Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  But Darwin reached out a long arm and clawed Paul in beside him to listen to what this guy was saying, and there was another conversation just as fascinating as the tacit knowledge one, this one about some kind of spiritual awakening the guy had had while out all night on a skidoo trip, lost in the wilderness, the moon a pumpkin to save him.

  “You never know who’s going to tell you the good story,” Darwin said. “Wherever you go, there’s your teacher.”

  Paul was thunderstruck by the wisdom of that.

  The music was louder than before, it was—someone was playing “Rock Lobster.” How long had he gone without hearing “Rock Lobster”? It must be either too long or not long enough. The halls of Trinity came back again. He was old, and maudlin, washed in nostalgia, showing off for the boys.

  Paul sank into another trance, watching crazy people gyrating and flailing on the tiny dance floor. Darwin nudged him to go dance, but he was only plastered, not insane. He leaned against the pillar behind him and watched the dancers’ shifting, sharding colours. It seemed they were all waving scarves, but those were just their arms.

  23. Lonely, lonely

  Paul was not in church. Clary didn’t like the replacement priest, a sneakered athletic type. He had an air compounded of insecurity and complacency. Absurd even to be noticing Paul’s absence. It would have been strange for him to let her know. They had no connection beyond his pastoral duties. She felt abandoned.

  The replacement priest’s mouth was screwed up into a sugary ecstasy as he opened his sermon with some sanctimonious claptrap: “God flows through you—and because of that so many beautiful things have come your way!”

  Her heart was littered with hate. Everyone irritated her—even the children. Lorraine had never taken them to church, and that was a perfectly legitimate choice. Clary could not say, You must believe! You must be good. You can be good without approaching church. If she had not come to church this morning she would have been much more good.

  Trevor slid back into the pew after Sunday school. He opened her hand and pressed something into it: a folded paper bird. He said urgently, “I have to make nine hundred and ninety-eight more of those. Dolly’s going to give me hers.”

  Bile came springing up in Clary’s mouth, that some cruel chance would make cancer the story this week—a thousand cranes to save that little Hiroshima leukemia girl. There was no saving her either, and anyway, this was the end of August; they should have been talking about nuclear disasters on the 6th and 9th, if they had to talk about them at all. She was furious. And there was no Paul. Where was he?

  Darwin brought Paul a plate of scrambled eggs. Paul shook his head, but his head was filled with exploding drums of used motor oil. He stopped moving so the bed would lie still.

  “There’s pills there. You should drink all the water. You’ll feel better faster, if you eat,” Darwin said. It sounded like experienced advice.

  Paul ate the eggs. Darwin watched Paul eat, then vanished into the bathroom; no singing in the shower. Paul sat with his plate in his lap, remembering his phone call to Candy Vincent at 6 a.m., telling her that he had a serious case of the flu. She’d been very kind. He had never missed a Sunday service before. He wondered, in a detached way, if they had found anyone to replace him. The sun was high and white—a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees, like William Carlos Williams’s sun. Waving his shirt around his head, wasn’t he? Like the people on the dance floor last night.

  “I am lonely, lonely,” Paul sang softly to himself, from the poem, padding downstairs with his plate. Nobody to hear him, Darwin still in the shower.

  “I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” His bare feet made a strange noise walking around on the bare living room floor. He kind of liked the new pared-down look.

  Dolly’s head was jittering with Hiroshima and radiation, but she had read her Barn book too many times, it was not working any more. When they got home from church she slid it out from under the mattress and dawdled around the house till Clary told her to take lunch out to Gran. She went out the back, and ran all the way down the long side alleys to Key’s Books.

  But it was closed, because it was Sunday. Dolly felt like crying. Maybe she could get in somehow. She peered in the window, her hands making a dark frame. There was the old guy, sitting at his desk. He was crazy. Maybe he never went home.

  He looked up, his old Bible head turning like an eagle, and saw her staring.

  She pulled back from the window as he lumbered over to the door and opened it.

  “Looking for something?”

  She nodded.

  “Come in, then. Kids’ books upstairs.”

