by Rule, Jane;
Ruth heard the young people come in, being unusually quiet for that, or any hour. You didn’t explain a man like Hal to anyone. It didn’t do any good. Tolerance was not what he wanted. They’d all have to cope as they could.
Ruth tried to sleep, but, like a drunk, she could not close her eyes for long before the bed began to fall away into space, and her own mother’s face would loom large, then recede, saying over and over again what Clara had said: “Let me go, Ruth.” There had never been any way to bargain, even when she had had that proverbial right arm. Her losses rained down on her from the great space of the night. What little comfort there was, she had had.
Ruth got up quietly, put on a robe, and went out into the hall. It wasn’t fair now to take her wakefulness to Clara. It wasn’t any longer loving to do so.
“Ruth?” that light voice inquired. “Ruth?”
A rock crashed through one of the high remaining windows next door.
I hear the geese, Clara, and I do feel sorry for them. Ruth wiped tears from her face and went back to Hal, who slept like a monument to himself, no flying thing, rock or bird, disturbing his faith in the future.
Joanie was timidly presentable at breakfast, the only one to appear. Tom and Willard had gone off early as usual, and Mavis and Gladys had left without eating. Ruth fixed Hal a proper trucker’s breakfast, and he was glad to occupy himself with that until he refused a second piece of pie.
“Got to watch it,” he said ruefully. “Let me tell you something, Joanie. Looking like that at breakfast is a real improvement, gives a man a good appetite.”
Joanie smiled uncertainly at him and excused herself.
“Girl like that,” he said to Ruth, “doesn’t have much going for her and has to make the most of it.”
He helped clear the table, disturbing the efficiency necessary to Ruth to accomplish the tidying, but she did not correct him. She could manage for a day or two, even if he went on being helpful.
“That was good pie,” he said, and again his hand reached down for her and squeezed. “Good piece of ass, too.” The dimple at the corner of his mouth was deep. “Wouldn’t mind seconds of that.”
“I’m not interested in that toothpick,” Ruth said.
He laughed, pleased with her, pleased with himself.
If being his wife were just this, she could have managed, oh, very well. His appetite had always been good. She liked to feed him. His sexual vanity was something he could share with her, make her feel for herself, but she could not live with the bullying vanity of his mind.
“Minds don’t come like cunts!” she had once shouted at him. “Leave me alone!”
“A woman’s mind is a cunt, and don’t forget it!”
She had a frigid mind then as well as a closed heart. His need to be obeyed and believed, when it went unmet, was as painful to him as it was to her, but she could not meet it and had to watch instead his normal intelligence go stupid with power. He did have a prick for a brain, and Ruth didn’t think it natural, except in bed, where he could tell her what she wanted and give it to her, even now after all these years of separateness, of bitterness, of loss.
Taking a shower afterwards, she could hear snatches of his self-satisfied whistle as he shaved. Having been a good husband, he must now set off to be a good son. He would not ask her to go with him, and she was glad of that. She did not want to be a good daughter to Clara if it meant finding a clean and comfortable place for her to die.
Clara and Ruth did not try to explain to or comfort each other through the day. They carried on their usual, open-ended conversation, the hesitant duet of voices they had accomplished over the years, and they were both relieved when Tom came home in the middle of the afternoon.
“Hi, old lady,” he called.
“Hello, son,” she answered, the lightest brush of love in the term which she’d never used to address Hal.
“I’m taking the harem out to dinner tonight, Ruth,” he announced, “even Joanie. Gladys says my generosity is a mark of profound cowardice, but she’s accepted the invitation; so has Mavis.”
“You should let me pay for it,” Ruth said.
“I wouldn’t think of it. Where we’re going they nearly pay you to eat the food anyway, and I may have help. Who do you think dropped by to see me today?… Stew. I didn’t recognize him, his hair all cut off. He even had on a tie.”
“How is he?” Clara asked, a hopeful urgency in her voice Ruth hadn’t heard in weeks.
“He seems really fine. Oh, a bit nervous at first, a bit thin. He’s staying with his folks over on the north shore. He’s going to apply to law school for the fall.”
“Stew?”
“That’s right,” Tom said. “I invited him for dinner. He wasn’t sure he could make it. I told him everybody’d love to see him. I told him he should drop by here to see both of you.”
“He doesn’t think we’re angry with him, does he?” Clara asked.
“I told him Joanie and Ruth had been to see him at the hospital. He didn’t remember that, but I think it made him feel better, easier about coming over.”
“Oh, Tom, I’m glad,” Ruth said.
“Yeah, it was good to see him.”
“Did he ask about Arthur?”
“No, we didn’t mention Arthur.” Tom paused and shook his head. “He may not even remember Arthur.”
What was remembering? The flickering smile like a light about to go out for good? Some children lasted only a few days and then were washed away by one current or another. Though Ruth still sometimes dreamed of her lost hand, she could not even remember clearly what it had looked like. Categories of concern break down. She let memory fail her, the only kind of dreaming she could sometimes avoid.
“Here’s Hal,” Clara said, having turned to the window at the slamming of a car door.
