by Rule, Jane;
“You’re irresponsible,” Gladys would shout after him. “A post-revolutionary state, achieved in isolation, isn’t morally any better than capitalist exploitation.”
“Oh, the poor language, the poor language,” Mavis would sigh, giving up again.
Still, she not only went out of her way in the morning to see that Gladys got to work on time but often waited for her in the late afternoon or went in to help with the last tying on of shoes and sandbagging into wheelchairs.
“You wouldn’t think Mavis had a way with kids,” Gladys said one day, “but she does. Nothing she says to them. Not the way she looks at them. It must be her hands. She has very good hands.”
Ruth had noticed that, too. When Clara needed help out of a chair, she did not turn to one of the men. She always ordered Mavis to her, who, not seeming to take more than ordinary care, could get Clara up without the briefest light of pain in her face. Ruth was at a disadvantage, but she and Clara together had developed a way for Ruth to get her out of bed fairly easily. It was Ruth’s last chore of the morning, after the dishes were cleared away and Arthur settled to wash the pots and pans.
Clara sat in her room most of the morning, reading, sewing, dozing. Ruth usually stretched out on the living-room couch and slept.
This morning the foghorns had begun with the first gray light, and now that Ruth was not distracted by human noise she looked out to them, to the heavy sea fog, darkened and seasoned by the slash burning on the northern mountains, closed off from view. The only evidence of water out there just a few hundred yards away was the persistent and repetitive conversation of foghorns and ship whistles. Ruth could not see much beyond the two mountain-ash trees on the boulevard, whose orange berries signaled to irresolute and quarreling robins, in this northern and yet temperate climate never certain whether to stay or go. The debate in the branches grew inevitably raucous and unreasonable until one drunken bird sailed out over the lawn and into the plate glass of the living-room window, leaving blood and feathers like a signature on the misty view.
“Another one?” Clara called, having heard the thud.
“Another,” Ruth confirmed and went to the back porch to find a shovel.
The fog-damp lawn soaked her sneakers, and she coughed against the taste of smoke, alerting the birds. They flopped out of the trees in disgruntled and alarmed pairs, racketing about Ruth and then shying off toward the house. She did not watch them, but her neck muscles stiffened to the dread of a mass suicide against the window. They circled back into the trees instead, though a few remained in the large lilac by the house, under which Ruth would bury the dead bird. She did not know, as she dug awkwardly with one hand, whether the drops that fell wet on her back through her thin shirt were shit or rain.
The first bird Ruth had ever buried was one she had killed, by aggressive accident, shying a rock at it as it perched on her favorite river boulder. She had probably wanted to stone the small children who had edged her out of her room, the yard, and even the orchard, so that the river bar was the only place left for her to be alone, if she walked far enough. She could not remember feeling sorry, only surprised and then responsible. A hardhearted child, her mother had called her. Closed-hearted, more truly. If she had let grief in then, there would have been room for nothing else. It was Clara who had taught her this stupid pity. In March, when the bulldozers arrived, they would unearth all this planting of bulbs and birds.
Arthur had gone back to his room in the basement, leaving the kitchen in careful order. Clara was listening to her radio. Ruth went to her own room, changed her shoes and shirt, and stretched out on her bed, her arm over her eyes.
The day wore differently for each one. Tom was usually the first home, smelling faintly of cooking grease, tired and quiet. He went as directly as he was allowed to his room and didn’t appear again until the others arrived, Mavis, Gladys, and Stew together, Joanie delivered to the door by one large American car or another, which would usually be back to collect her and the understood fare as shortly after dinner as she could get out of curlers again. Willard was last, carrying his head as he had all day, parallel to the floor. He did not straighten up until dinner was over and his evening routine was about to begin. Sibling rivals at the breakfast table, the young people courted each other at dinner or quarreled as lovers do for each other’s attention. Gladys, whatever else people tried to pretend, was the sexual center. She always looked as if she were comfortably and wonderfully naked under her clothes.
“Rape is the only adequate answer to any of Gladdy’s arguments,” Stew announced.
“Our radical male chauvinist,” Gladys replied, aware that Arthur was watching her, that Tom was refusing to.
Joanie shifted in her chair, restless with the attention Gladys always got, though she considered no one in the house eligible. Stew would be for Joanie the worst of the lot, with his hash and his clarinet and his long hair, never mind that he had lovely eyes. She did not know he had an allowance from his rich rather. Tom, well, if Tom had been something other than a cook—say, a lawyer or a stockbroker or even just some sort of executive—he was attractive enough, even sanitary, but Joanie was a little afraid of him, the way he was friendly for no good reason. Arthur was too new and illegal and sick to count. Once Ruth overheard Joanie asking Gladys why she would ever consider going to bed with Stew. “For the fun of it,” Gladys had answered. Sad that Joanie could not believe even a particle of that reply. Or did her passion for large cars have at least something to do with the size and comfort of the back seat? No.
“I have an extra ticket to Cinema 16 tonight,” Mavis said, apparently to the table at large, but Gladys immediately refused it. “Tom?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“Could you drop me at the pub, though?” Gladys asked.
