The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  It was easier for them to become friends with people Patrick liked than with people Rose liked because Rose was very adaptable, in fact deceitful, and Patrick was hardly adaptable at all. But in this case, the case of Jocelyn and Clifford, the friends were Rose’s. Or Jocelyn was. Jocelyn and Rose had known enough not to try to establish couple-visiting. Patrick disliked Clifford without knowing him because Clifford was a violinist; no doubt Clifford disliked Patrick because Patrick worked in a branch of his family’s department store. In those days the barriers between people were still strong and reliable; between arty people and business people; between men and women.

  Rose did not know any of Jocelyn’s friends, but understood they were musicians and journalists and lecturers at the University and even a woman writer who had had a play performed on the radio. She expected them to be intelligent, witty, and easily contemptuous. It seemed to her that all the time she and Patrick were sitting in the living rooms, visiting or being visited, really clever and funny people, who had a right to despise them, were conducting irregular lives and parties elsewhere. Now came the chance to be with those people, but her stomach rejected it, her hands were sweating.

  Jocelyn and Rose had met in the maternity ward of the North Vancouver General Hospital. The first thing Rose saw, on being taken back to the ward after having Anna, was Jocelyn sitting up in bed reading the Journals of André Gide. Rose knew the book by its colors, having noticed it on the drugstore stands. Gide was on the list of writers she meant to work through. At that time she read only great writers.

  The immediately startling and comforting thing to Rose, about Jocelyn, was how much Jocelyn looked like a student, how little she had let herself be affected by the maternity ward. Jocelyn had long black braids, a heavy pale face, thick glasses, no trace of prettiness, and an air of comfortable concentration.

  A woman in the bed beside Jocelyn was describing the arrangement of her kitchen cupboards. She would forget to tell where she kept something – rice, say, or brown sugar – and then she would have to start all over again, making sure her audience was with her by saying “Remember on the right hand highest shelf next the stove, that’s where I keep the packages of soup but not the canned soup, I keep the canned soup underneath the counter in with the canned goods, well, right next to that—”

  Other women tried to interrupt, to tell how they kept things, but they were not successful, or not for long. Jocelyn sat reading, and twiddling the end of a braid between her fingers, as if she was in a library, at college, as if she was researching for a paper, and this world of other women had never closed down on her at all. Rose wished she could manage as well.

  She was still dazed from the birth. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw an eclipse, a big black ball with a ring of fire. That was the baby’s head, ringed with pain, the instant before she pushed it out. Across this image, in disturbing waves, went the talking woman’s kitchen shelves, dipping under their glaring weight of cans and packages. But she could open her eyes and see Jocelyn, black and white, braids falling over her hospital nightgown. Jocelyn was the only person she saw who looked calm and serious enough to match the occasion.

  Soon Jocelyn got out of bed, showing long white unshaved legs and a stomach still stretched by pregnancy. She put on a striped bathrobe. Instead of a cord, she tied a man’s necktie around her waist. She slapped across the hospital linoleum in her bare feet. A nurse came running, warned her to put on slippers.

  “I don’t own any slippers.”

  “Do you own shoes?” said the nurse rather nastily.

  “Oh, yes. I own shoes.”

  Jocelyn went back to the little metal cabinet beside her bed and took out a pair of large, dirty, run-over moccasins. She went off making as sloppy and insolent a noise as before.

  Rose was longing to know her.

  The next day Rose had her own book out to read. It was The Last Puritan, by George Santayana, but unfortunately it was a library copy; the title on the cover was rubbed and dim, so it was impossible that Jocelyn should admire Rose’s reading material as Rose had admired hers. Rose didn’t know how she could get to talk to her.

  The woman who had explained about her cupboards was talking about how she used her vacuum cleaner. She said it was very important to use all the attachments because they each had a purpose and after all you had paid for them. Many people didn’t use them. She described how she vacuumed her living-room drapes. Another woman said she had tried to do that but the material kept getting bunched up. The authoritative woman said that was because she hadn’t been doing it properly.

