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The Young in One Another’s Arms
A Novel
Jane Rule
FOR HELEN
CHAPTER ONE
In the darkened street, Ruth Wheeler might have been mistaken for a boy of middle growth, spare-bodied, light on her feet. She nearly always wore trousers, and the empty right sleeve of her windbreaker could seem a boy’s quirk of style. But if she stepped under a streetlight, looked up and sharply beyond that illuminated space, her face redefined the first impression, the color of false pearl, dark eyes of remarkable size but limited by aging lids, anchored by taut lines to her temples: the face of a seventy-year-old woman. Ruth Wheeler was, in fact, just over fifty.
“I looked older than my mother when I was born,” she claimed.
Most newborn do but outgrow it. She had not. She had lived with that birth face until age became the excuse for it or was beginning to be. Her body, ordinary enough in growing, had refused to age, small breasts still high, belly firm as if it had never given room to the one child she had borne.
“I’ll die in pieces,” she said, her right arm the first sacrifice to that process, an accident she didn’t remember, though she’d lived with the fact of having one arm for fifteen years.
“I can only remember what’s happened to other people.”
Those accidents which she had not witnessed stayed vivid: her father crushed under a redwood tree (it didn’t matter that the report blamed a bulldozer), her daughter falling like a sparrow out of the sky (the late news invented an automobile accident). Ruth still dreamed occasionally of the falling tree and the falling child (who was twenty-two when it happened). She dreamed as well of the great six-lane highway that flowed over the valley in which she had grown up, a river of cars spawning to impossible cities, to be seen as broken and battered as fish on its urban shores.
Ruth had been part of the debris, carried along like an uprooted bush or root—or so she dreamed it, snagged here and there by a job that didn’t last, a man that didn’t last.
“You’re not a sort of woman to live with,” her husband explained to her when he left. But not the sort to leave behind entirely either. A memory of her would catch him like the first cold air in the lungs, and he would come back to her for a day or a week.
“Like a tooth you don’t get around to pulling right out. It flares up. You bite on it.”
Aching root, uprooted stick, walking the night streets often because she did not much like to sleep in the dark, Ruth Wheeler would speak to strangers or not. A cigarette smoked in the middle of the bridge or down by the beach was as good a companion as any. She did not stay out long, no more than an hour or so. She had a house to go back to and a number of invented responsibilities: her mother-in-law, her six boarders, an ailing runaway boy in the basement. She could sit by an open fire and look through the bulb catalogue, her inventions asleep about her, morning as far off as spring.
If planting bulbs could have stopped the dread of spring, Ruth would have gardened in the middle of the night, but for her there was never any way out of a fact. This house, along with all the others on the block, was to be razed to make way for a new approach to the bridge. In March, she would not sit in a rocking chair with a shotgun across her lap as young Gladys Ledger would like her to do, nor would she let Gladys organize the other boarders into any kind of protest. For most of them losing the house meant no more than finding another room to live in. Mavis Collingwood had been about to move out when the expropriation notice arrived and was staying on now only out of loyalty, knowing Ruth couldn’t easily rent her room again. The sick boy would be well and gone, in jail if Ruth couldn’t prevent that either, or in working safety on a boat or in the trees.
The only two who worried her were Clara, her mother-in-law, and Willard Steele, who had been in the house since Ruth bought it fourteen years ago, using as down payment the compensation money from her accident. Clara had decided that this was as good a winter as any to die, but she wouldn’t. Willard did not think about it, incapable of living in any terms that included change. Whatever Ruth decided for herself would have to include both of them somehow.
“I thought you’d be a fighter,” Gladys had said.
“What you lose is what you survive with,” Ruth answered, her right arm for a house, her husband for her mother-in-law, two rooms in the basement from the insurance paid for a dead child, and now whatever she could get with this new compensation.
“You can’t fight the expropriation itself,” Mavis Collingwood had agreed, “but you can fight for a fair price.”
Mavis, filling up her room with chapters of her Ph.D. thesis, which had everyone in the house reading Dickens, was good at the system and did not want to discover how little control one had over what happened, what a “fair price” for anything was.
“The government’s always fair, isn’t it?” Joanie Vaughan asked, her hair in curlers at breakfast and at dinner so that she always looked to Ruth like something to be opened later by lusting boss or lusting boy friend. For Joanie, with all her dependent daydreams, only people could be unfair, the men with big cars who either had wives or didn’t want them.
“You’re not going to try to buy another house, are you?” Tom Petross wanted to know. “Why don’t you get into business? Why don’t you go into business with me?”
“Doing what, Tom?” Ruth asked, her lined smile opening over handsome teeth, as young as her body.
Ten years younger, she could have been tempted not only because Tom Petross was an inventive and practical young man but because she would have liked to keep him near her. He had been with her longer than the others, except for Willard; he had been the first of the young Americans to come across the border for sanctuary. Tom had not needed her help after the first month, finding himself a job when no one could, in the middle of winter, as a short-order cook from six in the morning until two in the afternoon.
