by Rule, Jane;
“He just doesn’t want you to have an abortion.”
“Oh well, he’s too well trained not to agree that a woman has a right to control her own body, but when I told him to cut out all the poetry, Mavis said, ‘It’s his baby, too, of course.’ Mavis! I said it’s nobody’s goddamned baby, and why do I have to live with a bunch of romantic reactionaries? We can’t even take care of ourselves. What would we do with a kid? And if we got hung up on the creative miracle, I’d be dropping one every ten months, and the place would turn into a baby farm.”
“Do you think you’ll ever want children, Gladdy?”
For an answer Gladys burst into tears, but it took only a couple of minutes for that excess of feeling to spill over.
“That’s silly,” Gladys said, blowing her nose. “I’m not sad, Ruth. But I sure can wish sometimes that someone would invent something to replace sex. It’s such a bind! Maybe I’ll want kids. I don’t know. I just know I don’t want one now, and, if I ever did, I think maybe I’d rather it wasn’t my own. Then it would be perfectly clear it was just a job, you know? Not some sort of trumped-up destiny.”
“Just a job,” Ruth repeated.
“Well, I don’t mean it like that. I mean, keep it ordinary. Kids keep getting born to be their parents’ reason for living, their parents’ salvation, and that’s wrong. Claire didn’t save your life or your marriage or anything like that, did she?”
“No,” Ruth said. “Children are more apt to cost you both.”
“That’s what I said to Tom. How do we know where we’ll be or how we’ll feel about each other in a year’s time? We ought at least to know what we want to do with our own lives before we start messing with someone else’s.”
“And Tom can’t see that?”
“Tom wants to marry me,” Gladys said in a tone of such gloom that Ruth laughed. “Is it funny?”
“No, I don’t suppose it is,” Ruth said, “but people don’t usually make it sound like the final tragedy of life.”
“Even though it is for most people. I don’t ever want to get married, even for kids. Tom says that’s silly. Marriage doesn’t have to be a prison, but that’s all it’s designed for. Otherwise there’s no point in it, and it’s such a stupid thing to fight about.”
“I don’t suppose it is.”
“Will you tell me something? Why do you let Hal come back like that?”
“I don’t let him; he just does.”
“But he’s so awful. You don’t really have to put up with that.”
“Gladdy, when you’re young, it feels as if you have a lot of choices. Maybe you really do. I did marry Hal. What he thinks about that and what I think about that are different, and what I think can never be more than half of it.”
“But he doesn’t give you any space at all.”
“He’s given me lots of space, nearly the whole of it.”
“Wow,” Gladdy said softly.
“Clara says Tom doesn’t like his job at the country club.”
“No, he doesn’t. There’s nothing to like. And he won’t solve that one until he gets over thinking there are private solutions to public facts.”
“You’re his private solution?”
“I guess,” Gladys said. “He matters to me, too, you know.”
Ruth’s spirit was both lighter and more troubled when Gladys left, lighter because she had been taken out of herself for those hours, troubled because there was no way to protect Gladys or anyone determined to take life into her own hands. Claire smiled up at her from the page, hopeful, and Willard turned his key in the lock.
“Have to be off an hour early tomorrow,” he said.
“All right.”
The trouble with you, Willard, and the relief, is that you’re so easy to please.
It was not until nearly noon the next day that Ruth discovered why Willard had to be off so early in the morning. The RCMP phoned her.
“There’s a man in the house you sold to the city who claims it still belongs to you. He’s barricaded himself in, and he’s threatening to shoot anybody who sets foot on the property.”
“Don’t do anything,” Ruth pleaded. “I’ll be right down.”
As Ruth turned into her old street, she was in a disaster area of razed buildings. Her own house and the one next to it were the only ones left standing, and they had already been torn at, tormented by children and scavengers, windows broken, planks wrenched from the porches. A small crowd, attracted by the red pulse of the lights of three police cars, was being urged back by a policeman with a megaphone. At the sight of him, Ruth felt bitter bile rise in her throat, and for a second she remembered Arthur quite clearly, not as he was being taken off but as he sat at the table, smiling at Gladys. Beyond the cluster of people, there were not only other policemen but also men with cameras, obviously from the newspapers and television studios. One man was speaking into a microphone. Ruth pushed her way through the spectators until she was near enough to the policeman to call to him.
“I’m Ruth Wheeler,” she said. “I’m the owner of the house. You just phoned me.”
“Talk to the man in the car there,” he directed, “the one talking to that other one.”
As Ruth looked where her attention was directed, she saw Tom turn away from the police car and start up the walk.
“Tom!”
If he heard her, he did not acknowledge it.
“Don’t follow him, lady. He knows the guy.”
Two policemen blocked her way.
“I’m the owner. Let me through. He might not listen to Tom,” Ruth protested.
Tom was on the front porch, opening the door. The report of a gun startled everyone, and Ruth ran forward up the path, at the edge of which four early daffodils lay broken. Tom was lying across the threshold, a circle of blood widening on the shoulder of his sweater. Ruth knelt down.
“Willard!” she said sharply. “Come out here at once. You’ve hurt Tom. It’s just Tom.”