  Rose caught Jocelyn’s eye around the corner of her book.

  “I hope you polish your stove knobs,” she said quietly.

  “I certainly do,” said Jocelyn.

  “Do you polish them every day?”

  “I used to polish them twice a day but now that I have the new baby I just don’t know if I’ll get around to it.”

  “Do you use that special stove-knob polish?”

  “I certainly do. And I use the special stove-knob cloths that come in that special package.”

  “That’s good. Some people don’t.”

  “Some people will use anything.”

  “Old dishrags.”

  “Old snotrags.”

  “Old snot.”

  After this their friendship bloomed in a hurry. It was one of those luxuriant intimacies that spring up in institutions; in schools, at camp, in prison. They walked in the halls, disobeying the nurses. They annoyed and mystified the other women. They became hysterical as schoolgirls, from the things they read aloud to each other. They did not read Gide or Santayana but the copies of True Love and Personal Romances which they had found in the waiting room.

  “It says here you can buy false calves,” Rose read. “I don’t see how you’d hide them, though. I guess you strap them on your legs. Or maybe they just sit here inside your stockings but wouldn’t you think they’d show?”

  “On your legs?” said Jocelyn. “You strap them on your legs? Oh, false calves! False calves! I thought you were talking about false calves! False baby cows!”

  Anything like that could set them off.

  “False baby cows!”

  “False tits, false bums, false baby cows!”

  “What will they think of next!”

  The vacuum-cleaning woman said they were always butting in and spoiling other people’s conversations and she didn’t see what was so funny about dirty language. She said if they didn’t stop the way they carried on they would sour their milk.

  “I’ve been wondering if maybe mine is sour,” Jocelyn said. “It’s an awfully disgusting color.”

  “What color?” Rose asked.

  “Well. Sort of blue.”

  “Good God, maybe it’s ink!”

  The vacuum-cleaning woman said she was going to tell the nurse they were swearing. She said she was no prude, but. She asked if they were fit to be mothers. How was Jocelyn going to manage to wash diapers, when anybody could see she never washed her dressing gown?

  Jocelyn said she planned to use moss, she was an Indian.

  “I can believe it,” the woman said.

  After this Jocelyn and Rose prefaced many remarks with: I’m no prude, but.

  “I’m no prude but would you look at this pudding!”

  “I’m no prude but it feels like this kid has a full set of teeth.”

  The nurse said, wasn’t it time for them to grow up?

  Walking in the halls, Jocelyn told Rose that she was twenty-five, that her baby was to be called Adam, that she had a two-year-old boy at home, named Jerome, that her husband’s name was Clifford and that he played the violin for a living. He played in the Vancouver Symphony. They were poor. Jocelyn came from Massachusetts and had gone to Wellesley College. Her father was a psychiatrist and her mother was a pediatrician. Rose told Jocelyn that she came from a small town in Ontario and that Patrick came from Vancouver Island and that his parents did not approve of t
he marriage.

  “In the town I come from,” Rose said, exaggerating, “everybody says yez. What’ll yez have? How’re yez doin.”

  “Yez?”

  “Youse. It’s the plural of you.”

  “Oh. Like Brooklyn. And James Joyce. Who does Patrick work for?”

  “His family’s store. His family has a department store.”

  “So aren’t you rich now? Aren’t you too rich to be in the ward?”

  “We just spent all our money on a house Patrick wanted.”

  “Didn’t you want it?”

  “Not so much as he did.”

  That was something Rose had never said before.

  They plunged into more random revelations.

  Jocelyn hated her mother. Her mother had made her sleep in a room with white organdy curtains and had encouraged her to collect ducks. By the time she was thirteen Jocelyn had probably the largest collection in the world of rubber ducks, ceramic ducks, wooden ducks, pictures of ducks, embroidered ducks. She had also written what she described as a hideously precocious story called “The Marvelous Great Adventures of Oliver the Grand Duck,” which her mother actually got printed, and distributed to friends and relatives at Christmas time.

