it was growing up again. She must tell Jerry Melanson to send his nephew Hubert out there again with the scythe.

  There came Kay and Roddy, good, because Aunty Bob was driving out from town for dinner, bringing the Krito-sophian ladies to discuss the next lecture series. The ladies were attempting to secure Aimee Semple McPherson, so very interesting, with her mission life and wide experience. Thea found the idea irritating, but she was tired, after a long week alone with Aunt Lydia. Now Olive was married and never coming back, and this care would be her duty for some time to come, years perhaps. And the weather was oppressive, too warm for May.

  Francis had gone down to the stables. Back again, more or less in one piece. She could taste the silky mother-of-pearl skin inside his mouth, the tender inwardness that she loved—even at this advanced age, forty next week. She could let go his hand in the morning knowing she would lie with him again at night. Why are we all so sad? We are lucky, she told herself again.

  Kay waved to Thea, who was back from visiting, leaning on the veranda railing in her best silk chiffon. Thea shaded her eyes to see them, and Kay waved again. Roddy put on a turn of speed to go to his mother, but Kay, hearing Francis calling from the stable, went to see what he wanted.

  He beckoned.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He turned back to the shadowy interior and she followed, from long habit pausing to tap the horseshoe nailed to the doorway. But it did not help.

  “Pilot,” Francis said. He was crouched on the planks beside her old dog, without regard for the knees of his good grey suit. “He’s not doing well.”

  Kay went into the twilight. Her good dog Pilot thrust his nose up into her hand, from where he lay on an old horse blanket Francis must have set out for him. His long tail trembled and then gently thumped the floor in greeting. Under his fur she felt the lumpy growths she’d come to expect. Two, three of them—perhaps they were larger. He had been ailing for some time, this was no surprise. But Francis took her hand and held it, and with his other hand drew back the long fur under Pilot’s jaw. A greater lump there, and it had opened, oozing pinkish fluid. He had been sore and stiff before she left, but this was very bad.

  “It’s not the lumps, so much,” Francis said. “But this abscess, the open tumour—he’s in pain now, Kay. It’s time to give him release.”

  She saw that it must be so. Pilot’s eyes looked into hers until the effort of holding his neck was too much and he let his head slump, flump, on the blanket. That was how it was with dogs, they were frailer than humans and aged much more quickly, and the good thing was that one could put them out of their misery. It was all quite rational.

  “All right,” she said. Would Francis wish her to do it herself? He had taught her to shoot the little rifle. She put her hand under her eye to stop it trembling there. It was very hard for him to fire a rifle now, after the war, so she should do it.

  “He’s very old for such a big dog,” Francis said, looking at her a little anxiously. It made him look like Roddy. “We’ll give him a good dinner, and keep him warm, and it will be the best thing.”

  She nodded, and got up. “I’ll find something in the kitchen, then.” Best get on with it.

  He pulled a scrap of sacking over from the hay bin and sat beside Pilot, one hand buried in the soft mane. His trousers would be ruined.

  At the door, she turned back. “Should I tell Roddy?”

  “He asked me to have a look at the poor old boy. Ask Thea, as you go by. She’ll know.”

  Whether it would be better for him to know beforehand or afterwards. With people one did not have that choice, to know or not to know. But then parents were always discussing whether or not to tell their children this or that, whether it was good for them to know the truth or whether they should be spared.

  At the porch table, Thea had rested her head on one hand bent across her eyes—reading, or asleep? Roddy must have been sent to change his mucky breeches. Thea lifted her head as Kay climbed the stairs and, seeing her, said, “Oh, Kay, will you help Lena bring in lunch? I must go turn Aunt Lydia.”

  “Let me do that.” The cold misery of rolling Aunt Lydia’s oblivious sausage-body in the sheets was less disheartening than Lena’s conscious dislike.