“It’s not exactly between here and the university,” Mavis answered.
“I know, but I …”
“Yeah, I’ll drop you at the pub.”
Mavis was tired of being the household taxi, perhaps a reason she had decided to move out, though either Tom or Gladys was the important reason, Ruth couldn’t decide which. Mavis did not ask silly questions or make silly remarks; so what went on in her silly heart Ruth had more difficulty guessing than with the others.
“You’re not a keyhole peeper; you’re a mind fucker,” Gladys said to Ruth.
Not Clara herself, who usually joined them for dinner, could modify Gladys’ language.
“If you have to be obscene, couldn’t you at least be accurate?” Mavis asked. “I’m a mind fucker, if you like. Ruth’s a mind reader.”
No. Each of them had great areas of themselves which were closed off to Ruth. With Willard it might be because he was unaware of those areas himself. With Mavis, it was a matter of simple privacy. Ruth was not nosy. She felt required to know as much as each one of them wanted her to know, which was often more than they said. How else could she know unless she thought along with each one as far as she could?
The plot of Ruth’s own life had ended two years ago with the death of her daughter, or she saw it that way. Perhaps there had never been much cause and effect, only accidents and whims, but having a child deceives one into believing in a future, the child’s. Even birthdays are achievements. Then, afterwards, all those growing years seem random between the accidents of birth and death. She might have been, she might have had, she might have done anything … even lived.
Now, watching Mavis believe enough in the value of her thesis to fear failing it, seeing Gladys out the door with one of her dozen outraged placards to demonstrate for a new world, waiting for Tom to heal enough inside to risk himself again, knowing that Stew courted a jail sentence to punish himself for all his unpaid-for joy, wondering when the final car would carry Joanie off to daydream domesticity, Ruth could hope only one thing, that each of them might live awhile anyway, even if in fear, protest, pain, guilt, need. She could be watchdog, cook, mind reader, cipher, whatever, from day to day a while longer herself.
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In the evening paper, which Willard always brought home, were all the ads for houses, for apartments, for jobs. It was too soon to look, the move still nearly six months away. Ruth hesitated at the personals, safe and amused in the knowledge that no one would be advertising for her. Then she put the paper down and went in to Clara, who liked to be read to for an hour or so at that time of evening. Mavis sometimes read her Dickens, which Clara enjoyed with some critical confidence. Tom read her Loren Eiseley, whose ideas she often failed to grasp but whose language she thought so beautiful it didn’t matter. With Stew, who read her concrete poems, and Gladys, who read her The Georgia Straight or The Pedestal, the local women’s liberation paper, Clara was simply patient. Ruth was the only one who asked Clara what she would like. Lately she had wanted to listen to the novels of Ethel Wilson, who lived still, an old and ailing lady, not many blocks away in another world.
“How does she live in her world and write about ours?”
“Why do you think being married to a doctor and living in that kind of place makes so much difference?” Ruth asked.
“Because I like to,” Clara admitted. “Still we all share the weather and the mountains. It is a bond.”
Ruth would have liked to read a book about her own past weather and the trees. She never found one, and how could it exist? There had been so few to know it, and now it was gone. No one traveling seventy miles an hour had to suffer the smell of rotting eels, the wakening bear, the irritated skunk. Bridges were built high now, so that, even if there had been someone to listen through a night of swelling rains, there would be no sound of thrashing cable and splitting timber as the lumber bridge went out. But Ruth seemed to carry her weather with her: what could survive the winter was still broken by spring.
“You’re tired tonight.”
Ruth nodded, looking for her place to begin reading. Before she had found it, she had to get up to answer an assertive knocking at the door.
“Police,” one of the two men said, neither in uniform.
“What can I do for you?”
“Answer a few questions.”
“Come in.”
Her age, her lack of arm, the family comfort of the large living room tempered their authority. She answered without hesitation questions about the ownership of the house, the number of occupants, the length of time she had lived there.
“Any Americans?”
“I was one once,” Ruth answered, smiling.
“Any deserters?”
“Would you call me one?”
“Army deserters.”
“I don’t ask questions like that,” Ruth said. “If the Canadian government has no objection to them, there’s no reason why I should.”
“Some of them aren’t here legally.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ruth said.
“If you harbor …”
“This isn’t a hideout; it’s a boardinghouse. I don’t harbor anyone. I do make a good cup of coffee.”
They did not stay for it. The younger of the two hesitated at the door as if to explain himself, but, before he had half a sentence out, his partner urged him away.
“Why are they coming here now?” Clara demanded. “They’ve never come before.”
“Just routine, I suppose,” Ruth answered, relieved that Arthur had gone to his room.
“Do you think he is illegal?”
“I don’t know,” Ruth answered, “and I’m not going to ask.”
Some of the others surely had been, but legality for them was such a frail security that you couldn’t read it in their behavior. The police, cooperating with American authorities, weren’t always concerned with such niceties. In a world where even God, never mind Abraham, killed his only son as a loving gesture, how could the police understand a young Isaac or Jesus who wouldn’t offer himself up to the slaughter? But they had not come to her house before. Something had happened.