  “She is the sort of person who just covers everything with a kind of rotten smarminess. She sort of oozes over everything. She never talks in a normal voice, never. She’s coy. She’s just so filthy coy. Naturally she’s a great success as a pediatrician. She has these rotten coy little names for all the parts of your body.”

  Rose, who would have been delighted with organdy curtains, perceived the fine lines, the ways of giving offence, that existed in Jocelyn’s world. It seemed a much less crude and provisional world than her own. She doubted if she could tell Jocelyn about Hanratty but she began to try. She delivered Flo and the store in broad strokes. She played up the poverty. She didn’t really have to. The true facts of her childhood were exotic enough to Jocelyn, and of all things, enviable.

  “It seems more real,” Jocelyn said. “I know that’s a romantic notion.”

  They talked of their youthful ambitions. (They really believed their youth to be past.) Rose said she had wanted to be an actress though she was too much of a coward ever to walk on a stage. Jocelyn had wanted to be a writer but was shamed out of it by memories of the Grand Duck.

  “Then I met Clifford,” she said. “When I saw what real talent was, I knew that I would probably just be fooling around, trying to write, and I’d be better off nurturing him, or whatever the hell it is I do for him. He is really gifted. Sometimes he’s a squalid sort of person. He gets away with it because he is really gifted.”

  “I think that is a romantic notion,” Rose said firmly and jealously. “That gifted people ought to get away with things.”

  “Do you? But great artists always have.”

  “Not women.”

  “But women usually aren’t great artists, not in the same way.”

  These were the ideas of most well-educated, thoughtful, even unconventional or politically radical young women of the time. One of the reasons Rose did not share them was that she had not been well educated. Jocelyn said to her, much later in their friendship, that one of the reasons she found it so interesting to talk to Rose, from the start, was that Rose had ideas but was uneducated. Rose was surprised at this, and mentioned the college she had attended in Western Ontario. Then she saw by an embarrassed withdrawal or regret, a sudden lack of frankness in Jocelyn’s face – very unusual with her – that that was exactly what Jocelyn had meant.

  After the difference of opinion about artists, and about men and women artists, Rose took a good look at Clifford when he came visiting in the evening. She thought him wan, self-indulgent, and neurotic-looking. Further discoveries concerning the tact, the effort, the sheer physical energy Jocelyn expended on this marriage (it was she who fixed the leaky taps and dug up the clogged drains) made Rose certain that Jocelyn was wasting herself, she was mistaken. She had a feeling that Jocelyn did not see much point in marriage with Patrick, either.

  At first the party was easier than Rose had expected. She had been afraid that she would be too dressed-up; she would have liked to wear her toreador pants but Patrick would never have stood for it. But only a few of the girls were in slacks. The rest wore stockings, earrings, outfits much like her own. As at any gathering of young women at that time, three or four were noticeably pregnant. And most of the men were in suits and shirts and ties, like Patrick. Rose was relieved. Not only did she want Patrick to fit into the party; she wanted him to accept the people there, to be convinced they were not all freaks. When Patrick was a student he had taken her to concerts and plays and did not seem overly suspicious of the people who participated in them; indeed he rather favored these things, because they were detested by his family, and at that time – the time he chose Rose – he was having a brief rebellion against his family. Once he and Rose had gone to Toronto and sat in the Chinese temple room at the Museum, looking at the frescoes. Patrick told her how they were brought in small pieces from Shansi province; he seemed quite proud of his knowledge, and at the same time disarmingly, uncharacteristically humble, admitting he had got it all on a tour. It was since he had gone to work that he had developed harsh opinions and delivered wholesale condemnations. Modern Art was a Hoax. Avant-garde plays were filthy. Patrick had a special, mincing, spitting way of saying avant-garde, making the words seem disgustingly pretentious. And so they were, Rose thought. In a way, she could see what he meant. She could see too many sides of things; Patrick had not that problem.

