by David Bergen
Emily visited her every second day and she always arrived with a fresh collection of poetry that she read, leaning forward and reciting in a low voice. Once it was Pablo Neruda, another time Emily Dickinson. And though Hope didn’t often understand the point of the poems, the language was arresting and she felt great love for her friend.
A memory came to her one morning as she woke, just dropped into her head unwilled. When she was twenty years old and in nurse’s training, she was asked to prepare the body of a man who had just died. “A fresh one,” the head nurse had said. Hope climbed to the fifth floor and entered the room of the dead man and found him completely naked on his bed. It was not his nakedness that had disturbed her but the blood trickling from his eyes, which were closed. Upon closer inspection, she realized that the man had donated his eyes, and that they had just been plucked from their sockets. She looked away, and then looked closer, and for a moment she had the urge to lift one of the man’s eyelids to see the hole that would have been left. She did not do this. She tagged the man’s toe and wrapped the body, rolling it first to one side and then back the other way. Bizarrely, she was pleased that the man had been blinded, so that he did not have to suffer the shame of her gaze, even though he was dead.
That afternoon, she told Emily about the dead man. “I’ve been having the strangest thoughts. Memories just arrive. For instance, the other day I remembered sitting on my mother’s lap. I was three. My father was driving the car. The windshield wiper was slapping, and my mother was singing. I find myself talking to her these days, as if she were sitting right beside me. When I was a young woman and suffering some anxiety or generally overreaching, as she would call it, she told me, ‘Just imagine you’ve arrived at the end of the road and there isn’t anywhere else to go. Then you make do with what you have.’“
“I’ve thought of Paul lately,” Emily said. “In a good way. I can’t remember anymore why I left him. It’s very disconcerting.”
“Don’t second-guess yourself, Em. Too late for that.”
Too late.
In the evenings, when the ward was quiet and she was alone, she read her Bible by the light of the small lamp that Penny had delivered one day. She read Revelation, perhaps because she had drawn so near to death, or death itself had knocked at her door and then been sent away. She was not afraid of death, especially when she read chapter 21, verse 4: “He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” Well, that sounded impossibly perfect. It pleased her to imagine God’s hand wiping away her tears, even though she had not had the capacity to cry for years. Still, after she turned off the light and lay in her hospital bed, aware of the whispers of the nurses in the corridor, or of some man sniffling in the next room, she suffered doubt. “Who knows?” she thought. And just before she slept, slipping sideways into the vivid dreams that arrived as the result of her medication, she said in a dry whisper, “It is all a darkness.”
Conner had not come to see her in the hospital and this did not surprise her. Half a year ago he had lost his job at Mr. Lube, and after that he ‘d disappeared, resurfacing every six weeks or so, knocking on her door and coming in for a meal and a twenty-dollar bill that she pressed into his palm. Last she knew he was living in a bachelor suite and had traded in his car for a bicycle. He had become one of those men you see in the back lanes, digging through garbage cans and auto bins, smashing old computers, salvaging the innards, crushing tin cans, storing the flotsam in a backpack and delivering everything to a salvage yard in exchange for a few dollars. Conner wasn’t embarrassed by any of this. He felt much freer. “Don’t have to answer to the man,” he said. Because Conner was content, Hope was also content. Who was she to judge her son’s life?
The girls, when they heard about Conner’s misfortune, were astounded and mystified, except for Melanie, who had always seen Conner as the protective older brother. What had she said? “Let him be. He’s probably happier.”
A few weeks after Hope had been discharged from the hospital, Conner finally appeared at her door, and with him he had Rudi. Rudi had moved to the city and was living with Conner, calling him Dad, in fact. And now here he was, saying, “Hi, Grandma.”
Hope lifted a hand. Let it drop. “Oh, Rudi, is it you? Oh my. Look at you.”
Rudi stepped closer and she kissed his cheek. She held him at arm’s length and studied him. “You’re such a man,” she said. “Goodness, I’ve left my lipstick on you.”
