by David Bergen
“Well, look now. See? Gravity’s doing weird things, Roy. You’re gonna have to find someone younger.”
“And train her? No way.”
She hit him lightly across the head. She was standing by the bed. He was seated. She kissed the spot where her hand had landed. “There you go, Mr. Koop. What do you want to do? The kids are partying. We’re all alone.”
“We could lie down side by side. Right here.” Roy patted the bed.
“You’d like that.”
“I would.”
“Okay.” She walked across the room and turned off the lights. “Okay,” she said again.
Not long after, when the thin years arrived, she would look back on the vacation to Hawaii as the last hurrah and wonder if she had appreciated the fullness of that time. She worried that she had taken it all for granted, the easy lassitude, the money, the pleasure of lovemaking, the pride she felt being surrounded by family. The world and the joys offered to her.
Four years after Conner’s wedding, Penny was well into her third year of medicine and living in the city, coming home infrequently to do laundry or to eat, and sometimes deigning to share with her mother the odd detail from her life. She was an obsessed and hard-working student, and Hope wondered where her drive and vision had come from. Certainly not from Hope, who had studied French one year in order to be able to carry on a basic conversation with Jean-Philippe, but had given up when overwhelmed by the logic and simplicity of French verbs neatly aligned in her Bescherelle. It must have been Roy who passed down to Penny the genetic makeup to persevere, to memorize, and to press on like an implacable iceberg. And Hope was fine with that. She was maternal. Someone in the family had to dole out love.
Melanie graduated from high school that year. She was six feet two. Her height combined with her striking looks absolutely terrified boys her age, who consoled themselves by nicknaming her Giraffe. She had a scholarship to attend the University of Texas, where she would be joining the track team, her specialty being the high jump. At her graduation she took as her escort the phys. ed. teacher, Ollie Carlyle, who was single, twenty-eight, and known to be a bit of a playboy.
“Is that legal?” Hope asked one afternoon in June as she was fitting Melanie’s grad dress. Hope was on her knees, stick pins in her mouth. She looked up at her daughter’s chin.
“I don’t give a shit,” Melanie said.
“Well, Mr. Carlyle should maybe give a shit.”
“Mom. It’s not like we’re dating.”
“You’re not?”
“No.”
“Will he expect something in return?”
“He can expect whatever he wants. I’ll do what I like.”
“People will talk.”
“You’ve never cared about what people think, Mom. Why start now?”
Was this true? Why didn’t she know this? Perhaps she did know this at some deep level and was both ashamed and proud. Roy appeared to be indifferent to Melanie’s choice of escorts. He was deeply preoccupied with the business. Interest rates had risen to 22 percent and he was having a difficult time simply paying the interest on the excess units on the lot. The bank was intractable, threatening foreclosure, and though Hope heard hints of the trouble, she was typically in the dark when it came to the business. One night she woke and found the bed empty beside her and she rose and went to seek out her husband, who was sitting in his leather chair in the living room.
She stood in her nightie and said, “What is it, Roy?”
“I couldn’t sleep. It’s okay, Hope. Go back to bed.”
“Is it bad?” she asked.
“It could be better.”
She sat on the couch across from him. He looked diminished, sitting in the blackness of the living room, the faint shadow of his head in profile, and she felt the despair trickle out into the room.
“Would you like some tea?” And she rose and boiled water and steeped a cup of tea for him and placed it in his hands, which were shaking.
“I’m sorry, Hope,” Roy said. “You shouldn’t have to suffer this.”
“Don’t worry about me, Roy. Take care of yourself.”
“Forty years down the drain.”
“Don’t talk like that. Our children are healthy. We ‘re healthy.”
He did not answer.
She said, “We have friends. Couldn’t they help?”
They did have friends and acquaintances with more than enough, but as one of these friends said when Roy went to ask for a loan, “Why throw good money after bad?” Another said, “You made your bed, you’ll have to lie in it.” And another, who owned the wealthiest business in Eden, said, “Roy, you know very well that we are not a generous family.” His brother, Harold, who had left the business a number of years earlier to work as a manager with a new grocery chain in town, offered comforting words but had little advice and no money. At least Roy’s father, who had started the business, was in a seniors’ home and blissfully senile, unaware of the dealership’s decline.
Over the month that followed, Roy attempted to save the business. He asked General Motors to take back one hundred new vehicles, thereby reducing his debt load, but GM wouldn’t accept the returns. It was sink or swim. His debt grew and the bank panicked.
One Saturday morning, Roy went to the dealership early and returned half an hour later. He walked into the house and sat down at the kitchen table, looked right at Hope, who was standing by the stove, and said, “They shut me down.”
“What do you mean?”
“They put chains on the doors. I can’t even get into my own business.”
“That’s ridiculous. They can’t do that.”
“They did. I called Rollie at home and he said that his hands were tied. It wasn’t his decision. It came from the head office.” His face was pale.
“What will happen?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Worst case, they’ll take everything. The house, the cottage, the cars for sure. I’m sorry, Hope.”
“Oh, Roy.”
She knew that she should go to him, that she should hold him, but for a moment all she could manage was “Oh, Roy,” and then she felt the falling away of everything physical around her.