Ruth’s husband, who had married her in a grand gesture just before he went gladly off to war, didn’t like these young punks coming up across the border and curling up in Ruth’s pocket-book and heart.
“They’re my people,” she said.
“You talk like Americans were a bloody tribe of Indians. You changed your citizenship when you married me, didn’t you?”
She had and could therefore get a job sorting mail at Christmas, when she still had two hands, when she still had a daughter who would grow up Canadian, but a country for Ruth wasn’t so much something to belong to as something more to lose, as these young men were losing theirs. She understood them as she understood herself, glad of whatever snag could hold her still awhile. She was also angry for them, as she was not for herself.
Sometimes she was angry for all of them, even for Joanie and Gladys. Anger was the one thing that could keep them all alive for her, even in her dreams, so that they didn’t all come tumbling out of the sky at her like dying birds.
“I’m not fitting anyone with wings, Tom, especially you.”
“Hey, that’s cool, Ruth. You always stay in your space,” Stew said, his eyes shining behind his long hair, in his own space always.
Stew Meadow would get himself carefully stoned and sit on a curb across the street to watch the house come down over no one’s ears, a happening just for him, who would get past experience instead of going through it, taking nothing but new notes for his clarinet.
By the fire, late at night, with the bulb catalogue, Ruth listened to all their voices again, as another way of postponing her own dreams or listening to theirs, alive all around her in the sleepi
ng house. Could she find an apartment somewhere? Might someone hire a fifty-year-old, one-armed caretaker with an arthritic mother-in-law and a three-quarter-witted man of forty? Two bedrooms—Ruth could sleep in the living room, when she slept, but how could she listen late at night to the sleep of all those other people from whom she might only collect rent and useless greetings? There had to be room for her own dreaming, the highway then flowing over this house as well, the sky falling.
“Ruth? Ruth? Can you hear the geese?”
Ruth got up, walked across the hall and into her mother-in-law’s room. There was no light on, but she went up to the bed and reached for the hand she knew was there, frail-boned, painful.
“I never feel sorry for them,” Clara said.
“All the pity’s for the robins.”
“And I don’t even like them.”
“Have you been asleep?” Ruth asked.
“It’s hard to know, isn’t it?”
Even after all these years it was difficult for Ruth not to offer Clara something more than her hand, but the old lady suffered being waited on only if she could give commands and stay unaware of how willing Ruth was, how willing they all were. She stood for a moment longer in case there was something Clara wanted. Then she put the hand back where she had found it and went out. Another thing they never did was say good night, perhaps because it would have closed off a time in which they often encountered each other briefly, like that, the two restless watchdogs of a house that was never locked. They were not afraid of burglars.
“No need to be while you’ve got all the thieves already living under your roof,” Ruth’s husband said.
Did many women marry because they loved their mothers-in-law? Ruth’s own mother remarried when Ruth was ten, too old to learn to be the child of another man, too old to compete with the babies that came one after another. If there had been books, she would have read them. Instead she read the seasons in the south fork of the Eel River, in the meadows at the edge of the redwoods until she was old enough—was it fourteen or thereabouts?—to work along the road, ladling up plates of gravied meat for the truckers, turning hamburgers for the tourists, listening to the locals’ yearly doubt: “Where will the road go next year?” One straightened curve would take out a café, another a sawmill. “What the road doesn’t take, the river will,” people said, but they went on planting their gardens within reach of the spring floods and building their hopes along the twisting and straightening road. Nobody imagined in those days that it would finally simply take the valley, everything in it. Ruth went north to Portland with a trucker one night, then farther north to Seattle, and finally for no good reason across the border into Canada to discover Vancouver.
And met and loved Clara and married her son and gave her a granddaughter to be outlived, a house to be outlived. Why not pity the geese? Did Clara long simply for the regularity of the journey? Was that all she really minded, not ever being able to read the road?
“Haven’t you gone to bed at all?” Tom asked, on his way to work at five in the morning, his young face still bland with sleep, no point in asking him if he’d heard the geese.
“Coffee?”
“No, I’ll get it there. I like the walk on an empty stomach.”
Ruth thought of herself, walking to the same kind of job those years ago, down the forest track, blind in that dark, on accurate feet, out into the night light of the sky over the river, across the lumber bridge to the road. Sometimes it was raining, but she could never remember wind at that time of the morning. Tom’s walk would take him across Burrard Bridge, which spanned the industrial confusion of False Creek, but in clear weather, even in the last darkness, he could look across the inlet to the mountains, lined against the open sky.
“Morning, Tom.”
“Morning, old lady,” he called in to Clara, a joke between them they didn’t explain. He never called her anything else.
At the front door, he hesitated and turned back to Ruth. “An all-night café, why not?”
“With one arm?” Ruth asked.
“With three.”
That sounded friendly. Nearly everything Tom said did, as if there were never broken things inside him, though Ruth knew better. As the door closed behind him, she began to set the table for breakfast, shoving the tea cart before her with one hip, quicker with one hand than a lot were with two, something Tom often pointed out to her.
“I use my head as well.”
She had not liked being efficient before she lost her arm. There hadn’t been any real point.