  Like he didn’t remember chasing her that other time. She slipped past his big arm holding the door, careful to keep her back away from him, where the Barn book was hidden. It meant an awkward turn, trying to keep his eyes on her eyes all the time. She put her hand on the middle book table to keep her balance, and pretended to be interested in those books while he went back to his computer.

  Mistress Masham’s Repose, she saw under her hand. Mistresses were dirty. But the picture on the front was a girl holding a little barrel with a tiny man in it. She opened it—a map inside the cover, the kind of map she loved. This was a kids’ book, even though it was down in the old books. She read the first line: Maria was ten years old… and looked at the ink pictures of the big-shoed girl and the tiny people and their sheep. She went back to the beginning and read down to Unfortunately she was an orphan, which made her difficulties more complicated than they were with other people.

  Dolly wanted the book so badly she never thought of stealing it. She wanted to keep it forever, not to borrow it. She left it on the table and went up the teetering stairs, and slid the Barn book back onto its place in the shelves, so she was even with the giant. Then she went back down.

  “How much is this?” she asked him.

  He blinked away from his screen and glared at her, and held out his hand for the book.

  “$4.25,” he said. “An even five, with the tax.”

  “Will you save it for me while I go home for some money?”

  His eyes were scary, but she kept looking into them. That’s how wild beasts could be tamed.

  “Take it,” he said. “Bring the money later.”

  Clary was surprised when Dolly grabbed her arm, and surprised by the pinch of her grip.

  “Please can I have five dollars?”

  Automatic questions occurred to Clary, but she saw Dolly’s desperate face and turned instead to get her wallet. Stupid Sunday school teachers. “Do you need a drive somewhere? We’re out of coffee anyway.”

  Dolly shook her head and shot out the back door.

  Clary watched her running through the back gate. If it was candy she wanted, fine. Whatever helped.

  Coffee. The route took Clary past Paul’s house, standing on its corner looking bereft. The grass was long, the vines reddening and drooping off the roof of the porch. The porch light was on in the daytime, sad—he must have turned it on from habit, waiting for his wife to come home. She drove on, forgetting the coffee she’d gone for until she was at her driveway. She made an exasperated sound which Pearce, along for the ride, picked up. He tshed all the way back to the store, laughing every time she laughed at him. Good to have a baby to make fun of you.

  Paul came round the corner of the house, dragging the lawn-mower, in time to see Clary driving away. He looked on the porch to see if she might have left something. Parishioners did, these days, but he would not have lumped Clary in with the set of women likely to drop off a casserole. He’d forgotten to turn off the porch light.

  Was that her driving by again? Perhaps he was seeing her where she wasn’t. Heart of silver, white heart-flame of polished silver, burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur. Madonna of the Garden, that was. Te Deums of Canterbury bells. Foolish stuff, not even memorable. More lovely and more temperate, that was better.

  24. Stone school


  Life had to continue anyway. Whatever happened to Lorraine, the children had to go to school. Iris Haywood, the principal of Brundstone School, two blocks south and one block west of Clary’s house, was married to the parish treasurer from St. Anne’s. She had seen Clary with the children on Sundays and had gathered the whole story from mysterious parish sources. She welcomed the children to the school with grave formality, and then sent them to wait in the hall.

  “The mother is not expected to recover, I understand,” she said.

  Clary’s heart seemed to stop entirely. She stared into Mrs. Haywood’s face, wishing she could jump toward Yes! She is! But unable to do so.

  “Sometimes the doctors are wrong,” Mrs. Haywood said. “We’ll have to hope for that.”

  How far away were the children? Would they have heard? Clary’s heart beat again, painfully, and she said, “We’re going from day to day.”

  “Well, you’re very good.” Iris Haywood was a tall, imposing woman, blonde and almost graceful in a suit and little heels. She made it to the door before Clary, and opened it. “Now this is lucky, it’s kindergarten orientation today. Let’s take Trevor down to Mrs. Ashby’s room and introduce him.”

