A Serious Widow

by Constance Beresford-Howe

  “This is very kind of you,” I say. “And thanks, too, for the lovely plant you sent. Very kind.”

  Arthur is now straining to lick my bare feet. She jerks him back. “Sorry. He’s a fool of a dog, rather.” (Edwin would have agreed whole-heartedly. He disliked all animals, particularly this one, which is an indiscriminate barker. But I rather like his bright eyes and boundless enthusiasm.)

  “You must get in, Mrs. Hill – it’s cold. Be sure to let me know if there’s anything we can do … call any time. Ta ra.” And off she whisks, the fur coat and the spaniel’s ears flying.

  Which plant was theirs? I wonder as I put the casserole in the fridge. Oh, yes – the hibiscus. My feet are icy, so I pad swiftly upstairs to dress. A large quantity of air sharp with frost has pushed its way into the house like a trespasser, but I don’t mind. It seems to freshen the place up. On my way past the thermostat I nudge it up a notch to compensate. After all, no one is here to object.

  Now, I tell myself, it’s time to get practical. By way of a start, I zip up my skirt and make the bed. What should I tackle now? The thank-you notes for the cards and flowers? But what, given my present state of mind, could I say? And what name could I sign to them? Furthermore, it’s a chore that brings to mind one hot night last August on the porch when I overheard Pamela telling her husband what happened when she forced their eight-year-old to write his grandmother a thank-you letter. “Well, as a sort of bribe I let him use the new typewriter. After a bit I went along to see how he was coping. And my dear, the letter read, ‘Dear Gran, the weather here is fine, I hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the fuck shit damn.’ ”

  I was half shocked at the time, and relieved that Edwin was indoors. Now my mouth twitches in a smile. No, my thank-you notes will definitely have to wait. Let’s see, now, what was it Cuthbert told me … Wills turn up in old boxes or books – well, I can make a start on that, perhaps, before Marion gets home.

  On the top shelf of our clothes cupboard there is a shoebox full of old photos and letters … the sort of thing one doesn’t really want to keep but for some reason hesitates to throw away. After some groping I find the box, and when I pull it down, as in an archaeological dig, an old hairpin, two coins and a lot of dust come with it. After sorting out the old snapshots and some laboriously printed birthday greetings from Marion at the Brownie age, I come upon a yellowing packet of letters in Edwin’s neat hand. They are postmarked more than thirty years back. I look bemused at my old name on the envelopes. There is nothing else in the box.

  I find myself reluctant even to handle, much less reread, these letters. Nostalgia plays no part here; they were never, in the usual sense, love letters at all, and I wonder now why I ever kept them. Circumspect, decent and discreet, like their author, they began soon after my grandfather Clive first brought him home for dinner. Edwin, he told us, was a new customer; he’d just recently moved here from Ottawa; he was living in a bed-and-breakfast place and could use a decent home-cooked meal. I slipped away dutifully to lay another place, glad of the excuse to disappear. Edwin looked very old to me; even then, just approaching forty, he was balding, a little paunchy. I was seventeen, just out of high school, with a summer job filing invoices for a big construction company. I loathed the long, dead, boring days, and also the tittering, bold-eyed girls in the office, endlessly chattering about their sex lives, or speculating about other people’s. “In this day and age, every girl should be able to earn her own living,” said Clive stoutly, because he had recently noticed that it was the twentieth century, poor darling. And Nana, who hoped this dictum wasn’t true, nevertheless added gently, “That’s right, dear. We won’t be here to look after you forever.” But the thought of a long, long future filing invoices depressed me more than I could ever tell them.

  Of course it wasn’t that first evening, but perhaps a month afterwards, that Edwin (now a regular visitor) began to fix on me a peculiarly sad, intense gaze. It combined reluctance with an almost fixated absorption, and at first it puzzled me. Anything he said to me was always scrupulously correct; he certainly never touched me; yet I knew there was a clear connection between that gaze and the wise tittering of the office girls. I was not at all pretty, but my teenage acne had disappeared, and I was agreeably enough rounded here and there. Anyhow, for these or other reasons his eyes fastened on me as if helplessly fascinated, and of course that in turn soon began to fascinate me.

  Gradually my acute shyness with him (as with all strangers) wore off. The first time he asked me to go for a walk with him in the park one bright June Sunday, I accepted with only a mild qualm of alarm. As time went on, we fell into the habit of these Sunday walks, whatever the weather. Considering the sequel, this prim and innocent courtship echoes now in my mind with a sour kind of irony.