In the morning, when Ruth saw the first moving van parked at the end of the block, she realized that the change was not to be put off until spring. One by one all the houses on the street would be emptied, waiting for demolition. As they were, the kids would begin to move in, paying a cheap rent by the month or even by the week. The police had anticipated that. They would be back, often.
CHAPTER TWO
Ruth’s restless insomnia had for years been a way for her to take the burdens of her own moods out of the house. Clara, who could not walk, needed space for the anxieties and griefs they shared, and the others in the house should not be infected by the seasons of bleak fright life could become. Ruth went out and returned at any hour, more like an animal than a human resident. She had always liked the friendly street she lived on, lined with mountain ash, open to the sky, its large old houses either converted into suites or used like her own as boardinghouses. There was more sociable traffic than in neighborhoods to the west, still zoned for single-family dwellings. But it was a street too close to the center of this young city to stay that way. The concrete canyon walls must inevitably rise against the hope of trees and sky. From wilderness to this edge where she was, Ruth had been moving closer and closer to that center. Was there any use in backing off now? The houses she walked by were for living in, high-rise apartments for jumping off, but where else was there to go?
On the beach that opened at the end of the street, Ruth sat on a great log, one of the many washed up from booms broken up in sudden storms. Often the students who stayed at the house got summer jobs on the tugboats, and they told stories of the slow-motion drama of that life, where there was no way to take quick shelter against unexpected weather. A cove in sight was still two hours’ dragging weight away. The log boom she watched now, anchored in the sheltered bay, would soon be towed into one of the mills or around under Lion’s Gate Bridge to the harbor, where ships waited for their cargo. Ruth knew men on the docks as well, those who balanced on the floating logs and dreamed of getting winch ratings in the winter weather. She had met several when they were clumped together for a time as industrial accidents of similar interest to hospital staffs, occupational-therapy clinics, and compensation boards. Five years ago she might have helped Arthur get a job either on the tugs or at the front, no awkward questions asked. Now there were too few jobs for such favors.
Ruth looked across the water to the north shore, which had been nearly wild coast when she first arrived in Vancouver in 1939. Now waterside apartment buildings blocked the view of smaller houses behind them, and roads cut higher and higher into the wooded mountainside, great wounds with scabs of houses forming on either side. She turned to look at the city itself, the west-end high rises a surprise growth of only ten years, where before there had been old wood frame houses, gradually abandoned by families but still creating arbitrary families like her own. Now it was one of the most densely populated areas in North America. She had heard her husband argue that such a concentration of people conserved land and fuel, cut down the need for transportation, and was a very civilized solution to population pressures. She had never heard anyone who lived in an apartment argue such virtues, probably because they did not sit down at large dinner tables to argue about anything. She saw a single TV dinner in the window of a toaster oven, a thin film of gravy bubbling on the surface of a dry slice of turkey.
She would not be alone, of course. There would be Willard and Clara. For Willard, if he noticed the difference at all, it would probably be a relief with no clutter of young people to evade or ignore. Clara would live more in books, and, if she wearied of the unaccustomed silence, she’d probably become one of those inveterate phoners of hot-line programs who occasionally amused or alarmed her now. Clara who had shaken her head in disbelief at a drunken old woman calling over the public airways, “My son’s a homosexual and I need help to face this tragedy,” might begin calling the world to say, “My son is a road builder …”
Ruth felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to greet Tom, taking a detour onto the beach on his way home from work, the afternoon sun a pleasu
re after the days of fog. He sat down beside her, closed his hands over a book he was carrying, and rocked himself as if for comfort and warmth against some interior cold. There was no wind.
“Do you see it?” he asked after a moment, nodding at the view. “I forget to look.”
“I see it,” Ruth said, a reservation in her voice to suggest that she hadn’t let it be a pleasure to her.
“I had a letter from my sister today.”
Ruth had not known Tom had a sister, though she had assumed a family life for him as she watched him settle into her house.
“Funny, I’ve gone to General Delivery every week for months. Nearly forgotten what my name looked like, just written out in longhand on an envelope like that. Made me feel … oh … odd.”
As she often did with Tom, Ruth matched herself with him, wondering how she would feel to receive a letter from someone she was related to, but she had no idea where any of them were. She somehow doubted that her mother was still alive.
“Dad’s had a heart attack. She says it’s changed him. She and Mother wish I’d come home.”
“To jail?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t say.”
“Are you going to go?”
“No,” Tom said without hesitation.
They both watched a young man and a small boy playing with a Frisbee.
“When I think of them,” Tom said, “I think they have no way left to live.” He thumbed through his book. Then he read aloud, “‘The pond was a place of reek and corruption, of fetid smells and of oxygen-starved fish.’” He flipped a page and looked down it to another marked statement. “‘It is here that the water failures, driven to desperation, make starts in a new element.’” He turned to Ruth. “He’s talking about the lungfish, the clumsy misfit who finally climbed out onto the shore. It probably didn’t have much of a life, just learning how to breathe the air, but it did learn. I couldn’t go back.”