She looked up and saw Willard standing with the rifle in his hand.
“Willard, put that down and help me.”
He came slowly, as if reluctant to obey her but unable to refuse. Then he stood in the doorway looking down at Ruth, watching her as he had been watching her the night before at the table.
“Why couldn’t you tell me?” she asked him.
The gun report sounded behind them like a warning but immediately blossomed where Willard’s tightly laced face had been, and he collapsed backwards into the house. Ruth froze, like an animal, her body braced for the next shot Instead two men were climbing over her to reach Willard.
“Oh, leave him alone,” she cried. “Leave us all alone.”
Tom was in her arms, his head turned into her lap, a small trickle of blood at the edge of his mouth.
“Breathe, Tom,” she whispered to him. “Breathe.”
There were strong hands on her shoulders, trying to pull her away from Tom. She clung to him as if he were the last defense she had against drowning. “Breathe,” she kept saying softly, over and over again.
“I’m a doctor,” a voice was saying. “Let me see if I can help him.”
Pried away, half carried down the porch stairs, Ruth wrenched free and stopped over the broken daffodils. Then she raised her shocked face to the man standing tall above her.
“You kill everything,” she said, as two flash bulbs exploded.
“Is he dead? Is he dead?” a voice called.
“Stand back! Let the stretchers through.”
She needed to bury the flowers there under the lilac with the bones of birds.
“Can she identify them?”
“Don’t try to question her now. She’s in shock.”
“What have you done with Arthur?” Ruth shouted. “What have you done? They’re my children, all of them, mine. You kill everything. Bastards! Bastards!”
“Are they both dead?” someone called out.
Ruth crouched on her own front lawn, holding the broken flowers,
weeping, in a new burst of flash bulbs aimed over her head at the stretchers being carried down the walk.
CHAPTER TEN
“To cut down on the expense of superstars, everybody’s going to be famous for fifteen minutes,” Boy said, as he wadded up the front page of the newspaper and threw it into the wastebasket. “Miss Clara and me saw you on color TV last night, too, with them poor, pretty yellow flowers. So I told them shit-ass reporters down there in the lobby you’d had your turn, and anyway I can get you out through the laundry.”
“How long do you think they’ll stay?” Ruth asked.
“Don’t know. Don’t need to worry about it. Just pack up enough clothes, and you can stay at the farmhouse as long as you like.”
“Willard’s mother will be here tomorrow morning. I’ve got to do something about his things.”
“Mavis is going to meet her. She and Mavis can come over here and take care of that.”
“I’m frightened,” Ruth admitted. “I felt a little crazy when I went down and tried to get out of the building.”
“Nothing crazy about that,” Boy said. “Ruth, just about this time yesterday, you was bein’ shot at with guns as well as cameras. You can’t be surprised if you’re feeling just a little shy, you know.”
“If only Tom had waited, if only he’d let me …”
“Listen, it would just be you instead of him getting a bullet dug out of your lung.”
“I can’t understand why they let him, and then just … just shooting Willard down like an animal. They intended to kill him.”
“I already told Gladdy this morning, and I’m telling you now, it’s a natural disaster, that’s all, just like a flood or a fire, and you don’t blame nobody. If you start hating what hurts and breaks us, you’ll end up hating the waters of the earth. You’ll end up hating the sky. Nobody intended nothing.”
Ruth stared out the window. I have hated the waters of the earth. I do hate the sky. But I’m frightened of the people down there. I’m frightened of them.
“Miss Clara wants to lay eyes on you,” Boy said. “Let’s pack your bag.”
Ruth sat down in Willard’s chair, so tired suddenly that even the fear went out of her. Boy moved off and came back with a shot of whiskey.
“You drink, and I’ll pack,” he said.
The reel of events started to turn again in Ruth’s head. Tom was going up the steps of the porch; he was opening the door. Then the sound of the gun, which had freed her … the broken daffodils. Ruth shook her head sharply and took a sip of the whiskey. Tomorrow, next week, next month, if she could get there, it would begin to slow up, repeat itself less often, and then maybe she would think about it. Now her throat still ached with her own screaming, and she saw that screaming face, mouth pulled downward in a grotesque stone mask of grief, as it appeared on the front page of the newspaper all over the city.
“Don’t you have no bras, lady?” Boy called from her bedroom.
“Ever tried to put on a bra with one arm?”
Boy chuckled.
Ruth took the last bit of whiskey against the pain in her throat and got up to help him.
“Now we elope,” Boy said, shutting the case firmly.
He had discovered the utility stairs and the basement exit, and he made such an exaggerated and silly drama of their escape that it turned into a game without believable meaning. Ruth remembered hurling snowballs with Tom those snowy months ago, but the film slipped, and again he was climbing the steps.
“We’ll see Tom later?” she asked.
“When I get Gladdy at work and we change shifts.”
“Does he really need one of you with him all the time?”
“We need to,” Boy said. “Nobody much wants him out of sight, that’s all.”
“He’s a damned fool!” Ruth said.
“He’s a heeero, which in my private dictionary means he’s still alive. The man’s breathing, just like he said you told him to. That ain’t foolish.”