  Once in a while – though not often – he took me to a movie. But we were both much more at ease outdoors, walking in the sun, sitting on benches eating warm chestnuts from a vendor, and talking. He did most of the latter. He had a good deal to say about things like politics and the economy, and I listened with respect, though privately I preferred to hear the tales about his various landladies. One was a Seventh-day Adventist with thirteen cats. Another had an episode of DTs while serving breakfast. Never once did he so much as hold my hand. I found this reassuring and chatted away to him freely about the stenography course I was taking, to prepare for a higher destiny than that of filing clerk. I confided to him that shorthand made my head ache. I admitted to him that I much preferred the English literature course my grandparents were letting me take at night. “They don’t really see the point of Chaucer and Lawrence, you know; but it’s like … writers like that … they let you walk into a whole different world, and that makes you different, too, do you know what I mean? I know it sounds silly, but –”

  He smiled tolerantly. “My main concern is your being out alone on the streets at that hour,” he said. I saw nothing unusual in this attitude. My grandparents were, I knew, a little overprotective sometimes, but I only loved them more for it. I was glad to be able to tell him that Clive drove me downtown weekly to these classes, and picked me up after them. And the following winter when Clive’s cancer was diagnosed and he had to sell the car and close down his little printing business, I dropped English Lit. without too much regret. After all, I had the reading lists; I could and did go on by myself, becoming in the end a sort of addict. Not long after that Clive died, and Nana had a heart attack that left her paper-pale and all but weightless.

  It was then that fear began to haunt me. An unimaginable future orphaned of her as well as Clive presented itself, not just as a threat but a reality. I was eighteen by then, but I’d never been on my own, economically or any other way, nor had I the slightest wish to be so.

  Then, one Sunday, after the doctor had called and pursed his lips over Nana in a dissatisfied way, Edwin suggested our usual walk, though it was a cold, drizzling day without charm. Under a shared black umbrella we strolled in silence along the paths plastered with wet leaves. Then he said abruptly, as if the words had forced their way out, “I wish to God, Rowena, I could take care of you.”

  “Do you? Do you really?”

  He stopped short and looked into my face. His own wore an almost tormented expression I could not easily account for. “It’s what I want more than – more than you can – but it wouldn’t be fair … I mean it’s out of the question, of course.”

  “Do you mean you want to marry me?” I asked.

  A peculiar look of shame crossed his face. There was a long, tight silence while the thickening rain tapped the umbrella over our heads. Then he said with a jerk, “Yes. That’s what – in spite of everything, it’s what –”

  “Then I’ll marry you,” I said eagerly. It actually seemed romantic that I could feel his arm trembling. At that moment I sincerely believed I loved him. Even then, though, I was honest enough to know I also loved the prospect of never having to use that hated shorthand. I was so absurdly incomplete as a
person – indeed, I still am – I actually thought relief was the chief component of happiness. Now Nana’s approaching death would not leave me totally alone. And when we got home, her joy at the news corroborated mine. As for Edwin, though he looked by turns sombre and sheepish, it was clear that he found deep satisfaction in his new role not just as lover but as rescuer.

  “It’s true he’s older,” Nana said to me later that night, “but a man’s no worse for being mature. As for his being married before – what of it? Experience is no bad thing, either.” It did not occur to me then that there was anything defensive in these remarks. She looked at me a little sharply over the word experience, but as far as I could tell, this only confirmed what I’d just discovered: that Edwin knew how to kiss pleasantly. True, my standards of comparison even here were very scanty. There was the boy in grade twelve who after a school dance clamped his wet mouth over mine and sucked, like someone drinking out of a bottle. And there was the mail boy from last summer’s job who pawed me through an endless double bill at the movies. When he called to ask me out again, I cried and made Nana say no to him on the phone. It was not what anyone, even in the fifties, could call a sophisticated sexual record. Edwin’s first marriage, neatly curtailed (I thought) by death, was to my mind all to the good. He would naturally know whatever it was, exactly, that married people did, and how to do it. Nana’s gentle hints about seeds and eggs were so far from explicit I went to the altar with the vague impression that the male fertilized the female with all the delicacy of a dandelion puff ball seeding the breeze.

  Somewhat sharply I replace the lid on the box of letters. No, it would be painfully embarrassing to read them again. All those decorous, misleading sentiments, expressed and evoked quite sincerely at the time – they are now far past their Best-Before date. Furthermore, of course, they are no longer relevant to anything or anybody, least of all me. Downstairs Marion’s key can be heard in the lock, then her voice calling, “Mother?”

  “Here, dear. Just coming.” On my way down, I drop the box into a wastepaper basket. Another interment.

  Marion waits for me at the foot of the stairs in the neat, semi-military Guide uniform she seems to have been born to wear. It suits her trim, upright figure; even that stiff and rather dreadful hat with its badge is becoming in its austere way. The lace-up oxfords, though, at the end of her handsome legs, can only be deplored. Altogether, Marion is quite a good-looking woman, but this does not seem to interest her at all; nor does she appear to want it to interest anyone else. She wears her abundant dark hair scraped back tightly from her face and coiled in a braid at the back; and she never uses makeup of any kind. This austerity makes me, with my unsuccessful home permanent and timid dab of lipstick, feel obscurely guilty – but of course she can’t be blamed for that.

  “Well, Mother,” she says briskly, “what have you accomplished? Any sign of that will?”

  “Nothing much, I’m afraid. And there’s no sign of any will. So far, that is.”