“How are you, Grandma?”
“I’m … Oh, Rudi, I’m so pleased.” She wanted to say that she was overflowing, but she didn’t want to frighten the boy. She held his hand as they sat on her couch. She had so many questions. Why are you here? How did you come to get that beautiful face? When did you grow up? Are you dragging through dumpsters with your father? Where is your sister? Who do you love? But she asked none of these. She turned to Conner and asked him to fetch some ice water, please. Rudi should be thirsty. She believed that this was the beginning of something. All good things come to those who wait.
And yet, on any given day, she was mostly alone and still waiting, as if her name might be on someone’s calendar out there, and certainly a phone call was on the agenda. To quash the feeling that waiting produced, she set out on various journeys. One hot day in June, she took a taxi to Zellers to buy some annuals to plant in the window boxes that sat on her balcony. She realized that her age might be marked by the number of times she had restored her small garden. Year after year after year. She grew tired as she tottered among the picked-over geraniums and creepers. In the end she returned home empty-handed. It was not a disaster. Come August, when annuals typically began to wilt and the leaves and petals dropped to the ground, the season would be over and not one person would be the wiser about Hope Koop’s decision to forgo flowers.
She had come to believe that much of the sadness in the world resulted from the failure of love. Quite simple, really. And her job in the end was to love her children well. Had she? Her thoughts gathered and then flew away like the sparrows that sometimes visited her balcony, a coming-together and a dispersal, and it was in the dispersal that she saw the end, because all was flying away: Roy, Arthur, her children. That night she dreamed of her mother, who was standing at a bus stop, a small leather carrying case at her feet. The bus arrived and her mother climbed on, forgetting the case. She woke and sat up and then climbed from the bed and went to fetch a glass of water. She stood in the darkness of the kitchen and looked out at the night sky. Her mother had been very young in the dream, dressed in a mauve coat and black high-heeled shoes. She had looked content and smiled, and Hope had understood then that there was nothing to be frightened of.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The Age of Hope is set in Fournier. In 1924, Monotype based this face on original types cut by Pierre Simon Fournier circa 1742. These were some of the earliest and most influential of the eighteenth century’s “transitional” typefaces, and they were a stepping stone to the more severe “modern” style made popular by Bodoni. Fournier’s faces had more vertical stress than the old style types, greater contrast between thick and thin strokes, and disparate proportioning between the roman and italic. Fournier has a light, clean, even-coloured look on the page and provides good economy in text.
About the Author
DAVID BERGEN is the award-winning author of six previous novels and a collection of short stories. A Year of Lesser was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Case of Lena S. was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the winner of the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. In 2005, Bergen won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Time in Between, which also won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. His sixth novel, The Matter with Morris, was a finalist for the Giller Prize in 2010 and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2012. A recent winner of the Writers’ Trust Engel/
Findley Award for an author in mid-career, Bergen lives with his family in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
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Praise for
David Bergen
“Immaculately written, trenchantly honest, hugely compelling.”
—The Globe and Mail on The Matter with Morris
“One of Canada’s very best writers.”
—The Gazette (Montreal) on The Retreat
“With his thoughtful dialogue, Bergen makes the
characters’ heartache seep off the page.”
—TIME Magazine on The Time in Between
“A magical piece of writing.”
—Calgary Herald on The Case of Lena S.
ALSO BY DAVID BERGEN
The Matter with Morris
The Retreat
The Time in Between
The Case of Lena S.
See the Child
A Year of Lesser
Sitting Opposite My Brother
Credits
COVER DESIGN: LISA BETTENCOURT
AUTHOR PHOTO: THIES BOGNER
COVER IMAGE: YOLANDE DE KORT / TREVILLION IMAGES
Copyright
The Age of Hope
Copyright © 2012 by David Bergen.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-41137-0
A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
FIRST EDITION
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
The author acknowledges the assistance of the Manitoba Arts Council.
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