He came in jaunty, hat tilted back on his head, toothpick riding high. Tom nodded and turned past him in Clara’s doorway.
“The professional dodger,” Hal said, laughing at his own wit. “Well, it’s settled: private room and bath, color TV, in Queen’s Court, and I can move you in tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!” Ruth exclaimed
“A job needs to be done, get it done. We can pack you up tonight, Mother, and we’ll be ready to go in the morning.”
“But Christmas is only five days away,” Ruth protested. “She could move after the New Year.”
“I haven’t got ’til after the New Year. I’ve got to be out of here tomorrow night.”
“You don’t have to move her,” Ruth pleaded. “Tom could do it, he and Mavis.”
“She moves tomorrow, and I do it. That’s settled.”
“It is not settled!” Ruth shouted.
Clara put her face in her frail hands.
“Oh, Clara, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Ruth said, going to her.
“Let him get it over with,” she said quietly, “please.”
Hal stood, fury in his face at the scene before him. You are a good son, Ruth wanted to say to him. It’s just that you’re such a bastard. She turned away from Clara, walked past him out of the room, out of the house into the strong taste of snow that had begun to fall. Why wasn’t she old enough to be able to go off and die? What point was there now in anything?
At quarter to six she was, nevertheless, in the kitchen, cooking for Hal and Clara and Willard, who smiled in at her before he went to finish his paper.
“Willard, Clara’s going into a nursing home tomorrow,” Ruth said.
“She’s getting on, Mrs. Wheeler is,” he observed.
There was no point in imagining, after all this time, that she could teach Willard to talk. The unnatural quiet in the house was prelude to what living would come to be. Without Clara, without the buffer of young people between them, Ruth wondered if she had the charity for Willard. His refusal to take any space at all had been convenient in the clutter of living this house had contained, but he’d be less company than a dog when they were alone together, stored tid
ily in a high rise for the rest of their arbitrary lives.
Ruth only half listened to Hal’s monologue through dinner. He was talking about investments, a duplex or a small apartment building that could pay for itself out in the valley somewhere maybe or on Vancouver Island. His plans for her did not include Willard, whose welfare concerned Hal as little as it concerned Willard himself.
“I haven’t decided,” Ruth said evasively.
“You’ve got two months at the most,” Hal insisted. “There’s nothing to hang on for now that Mother’s settled. You’ll have the money to move next week.”
“I’m not ready to move.”
“You want to wait until the kids break every window in the house?”
“Kids aren’t going to scare me out of my own house.”
“Ruth, you’ve got to make things happen. You can’t just wait around and let them happen to you. Women!” he said, shaking his head at Willard, who, simple as he was, would be expected to understand better than Ruth.
“It’s not your problem,” Ruth said.
“Listen, any problem you’ve got is my problem.”
Ruth yawned. It was nerves more than weariness, though she knew she must be very tired. Hal pounded so on the doors she had shut and locked against him years and years ago.
“I’m going to shovel the walk,” Willard announced.
Packing Clara’s belongings was not a major undertaking. She had only a few clothes. Aside from her sewing box and her radio, there was nothing else she wanted. Clara did not like cluttered surfaces, and she did not keep reminders, like photographs. The baggage of the past she carried in her head.
“Books? No, dear,” she said in answer to Hal’s question about the contents of her bookcase. “I don’t read much to myself any more.”
“There’d be room for your chair if you want it,” Hal offered.
“Take it,” Ruth urged, bewildered by the meagerness of Clara’s possessions.
Clara consented to please them both, but she was essentially indifferent to what left the house with her, not born into a culture accustomed to furnishing its dead for the comforts of the journey. Hal moved the suitcases from one side of the room to the other, tonguing his toothpick in and out of his mouth. Then he paused and looked down at his mother.
“Now, just one thing, if you don’t like the place, nobody ever said a woman couldn’t change her mind.”
She sighed and gave him a frail smile, too tired now to attempt words to reassure him. He carried the chair out of the room.
Ruth would have liked to continue that speech, but she knew Clara had no reassurance for her either, needing the little courage she had left for herself. Ruth would have liked to make promises and plans, too, but she had none of Hal’s illusions that she could make anything happen.
“Is it still snowing?” Clara asked.
“Yes.”
“Don’t forget to put out something for the birds, will you?”
Ruth smiled. That and the taking of Clara’s hand were the only expressions of affection left to Ruth, who had intended to keep small life offerings before Clara the winter long, but she was being asked to accept Clara, too, after these faithful years, as a bird of passage whose time had come. Had she really expected not to have to face anything but Clara’s death? I would have buried you under the lilac bush with the robins.
Hal needed a drink, served him in the living room, where he could pretend for a while to be self-satisfied master of the situation, but he had done enough that day to leave the problem of Ruth’s future alone. He was tired.
“What time in the morning?” Ruth asked.
“Just after nine.” Hal looked at her steadily. “I don’t ask you to thank me.”
“I suppose I should be able to.”
“You never were,” he said with no bitterness in his voice, simply stating a fact.
Being his sort of man had always seemed to Ruth a thankless task, but she had not until that moment seen any point in it either. Perhaps all the years of bullying had been necessary preparation for these hard endings which he was strong enough to manage without her gratitude.