  How typical this exchange is, both of us and our relationship – dryly pragmatic on her side; ineffectual and defensive on mine. Often I wonder wistfully whether somewhere outside the pages of books there are mothers and daughters who embrace each other – laugh together – even confide in each other. Years ago I used to speculate whether something I ate or didn’t eat during my pregnancy could account for the bloodless distance between us two. Whatever the reason, she is always crisper and more efficient with me than with anyone else, while with her I become even more than usually neutral. In Marion’s company, my normally colourless speech sinks to a level of platitudes and clichés that dismays me even as I utter them, as now when I bleat, “Have a good meeting?” Quite rightly, she does not bother answering. We go into the sitting-room where she sits down like a visiting social worker, feet neatly crossed at the ankles. “Have you had lunch?” she asks me.

  “No, not yet.”

  “It’s nearly half-past one. You’ll have to watch this, you know. Women alone never eat properly.”

  “The next-door neighbour brought over a casserole,” I say vaguely. Nothing Marion has said during these last days is actually offensive, but implicit somehow in all her remarks is the message that my present predicament is largely the result of my own weak character. The worst thing about this, of course, is that it’s true. For years she has nagged me about my complete dependence on Edwin. Unfortunately, as it’s turned out, I was more afraid of him than of her, and therefore took no steps to protect myself. Now, to evade her critical eye, I begin to pull dead leaves off one of the funeral plants, which looks even uglier today in the bright sunlight than it did yesterday.

  “We’ll have that, then. I’ll heat it up.” And Marion strides out to the kitchen forthwith. On her way back she pauses to glance at the thermostat. Muttering something, she pushes it down a notch.

  “Now, Mother, we need to have a talk. Sit down, do – never mind those plants. It’s beginning to look as if Dad made no will to provide for you. According to Cuthbert, that may mean those people in Ottawa can claim everything. And that, of course, includes this house. Perhaps you hadn’t realized that,” she adds more kindly when I turn appalled eyes on her.

  “Because of course this property is in Dad’s name, right?” she goes on. “As far as I can see, then, that small insurance policy naming you as beneficiary may be all you’ll get. And once the funeral’s paid for, that will leave you with maybe two thousand dollars. You can’t live for long on that.”

  I nod, feeling rather sick, like the victim of a robbery. The air in this small room is heavy and stagnant. A fine dust hangs in the light that slots in through the Venetian blind. Some ancient tombs are like this, I’ve read somewhere: claustrophobic little furnished cells aping the abodes of the living.

  “The question is, Mother, how are you going to manage?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid that’s the question, all right.”

  “Well, the obvious solution is for you to come and live with me – at least until you can get some kind of job. My sofa makes into a bed – we could manage. Later on, if you win this case in court, we might get a bigger place. Actually it would be quite convenient for me to have someone to run the vac. around, get the evening meal and so on. I mean there’s no need for you to feel –”

  “It’s good of you to offer, dear, but –” I cannot finish this sentence. She has been (for her) tactful and generous. How can I confront her with the truth: you would hate living with me. And that is nothing to my dismay at the thought of living with you. The frightening question is, if no alternative can be found, and she insists, what can I do? Because my one and only skill is knowing how to acquiesce, agree and be guided. And at my age it’s surely too late to change. There’s a negative kind of comfort in that, I suppose.

  After a pause I add feebly, “I’m afraid – well – I’m sure something will turn up.” (And must you, I ask myself, keep on saying, “I’m afraid,”?) Marion is looking at me sternly, and I try to pull myself together.

  “Such as?” she inquires dryly.

  “Well, I don’t know … Don’t they train people to sell things in department stores?”

  “Mother, you’ve never touched a cash register in your life.”

  I hardly need to be reminded that my only equipment to face the commercial world is half a secretarial course a generation old. It’s not fair of me to resent her for pointing out the simple truth. Nevertheless, I do resent her, quite keenly.

  “Well, then, maybe I could take in a lodger.”

  “You may not have this house at all,” she reminds me.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s so.” Incredible that I should, even momentarily, forget this significant detail. She is quite right to treat me like a moron.

  “Well, in a few days Cuthbert ought to have a better idea just what your position is; but meanwhile we should be ready with some kind of practical plan.”

  There follows a frustrated silence. Marion has already revealed her practical plan, and p
resumably has no other. I for my part have none at all, practical or otherwise. The silence stretches itself out like a stifled yawn. Next door a shriek of laughter rises and Arthur breaks into a fit of barking. Finally I say recklessly, “Well, maybe I could be somebody’s cook. Or possibly set myself up in the oldest profession. They say it pays well.” I might have added with some bitterness that it was about the only job I was qualified for, but she cuts in sharply, “Oh, try not to be ridiculous, Mother.”

  To my surprise, she is blushing darkly, either with embarrassment or shame. In spite of all her efficiency and her calendar age of twenty-nine years, there are times when I realize that Marion is not in fact fully adult. It may also be true, I think with something of a pang, that the situation we find ourselves in may be even more painful and dismaying for her than it is for me. After all, she admired Edwin as well as loved him. A sharp mental picture comes to me, the bystander in their long-ago breakfast game – her four-year-old hands pressed over his eyes while she cried gaily, “Guess who?” Which one of us was most truly hidden then?