  Except for some great periodic fights she was very docile with Patrick, she tried to keep in favor. It was not easy to do so. Even before they were married he had a habit of delivering reproving lectures, in response to a simple question or observation. Sometimes in those days she would ask him a question in the hope that he would show off some superior knowledge that she could admire him for, but she was usually sorry she had asked, the answer was so long and had such a scolding tone, and the knowledge wouldn’t be so superior, either. She did want to admire him, and respect him; it seemed that was a leap she was always on the edge of taking.

  Later she thought that she did respect Patrick, but not in the way he wanted to be respected, and she did love him, not in the way he wanted to be loved. She didn’t know it then. She thought she knew something about him, she thought she knew that he didn’t really want to be whatever he was zealously making himself into. That arrogance might be called respect; that highhandedness, love. It didn’t do anything to make him happy.

  A few men wore jeans and turtlenecks or sweatshirts. Clifford was one of them, all in black. It was the time of the beatniks in San Francisco. Jocelyn had called Rose up on the phone and read her Howl. Clifford’s skin looked very tanned, against the black, his hair was long for the time and almost as light a color as unbleached cotton; his eyes too were very light in color, a bright gray-blue. He looked small and cat-like to Rose, rather effeminate; she hoped Patrick wouldn’t be too put off by him.

  There was beer to drink, and a wine punch. Jocelyn, who was a splendid cook, was stirring a pot of jambalaya. Rose made a trip to the bathroom to remove herself from Patrick, who seemed to want to stick close to her (she thought he was being a watchdog; she forgot that he might be shy). When she came out he had moved on. She drank three cups of punch in quick succession and was introduced to the woman who had written the play. To Rose’s surprise this woman was one of the drabbest, least confident-looking people in the room.

  “I liked your play,” Rose told her. As a matter of fact she had found if mystifying, and Patrick had thought it was revolting. It seemed to be about a woman who ate her own children. Rose knew that was symbolic, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was symbolic of.

  “Oh, but the production was terrible!” the woman said. In her embarrassment, her excitement and eagerness to talk about her play, she sprayed Rose with punch. “They made it so literal. I was afraid
it would just come across as gruesome and I meant it to be quite delicate, I meant it to be so different from the way they made it.” She started telling Rose everything that had gone wrong, the miscasting, the chopping of the most important – the crucial – lines. Rose felt flattered, listening to these details, and tried inconspicuously to wipe away the spray.

  “But you did see what I meant?” the woman said.

  “Oh, yes!”

  Clifford poured Rose another cup of punch and smiled at her.

  “Rose, you look delicious.”

  Delicious seemed an odd word for Clifford to use. Perhaps he was drunk. Or perhaps, hating parties altogether as Jocelyn said he did, he had taken on a role; he was the sort of man who told a girl she looked delicious. He might be adept at disguises, as Rose thought she herself was getting to be. She went on talking to the writer and a man who taught English Literature of the Seventeenth Century. She too might have been poor and clever, radical and irreverent for all anybody could tell.

  A man and a girl were embracing passionately in the narrow hall. Whenever anybody wanted to get through, this couple had to separate but they continued looking at each other, and did not even close their mouths. The sight of those wet open mouths made Rose shiver. She had never been embraced like that in her life, never had her mouth opened like that. Patrick thought French-kissing was disgusting.

  A little bald man named Cyril had stationed himself outside the bathroom door, and was kissing any girl who came out, saying, “Welcome, sweetheart, so glad you could come, so glad you went.”

  “Cyril is awful,” the woman writer said. “Cyril thinks he has to try to act like a poet. He can’t think of anything to do but hang around the john and upset people. He thinks he’s outrageous.”