“The furniture?” she whispered. “That too?”
He shook his head. He didn’t know.
She stepped across the linoleum and took his head in her hands and pushed his face against her stomach. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll manage.”
And Roy began to cry. His tears wet her dress and she patted his back and thought that he sounded like a trapped animal. She worried that the children would wake.
“Shh, shh. Come.”
And then he stopped crying and stood and went to the sink and splashed water over his face. He dried himself with a tea towel. His back was to her.
“We ‘re not sick, Roy. We have our health. We have each other. The children.”
He did not answer.
Over the next week, whenever she entered the living room she found him sitting in his chair, staring out the window that gave onto the large backyard. It was late summer. The begonias that he had planted alongside the house raged with high colour. The grass grew thick and green. One afternoon he mowed the lawn, carefully overlapping each previous cut. She stood by the kitchen window and watched him. He was wearing his suit pants, a dress shirt, a tie, and his good black leather shoes. As if he might step out of this picture at any moment and drive to his office. She studied his face for some sign of resignation, despair, hope, grief—but she saw only the intensity of a man who was cutting the lawn and doing the best job possible.
The final eight years in Eden had been the richest of her life. She took to calling them “the fat years,” alluding in her biblical way to Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream in which the lean and ugly cows ate the fat cows. And the rich years disappeared with such stunning swiftness. Her house was yanked out from beneath her. She lost her vehicle and Roy lost his, and the cottage was sold at a rid
iculously low price to a couple Roy and Hope had imagined were good and faithful friends.
Hope and Roy left Eden in the fall of 1981. They rented a small apartment in Winnipeg, in a building near the legislature. It had three stories, with no elevator, and they lived on the third floor in a one-bedroom. At midday, the sunlight poured into the south-facing windows and onto the few pieces of furniture that had been rescued from the house—a house that over the previous two years had been completely renovated. Hope’s pride and joy. Gone now.
Walking across the bridge to Safeway to buy groceries, Hope remembered her youthful desire to be a nurse, and how the longing for Roy and children (she had slipped into motherhood so simply and naively) had conquered that early wish to be independent and employed and gainful. The pandemonium of the past month, the humiliation and loss, sat heavily on her. She saw herself carrying her grocery bags and imagined that others might see her as poor, which she now was.
She looked for what was familiar and found that the river was still dirty and flowed in the same direction, though there were now homeless young people with their dogs living under the bridges. These vagabonds did not frighten her. In fact she felt an affinity to their poverty and their destitute freedom. She thought that if she could be young again she might choose differently for herself. There were all manners of life to be lived. She did not need the limelight, but now, at her age, she felt hidden and undistinguished, a wisp of her former self. She had managed to pack several suitcases of clothes before leaving Eden, salvaging the best from her past, though now, on the street, she sensed that her clothes were out of fashion. It was early September, the days warm, the evenings cooler. She avoided the apartment during the day because she became overwhelmed by sadness, and so she walked, across the bridge and into a small park where children from the local daycare played. How lovely. Children.
When Judith heard about the bankruptcy she came back from Paris for several weeks. She slept on a cot in the living room and during the days she ranted about the smallness of the apartment and the narrow minds of the people of Eden. “You’re damned lucky to be out of that horrible village,” she cried out one day. She was sitting at the small kitchen table with Hope. Roy had left early in the morning, dressed in his suit. He did this every morning, seeking out work, and he returned every evening, worn out, claiming that a job was “just around the corner.” Hope felt as if Judith’s rage was aimed at her personally, as if Hope were to blame for the failure of Roy’s business. And to counter that feeling, she told Judith that Roy had made mistakes of his own. He had got greedy. He had overextended his credit and planned to expand at the worst of times, and he hadn’t paid attention to his family.
“Look at us,” she said. “Is this how we end up? I did my job. I raised you children. Maybe I wasn’t perfect, but I did my job and you children flew away and you’re healthy and independent. Why couldn’t Roy manage his side of the business? No, now we ‘re stuck in this dirty little place and I barely have enough for food. Who are we?”
“That’s so unfair, Mom, and you know it. Dad did everything for you. He still does, walking out of here every morning, pretending everything is fine. I feel sick when I see him. He always paid the bills, making sure you had your fur coats and your new dishes.”
“Is that what you think? That I lay about like the Queen of Sheba? I raised you children. I fed you. I patched your clothes and your hearts. Don’t you forget.”
“Christ.”
“You think I don’t feel sick every time your father leaves this little hovel and then comes home all upbeat? Well, you’re wrong. I’m full of sadness. Stop talking, Judith. You’re just being mean right now, and I’m not sure why. Is it Jean-Philippe? Are you fighting? This isn’t like you.”
But it was exactly like her. She had always appreciated her father more than her mother. Only Penny seemed to understand Hope. She was the one child of four who did not always side with Roy.
When Judith finally returned to Paris, Hope was relieved. She no longer had the emotional energy to support both Judith and Roy. The other children were fine. They had lives to live, and yet this too felt like a betrayal of sorts. How was it that the sun still rose every day, that folks climbed out of bed and went to work, and that her own children, with apparent nonchalance, shrugged off the tragedy of their parents’ life and carried on eating and drinking and making love?