“Only solve the problems you have,” she tried to tell them all.
“And if there’s no solution?” Mavis had asked, baiting Ruth as she probably baited her students, with assumed detachment.
“Then don’t call it a problem. It isn’t one.”
“Cool, Ruth, cool,” Stew must always say.
“Cheating,” Gladys contradicted, on Mavis’ side for a change.
They couldn’t ordinarily agree, those two, Gladys a street radical, Mavis a conservative. Gladys had a heart as big as her mouth and should have trusted it more. Mavis had a mind, though what good it would do her Ruth wasn’t certain. So many gifts turn out to be obstacles, just by chance.
Willard was always the first up for breakfast, though he did not have to be at work until eight-thirty. The young people disturbed him in the morning. He preferred to begin the day quietly, neatly.
“You know, he even looks like a shoe,” Gladys remarked one day, not in his hearing; they were all absentmindedly kind to Willard. “Would it happen to anyone?”
His black hair polished to his small head, his eyes as close together as tightly laced dress shoes, his mouth a short, straight line, Willard went off every morning to sell shoes, came home every evening at quarter to six, endured dinner, and then went off on Monday night to the movies, on Tuesday night to the laundromat (he would not let Ruth or anyone else touch his clothes), on Wednesday night to a card game in Chinatown, at which he lost a budgeted amount of his salary, to his room Thursday night to write to his mother in Kamloops, to the beer parlor on Friday. Saturday night he stayed home to watch television since there was usually no one else around. Sunday he went to church and then read a thriller until it was time for him to sleep. Week in, week out, year in, year out, Willard endured the griefs and changes of the house as if they had not occurred, and came to weigh on Ruth like a negative habit. He was the only one in the house she was sometimes simply cranky with, nagging him about ashes on his butter plate, about the early hour he wanted breakfast. He was not meek so much as inattentive.
Willard had one odd, gentle mannerism. He always kissed Ruth goodbye in the morning, lips surprisingly soft and warm on her cheek. Then he knocked on Clara’s door and called, “Have a day, Mrs. Wheeler.” They had long ago stopped laughing about it or even using it themselves as a slogan. That persistent kiss and wish had lasted into minimal dignity. For the others, he behaved as if they weren’t there and perhaps didn’t notice when they had gone. Even Ruth’s daughter? Willard obviously had not thought it proper to acknowledge her while she lived. He had no way, therefore, of acknowledging her death. Could a life be made so small as to keep all suffering and joy out of it? Perhaps, with help. Ruth would not leave Willard behind.
Between Willard’s departure and the gang feeding at seven-thirty, Ruth took Clara her breakfast on the freshly cleared cart, an extra cup for herself for a companionable taste of tea until all sets of plumbing began their four-part morning harmony and it was time to cook the eggs.
Mavis was always on time, her short black curly hair wet and disciplined against her temples, her eyes shallow behind her glasses, refusing to focus a distance beyond her plate until she looked out over the podium at her first class. Because waking was always a bitter wrench for Mavis, in her dreams free of all that rational armor, she was extremely polite at breakfast.
Then Joanie, prattling about her dreams which were always violently obvious, the ill-stacked curle
rs riding above her childish face, would appear in the kitchen to “help.” Since she had never finished the buttoning and zipping when she arrived, Ruth simply herded her into the dining room in front of the cart, now carrying plates of eggs.
Gladys and Stew, cultural twins with their flowing hair and blue jeans, came in at the last minute, still sleepwalking into each other, disagreeable and affectionate. They both counted on a ride from Mavis, Gladys to the school for handicapped children where she taught a variety of uncertain skills, Stew to the university where he was slowly acquiring credits toward no degree.
Shortly after them came the boy from the basement, who had only the one name, Arthur. His military haircut had not had time to grow out, and he wore an army shirt tucked into his jeans. After a week with them, he had begun to eat with less furtive greed, and, though the nerves in his face still didn’t allow him to hold a smile, he risked quick ones now and then as a way of thanking. The others had learned not to ask these boys questions, waited for the tale to be told or not, and they didn’t offer suggestions either until Ruth indicated that it was time to help. But each of them spoke to him, even those who had not bothered in the dark morning to speak to each other, and they called him by name, for he would need them as friends when he was well enough to have friends again.
Stew always wanted to give them hash as a way through the first painful time, but Ruth did not approve. She said, for these kids, it had to be a halfway house, not a far-out house. She wanted the police to have no secondary excuse to take anyone back across the border.
“If you want to be first clarinet in the pen band, Stew, that’s your business.”
“I can’t see a narc getting through your front door, you know.”
“Not only through my front door but into the living room for a cup of coffee,” Ruth answered firmly. “I have no quarrel with them.”
“No quarrel with the pigs?” Gladys demanded.
Ruth would not argue past practical point. She hadn’t the patience. Mavis often did on principle. Gladys shouted out bits from The Georgia Straight, the local underground paper. Stew, even without aid of drug, floated out on his own smile, larking a whistle over the noise to counterpoint rather than harass.