  They went down long corridors past empty, tidy, gaily decorated rooms waiting for the invasion. Dolly lagged behind Trevor, trying to memorize the school. Old stone on the outside, fresh paint everywhere inside. The big gym in the centre. Every door on the right opened into it. The classrooms were along the left side of the hall. Maybe the big woman was going to put her back because this was a new province. Opposite the last door into the gym, the second kindergarten room, a nice skinny young woman with sparkly glasses and curly black hair sat on a desk. She smiled at Trevor and put her red-sweatered arm round his shoulders while she crouched beside him. He’d be fine, Dolly thought. Her feet were damp in her new school shoes. Grade 4 teachers were not all sparkles like Mrs. Ashby.

  On September 10th Clary woke up early and stared through the crib bars at Pearce, lying flat on his back, arms and legs flung out, head tilted skyward as if his closed eyes could see. He was one year old today.

  She didn’t say anything to the children, and Mrs. Pell was oblivious to everything but her third piece of French toast. When Clary had walked the children to school she decided, blown by some needling zephyr, to take Pearce over to the hospital.

  In the parking lot she was fine. Pearce gabbled his strange language to her and then, leaning strongly over her shoulder, to the man they passed walking down the hall. But halfway up in the elevator Clary lost momentum. She hit L again and stood still while the doors opened and closed on 5, even though Pearce strained around to see where they ought to be going, then rode down to the gift shop for a present. Pearce insisted on getting down on the floor to look at the books. Clary could not pry his fingers away from Spot the Puppy. He didn’t complain or cry, he just wouldn’t let go of the book. She stared around the store while the volunteer was ringing it up, searching for something for Lorraine. Give me one of those little doodads, she would say, that will console a woman who has lost her family and this beautiful one-year-old boy, that’s just the ticket. She went back to the flower fridge and got out a cream velvet rosebud with a pink centre. And a huge blood-red rose, fully opened. She carried them unwrapped, thorns biting into the soft part of her palm, and went upstairs before she found more reason to delay.

  Lorraine was awake, no nurses or doctors around her, no breakfast tray in front of her. She sat propped up, empty hands on the tidy sheet, one cupped in the other.

  “I thought Pearce needed to see you today,” Clary said, sitting on the end of the bed.

  Pearce dropped the book and listed forward off her lap toward his mother, Clary holding him around his sturdy waist, his hands reaching out for Lorraine.

  “It’s his birthday today,” Lorraine told her. She held Pearce’s hands, and between them he walked across the bed, silent with effort, over the green rolling country of the coverlet.

  “Well, that would explain it,” Clary said.

  “This has been a long year.”

  Clary nodded.

  “Darwin said he’d get a cake, and a candle, one of those Number One candles,” Lorraine said. “He’s going to Dairy Queen, the kids like those ice-cream cakes.”

  “That’ll be good,” Clary said. “We’ll make birthday cards after school.”

  They sat silent, watching Pearce, who had found the hollow nest his mother’s bent legs made, and was tamping it down with his feet, his fists holding her fingers. No talking about how his birth had been, what a day that was, or Clayton, how happy. Lorraine looked up and caught Clary’s eye, then looked away, to her hand lying over the bed’s footboard. “Flowers?”

  “Oh, yes! White for Pearce, red for you,” Clary said. “You hang on to him, and I’ll get a vase.” She made herself get up and walk out of the room, not looking back to see if Pearce would fall, if Lorraine would be too weak to hold him.

  Mrs. Kernaghan, Dolly’s Grade 4 teacher, was famous as the one who used to strap her kids when they were still allowed to—that’s how old she was. Dolly had forgotten school’s weird, stretching time. It seemed like forever every day until she could go home and read Mistress Masham. From her seat Dolly could see Trevor going out for recess, or lining up at the drinking fountain with the other little kids. That helped, for the first few weeks. The girl beside her, called Ann Hayter, was new too. Todd Bunchley said “Love her or Hayter,” and then they called her Lover, or Lover Ann, or made smooching sounds when they saw her coming in the playground. Sometimes they said Sucker Ann or Lezzie Ann. Dolly was desperate not to be treated like that. Nobody had teased her yet. Maybe they would be too busy with Lover Ann. If Ann had told Mrs. Kernaghan, Todd would have got in trouble. But Ann didn’t talk, except to say yes or no when Mrs. Kernaghan spoke right to her. She had stick-straight hair, more green than blonde under the school lights. Her clothes were ugly: a sweatshirt with a Mickey appliqué, a pink one with glitter rubbing off. Pink pants, grey around the bottom edges. Filthy socks. Dolly’s socks had been dirty in the old days and she was not shocked, but she could imagine Ann’s life because of it.