Boy let her out of Mavis’ car at Queen’s Court and didn’t pull away until he’d seen that she was safely inside.
“I couldn’t have got here without him,” Ruth said when she had finally reached Clara.
“I had to see you,” Clara said. “It wasn’t enough, talking on the phone, not after television and that terrible picture.”
“We’re never spared anything, are we?” Ruth said, the waves of nausea and exhaustion coming over her again. “I need to lie down.”
There, in Clara’s presence, Ruth slept. When she woke, Clara’s face was the deep reassurance it had always been.
“When you go back to the apartment—if you go back to the apartment, I’m going with you,” Clara said.
Ruth did not try to stop or hide the tears of relief that spilled down her face.
“I should never have come here,” Clara said. “Boy said I’m not to say ‘if only’ one more time, and that’s right, but I can only stop saying it if I’m at home with you.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever go back to that apartment again,” Ruth said, “but I’ll find us a place to live.”
“Ruth, I’m so sorry. I need to comfort you, and I can’t unless I can comfort myself. I’m a very angry woman.”
“Yes, so am I … and afraid.”
“Did he … did he suffer?”
“No,” Ruth said.
“I can bear Tom’s pain as long as he’s going to be all right, but I couldn’t forgive if Willard …”
“I can’t think about it at all yet,” Ruth confessed. “I keep living through it. I expected to be shot, too. I expected them to kill us all.”
“It must have been terrible.”
“It’s so real,” Ruth said.
“Did Willard say anything?”
“Not a word. What would he have said?”
“It’s a troubled world,” Clara said softly, at that place where there is no difference between a joke and a cry of pain.
“He was the one person I thought I could protect … spare.”
“You did, Ruth, for years …”
“If only …” Ruth began and shook her head.
Boy was right about that, and it was not something he had taught them. Ruth and Clara would have had to be cretinous not to have learned long ago that “if only” is the cardinal sin in the survivor’s handbook.
“I do need to be with you, Ruth.”
“And we have to get out of here,” Ruth said. “I do know that … now.”
But she was as afraid of inventing the future as she was of reinventing the past. To try to make anything happen was to risk even graver consequences than to be victim and witness. Willard was dead.
Tom dozed in his hospital bed while Mavis read Dickens. Ruth and Boy and Gladys came into the room quietly.
“I’ll stay now,” Boy said, handing Mavis the car keys. “You all go home and get some dinner.”
As Ruth stood looking down at Tom, he opened his eyes and smiled. Ruth felt her own face soften, give way to smile in return, and she was for that moment free of her own death’s head in the newspaper, free of the image of his face in her lap, bleeding. You’re a lungfish, all right. You can breathe. She bent down and kissed his forehead, then stepped aside for Gladys.
“I’ll be back after dinner,” she said.
Mavis signaled them away as Boy settled in her chair.
“I didn’t think we could leave him with Tom,” Mavis admitted out in the corridor, “but he really doesn’t chatter. He said he’d always wanted to be a batman or a male nurse for somebody gorgeous like Tom.”
“He must be worn out,” Gladys said. “Mavis and I finally did go home to sleep for a couple of hours. He was there all night.”
“And rescued me from the reporters this morning,” Ruth said.
On the street and in the car Ruth held herself rigid against the fear of the day before. Anyone walking along might have a gun. Anyone driving along might swerve into their path, the intention to kill as real and as ordinary
as stopping for a red light. Only when they turned off Marine Drive and drove the quiet road by the golf course down onto the river flat did Ruth begin to breathe more easily, and the farmhouse, where she had felt so alien, welcomed her now in evening twilight and the green fragrance of spring, Coon Dog barking at them, jumping up, circling round. Ruth went out into the kitchen among her own pots and pans, among the pottery Claire had made. Once she had been hurt by the realization that things broke much less easily than people. Now she was glad of their durable familiarity. There was no tea cart, but Gladys and Mavis moved about more confidently than they had in a kitchen entirely Ruth’s, aware of what she needed since there were also no clamps for one-handed lifting. Needing their help was a comfort.
“I’m glad I’m here,” Ruth said as they sat down at the old table.
“I’ll get the tea cart and the clamps tomorrow,” Mavis said.
“And we can move everything else over here next week,” Gladys said, “before Tom comes home.”
Ruth smiled again, her face still uneasy in the effort, as flickering as Arthur’s had been.
“We’ve got a lot to figure out,” Ruth said, “when we can. Clara wants to come home.”
There were a great many questions, practical and emotional, but none of them wanted to confront or be confronted. They were exhausted. For Ruth, Willard’s mother and Willard’s body were the barrier between her and any other problem.
“I’m going to meet Mrs. Steele in the morning,” Mavis said, as she and Ruth were doing up the dishes, “and I’ll take her over to the apartment for Willard’s clothes.”
“I’ll have to see her,” Ruth said.
“Have you met her before?”
“No.”
“Maybe we could have lunch or something like that,” Mavis suggested.
“Thank heaven she wanted to take his body back to Kamloops,” Ruth said.
“Do you suppose …? Gladdy’s afraid all her talk put the idea into his head.”