“You’ve been good to her,” Hal said quietly.
Ruth shook her head impatiently. Crude duty was all he would ever understand, a virtue she had rejected by the time she was ten years old.
“And you don’t ask me to thank you either,” Hal said, as if agreeing with her.
“You need another drink?”
“Can you wait that long?” he asked, giving her his deep, dimpled grin, punctuated by his toothpick.
“Maybe,” she said, answering the smile, but she didn’t want to wait rigid against his will. She wanted to give in to him in the one way she could.
Lying in the noisy dark of his deep sleep, Ruth listened again to the unusual quiet of the returning young. If they had all really been her children, if she had borne them and borne with Hal, he would have driven them all out of the house and Clara to her grave years ago. Thankless tasks all right, hard on a decent man unless he could believe in duty, which had also taught him to kill men and trees. She touched his handsome head, heavy on her breast. Poor bastard.
CHAPTER FIVE
“We had better do something about Christmas,” Tom said to the back of Ruth’s head as she sat watching the snow fall.
“Willard’s going to Kamloops to his mother,” Ruth said.
“And Joanie’s going home, but that still leaves Mavis and Gladdy and me … and you.”
Ruth had been sitting in the empty house since ten in the morning, her heart stiff with the loss of Clara, her body stiff with unaccustomed attention. She had traveled so far in that emptiness she had forgotten Mavis and Gladys and Tom, perhaps even, as Tom was suggesting, herself. She had no will to return, even to him.
“What is it you want then?”
“A tree, presents, a Christmas dinner.”
“Why?”
“Look at me, Ruth,” Tom urged. “I’ve lost my whole family, too, and you didn’t let me just sit and stare. Christmas can be a lousy day, but trying to ignore it just makes it worse.”
“I could ignore it,” Ruth said. “I don’t keep birthdays of the dead.”
“All right, it’s obscene, barbaric, commercial, and all things unholy, but it happens to be the only thing we’ve got.”
“Hal used to talk about singing Christmas carols in the trenches, all good Christians together.”
“Has he left?”
“Yes.”
“Then we don’t have to sing in the trenches,” Tom said, offering to smile.
“It occurred to me last night that, if you all had been my children, you would have left me in peace years ago.”
“Interesting, because it occurred to us last night that we’d been behaving like children long enough. We’ve decided to turn this place into a commune, everybody taking a turn at cooking and the dishes, except for Willard, of course.”
“It’s my house, Tom Petross,” Ruth flared, “and I run it.”
“Sure, fine; a commune with a dictator, that’s all we meant.”
“You begin to sound like Gladdy.”
“Do I?”
The contrived innocence of his tone and expression forced Ruth to register the lively shifting patterns even in these remnants of her household. Clara, Tom and Gladys are in love, and they want Christmas. Why? tipped to Why not? in one moment’s unspoken information.
“All right,” Ruth said, “we’ll get the silly tree. Come on.”
Snow softened the street, covering the evidence of neglect in the yards of deserted houses, turning loitering adolescents back into warful children, hilarious in snow forts facing each other on either side of the street. Tom ducked a snowball and fired back.
“Nobody is finally a pacifist,” Ruth commented.
“Not in this elemental sense, no,” Tom agreed, ducking and hurling another.
A snowball thudded against Ruth’s back.
“If I had two hands …”<
br />
“Here,” Tom said, handing her a snowball.
She lobbed it with high accuracy into the fort across the street.
“Got me!” someone shouted, falling melodramatically through the soft snow wall.
A hail of snowballs followed.
“We’re outnumbered,” Tom said. “We’d better run for it.”
Patched with snow, out of breath and laughing, they arrived at the bus stop, where rather more sedate neighbors stared away from them with superior smiles. A neighborhood was a neighborhood after all, and one was expected to act one’s age.
“We mustn’t fool around too long, Tom,” Ruth said, trying to catch her breath and her dignity. “I have to get dinner on.”
“Gladdy’s cooking tonight,” Tom said.
“Maybe I didn’t get this straight. Who’s supposed to be the dictator of this commune?”
“You are, Ruth.”
“And what’s for dinner?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“But the mess in the kitchen won’t be.”
“I’m on KP.”
“It begins to sound like a barracks.”
“It’s going to feel like home. Wait and see.”
Mavis and Gladys were both in the kitchen by the time Ruth and Tom got home with the tree.
“Don’t ask what it is,” Gladys warned. “It’s French with a Greek accent.”
Ruth refrained from looking into the kitchen. She went off instead to find the stored tree stand and ornaments, the sharp missing of Clara no longer a silence in her head but instead a recording of all the sounds of the house to play back to Clara tomorrow. She was not, after all, dead. She was only a dozen blocks away in a pleasant room with a view of the water, resting instead of having to rise to the occasion.
Though Willard’s chair was in the place where a tree should have been, Tom had not moved it. Instead he and Mavis had moved the couch so that the tree could stand at the corner of the big window. They were spreading a sheet there when Ruth came back in with the stand.
“The ornament boxes and lights are in the back hall,” she explained, and then she glanced into the dining room. “Wine for dinner?”