  Clary brought Lorraine a small white box.

  “Mrs. Zenko thought you could make some use of this.”

  Lorraine looked blank. She took the box, turning it in her thin fingers. Her wrists were thinner too, but her face puffed. And her poor bald head. What a disaster. But she was back in an ordinary double room, and the delirium had not reappeared.

  She opened the case, shifting her i.v. lines carefully to avoid the cold rush of drugs that sudden movement brought. Twelve cough drops of colour, a neat steel paintbrush. She looked up and caught Clary’s sad gaze, and laughed. “Okay,” she said. “I need something to do.”

  “There’s a waterproof pen too, and cards to paint on, and extra brushes,” Clary said. “Dolly told us you’re a good artist.”

  “I used to paint on stones for them,” Lorraine said. She cranked the head of the bed up and pulled the rolling table closer. “Hand me a glass of water, will you?”

  Clary filled two paper cups at the sink, one to wet and one to rinse, and left her to it.

  Mrs. Zenko was so good, Clary thought, standing by the elevators. Useful and peaceful, she’d gone through the torrent and sailed on into calm. Clary remembered her wild teenagers. Strait-laced Mr. Zenko tore his hair out over the youngest daughter, Nathalie—an artist in London now. That was her watercolour box.

  Paul came down the hall. He spoke immediately, as if he had been looking for her.

  “Joe Kane died this morning,” he said. “I won’t be haunting this place quite so much.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

  The elevator pinged. He held the door to let her go in. “He was very old, and didn’t have much pain. I never did beat him at chess. Are you going home?”

  “Yes, I have to run—I thought I’d be twiddling my thumbs by now, but the children come home for l
unch, and Trevor only has half days, and it’s busy.”

  Paul watched a nerve trembling under her eye. Her skin was not as flowery as usual. “You look tired,” he said, in case she wished to talk, in the little confessional of the elevator.

  “No. Well, I’m always tired these days. Pearce is so good-natured, but he wakes up early, and school is an adjustment for the others.”

  “Do you need some help at home? Should I ask the parish?”

  She laughed. “Millions of women look after three children—I’m not even working!”

  “You’ve been swept into it, though, no gradual acclimatization. You’re doing very well.”

  “We’re always in a scramble. I need to make a push to reorganize.”

  “I give myself a false deadline—I say that I have to have the sermon done before I can have supper on Saturday. Otherwise I’m still writing at 2 a.m.”

  “My mother used to invite the bishop for dinner,” Clary said.

  Paul laughed, knowing some bishops. He held the door open to the lobby.

  “It worked very well,” she said, remembering the whirlwind her mother liked to spin up. “Since we don’t know any bishops, will you have dinner with us on Saturday? Then you’d have to make your deadline, too. Darwin would be happy to see you.”

  He paused, not sure how to answer.

  She immediately gave ground. “Or—you’re already booked—I’m sure you must be always going to parishioners’ houses.”

  “Well, you’re a parishioner,” he said. “I’d be very happy to come.”

  He waved goodbye as she went out the door. He hoped he would remember to phone Iris Haywood and get out of the fellowship dinner on Saturday night.

  Lorraine liked the picture, once she had done with it. In her experience you usually did like your picture, until you had to show it to someone. She set the postcard-sized paper flat on the bedside table to dry. She had to twist awkwardly to clear a space big enough for it—too many things on this table. She was learning what she needed, here: less than she’d thought before, less than she’d had in the Dart. Not clothes or cutlery or a box of treasures. Not Clayton, turns out, she thought. The kids. Someone to talk to from time to time, Darwin or Clary. Maybe a stone to paint on.