Conner was the child most affected by the loss of the business, because he had worked as a salesman for Roy and it had been Roy’s intention that he eventually take over the dealership. Conner found a job selling farm equipment. His wife, Charlotte, was a busy little beaver, making lots of money as a lawyer, and the few times that Hope and Roy were invited to their house for Sunday lunch, Hope felt that Charlotte, who had always been aloof, was even more disdainful. Invitations to Charlotte and Conner’s house eventually petered out.
Penny was happily ensconced in medical school. She received the news of the bankruptcy in her typical cold and clinical manner. Shit happened. She wrote Roy a cheque for one thousand dollars and told him to use it for the down payment on a car. When he said he couldn’t take money from a student, she said, “That’s ridiculous. You paid for my schooling up till now. And besides, I’ve got some extra.”
Roy went out the following week and, still faithful to General Motors, purchased a used Oldsmobile.
As for Melanie, she had a full scholarship to the University of Texas and was not in need of money. She had maintained contact with Mr. Carlyle, who spent the last two weeks of his summer vacation helping her settle into the house she would be sharing with four other athletes. That fall she wrote long letters to her father in which she described her rigorous schedule, the various classes, and the friends she was making. She was easily clearing six feet in her jumping, beating her personal record. She had broken off with Mr. Carlyle and taken up with a basketball player named Jane. “Yes,” she wrote, “Jane is a girl.” Roy was quite shaken by this revelation. He showed Hope the letter and wondered out loud if “taken up” didn’t just mean that they were good friends. Hope read the letter and then put it down and said that she had had no inkling. None whatsoever. “She always liked boys. Though there weren’t a lot of boyfriends.”
Hope wondered if that was why Mr. Carlyle had entered Melanie’s life. She might have chosen him because he was safer than boys her age. Or it might have been a statement on Melanie’s part: Look at me, I’m not who you think I am. Roy had a much harder time with homosexuality than Hope did. Hope simply wanted her children to be happy and to live a good life. If that meant dating a girl named Jane, so be it. Roy, on the other hand, prayed for a change of heart. “Maybe it’s just a stage,” he said after another letter arrived, in which Melanie advised them that Jane had been replaced by a girl named Marion.
“That’s such an old-fashioned name, don’t you think?” Roy asked, as if trying to convince himself that “old-fashioned” and “lesbian” were two words that could not walk down the same road.
Her letters were addressed “Dear Dad (and Mother),” and this was disturbing to Hope, who imagined that was a signal of some sort, that her own life was parenthetical—Hope apparently existed outside of the complex motion of Melanie’s life. She had always hoped that her power and influence over her children would extend beyond the vital years of child-rearing. Her fear was that her little girl had been damaged in some way by her mother’s illness, by her absence, by her inability to love Melanie. Hadn’t she made up for that? Nobody could accuse her of being indifferent now.
Before the bank foreclosed on the business, Hope had visited the bank manager, Rollie Tiessen, who was the father to Maxine, the girl she had driven to Minneapolis for an abortion ten years earlier. So long ago now. Hope had dressed up for the meeting, had put on one of her finest dresses and had her hair done, and then driven to the bank and announced herself. She was made to wait two hours for Mr. Tiessen. When he finally saw her and allowed her into his office, he didn’t apologize or a
ppear to want to take any responsibility. He was a successful man. His stomach stretched his starched shirt and hung over his belt. She wondered, oddly and quietly, how he managed to see his penis. Did he find it without a mirror? His daughter had certainly known how to find penises.
He was a man in great demand, and he applied haste to the meeting. He did not look at her, but looked instead at his smallish hands, as if they were coated in precious metal.
“Is there something you can do?” she asked.
“There is nothing, Hope. My hands are tied. Businesses are falling like rotten trees in a forest.”
“I would think that would be exactly your responsibility. To save those trees.”
“One must help oneself, Hope.” He smiled thinly. His head was perfectly round, like that man on the Monopoly board.
“There is nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Is this about Maxine?”
“What do you mean?”
She saw that he had no idea of the abortion. She paused, held her breath, then said, “I’m sorry. I was thinking about something else. It’s very hard.”
“I understand. I’m also sorry.”
“Everything will be lost.”
“You are alive and healthy, Hope. As is Roy.”
She felt incredible rage and hoped that this bald man with his red nose and fat paunch would die of a heart attack. Soon. “We are not mere things, Rollie. Do you have a job for Roy? Or me? Perhaps I could be your personal secretary. I could run errands for your younger daughter. Take her on trips to Minneapolis.” She stood and walked out of the bank.
Roy would hear of this meeting, and he would then blame her for making matters worse. But how could they be worse?
She drove to Gertrude’s Inn and ordered a Denver sandwich and salad, and when she was finished eating she asked Grace, the waitress, to put it on Roy’s bill. Grace nodded and walked away and Hope saw her conferring with the manager. Eventually Grace returned and said, leaning forward as if a secret were to be shared, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Koop, but you will have to pay for the meal.”