  Lena Hubbard had left the sea as well, and worked for Thea now, her hind end still a mute reproach to Kay. Nothing was known of Hubbard’s whereabouts; Lena had come back to Yarmouth, destitute, a week before Olive left for her long-promised six month’s tour of Europe, just as Thea and Francis were about to take on Aunt Lydia’s invalid care in Olive’s absence. Kay had begged them not to hire Lena, but of course that was no use.

  Now Thea caught Kay’s sleeve gently. “What would you like me to do? Leave her to rely on the parish?” She meant Lena, not Aunt Lydia. Abandoning Aunt Lydia was not even imaginable.

  “No,” Kay had to say, and again, “No!”

  Thea looked up, her eyes still in her hand’s shadow, considering her as Father used to. “You still must work to correct your temper, and a reminder in the house can do no harm.”

  The cruel justice of this left Kay with nothing to say—indeed, let the breath out of her chest so that she had to walk to the end of the porch to find more air to fill it. But she could not be angry with Thea.

  She was not allowed to be angry anywhere, with anyone, was the truth of it, and that alone made her want to screech like a harbour gull. She made her fingers into talons and flexed them, and went in through the glass doors at the end of the veranda to turn Aunt Lydia.

  The shade, and the heat, the smell, the quietness, all magnified the clunk of the clock on the mantel in the dark-panelled room that had once been the dining room. The great body lying there, not quite a husk. Olive had been right to worry, long ago, that Kay might send her mother apoplectic. But it was not Kay that felled Aunt Lydia, it was the war, and Forrest lost in France. Nobody blamed poor Olive for leaving; she had managed all that time alone, six years of ministering to an unresponding lump. When she came back, Thea had said, they would make sure she had daily help; with any luck, Lena could be persuaded to stay with her. But now Olive was not coming back.

  With practised moves, Kay stripped the top sheet off and pulled a clean sheet over Aunt Lydia’s bulk, tucking half of it in on the wall side; rolled the body forward onto the clean half and slid the soiled half out with a jerk. Not as efficiently
as Thea did it, but her clumsiness caused no stirring from Aunt Lydia. Tuck, tuck, and then she allowed the bulk to roll back, and roll a quarter turn again to give a fresh side to the bed. Old sores that Thea had found when they first came were healed now. But indeed, it must have been very hard for Olive all alone.

  Kay pulled the nightgown into place down the thin old bluish legs, set the bolsters to brace the body and tucked the sheets in carefully to keep it suspended on its side—on her side.

  It was not necessary to think of this body as a woman; Kay felt sure that whatever had made Aunt Lydia herself had left this mortal shell long before. She had no wish to remember her aunt in true vivid life, grown more cranky and difficult with age. Even Francis had disliked her, and she was his aunt too, by marriage. But he had agreed that they must relieve Olive, and had not protested at moving out to Lake Milo for six months or however long the European tour would take. He did have some relief: from time to time he stayed at the house in Yarmouth, attending to business that could not be delayed. His affairs were mysterious to Kay—holdings in various ships, interests in others; not always successful, she supposed, from the Elm Street house, which was smaller and less opulently furnished than Marion Hilton’s father’s place. Shipping was chancy business.

  To relieve the gloom and silence, Kay opened the curtains to the afternoon light, although Lena would certainly close them again, left the French door to the veranda ajar and lifted the heavy sash of the west window halfway. Light brought a pale pearl-glow to Aunt Lydia’s arm, extending limply from the linen sleeve. Outside in the sunlight Thea looked pale too. Was she ill?

  Kay curbed her sudden fear—it was Pilot who was ill. She went to forage in the kitchen, where she found cold beef and warmed a dish. Out in the stable, the dog was sleeping. She knelt on the straw beside him and stroked his great head without waking him.

  Francis, still sitting vigil, said he would stay with him. “We’ll wait till morning, in case there’s any change,” he said. He’d made himself a cot of horse blankets, and she could tell Thea he would not come in for dinner. “Pilot is saving me from those damned Cryptosporidians,” he said. “Faithful to the last.”