A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  Daphne’s friends called for her in the morning, sometimes lifting her books off the table to carry them in their own arms, and one of them usually came home with her after school to hang around the house until supper. Sylvia wondered occasionally if all this solicitude could be real. Once or twice she caught herself thinking that these girls were just playing, just impersonating grown-ups, with one of them, Daphne, the pretend-hurt girl, and all of the others the pretend-loving friends. Bill was more than a little unnerved by the unrelenting high-pitched babble that filled his house now, the wild giggling, the running up and down the stairs for no good reason. But he didn’t let anyone hear him complain. He told Sylvia he only hoped it wouldn’t just suddenly evaporate one day, like some fad.

  Sylvia made hearty soups to get the necessary nourishment past the wiring in Daphne’s jaw and she helped her with her teeth, most of which had been left, miraculously, intact. She held Daphne’s pretty lips open to get the toothbrush inside her mouth and after her teeth were clean they moved from the bathroom to Sylvia’s bedroom vanity. She sat Daphne on the upholstered vanity stool and played with her hair, twisted it up in a high bun and then pulled it back into a French roll, which she said was much too old for her now but might be something to think about later on. They experimented and laughed into the three-way mirror as the blood-red bruising down Daphne’s throat turned to brown and mauve and then to a sickly yellow and then was finally gone.

  As bad as Daphne’s jaw looked, and was obviously going to look, both Patrick and Paul were secretly relieved that it wasn’t worse, glad it wasn’t her spine that had been shattered. Although, of course, they didn’t say that out loud.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME Murray McFarlane came over it was an October Sunday afternoon and they were all outside raking the leaves back to the creek to burn them. Bill found Murray an old, semi-retired rake up in the rafters of the garage, and while everyone else gathered the leaves into bigger and bigger mounds, Sylvia used a shovel to contain the fire, to over and over again scoop the red-hot ash back toward the centre of the fire. The still-burning leaves that drifted slowly in the updraught like charred butterflies or papery crows sometimes floated up out of sight and sometimes they dropped back down, either into the fire or into the creek, sizzling when they hit the water. Paul threw chestnuts into the burning piles, pitched them as hard as he could to sink them deep, and each time a hot chestnut exploded, Daphne jumped and someone else laughed, making light of her fear, which was new to her, and to them all.

  Hearing Patrick complain about a wasted Sunday, Sylvia had to stop herself from taking a strip off him. She thought it had been a good day. “Your reward is that smell in the air,” she said, nodding her head to the rusty, bittersweet smell of the fire.

  When it was almost done Bill and Sylvia left the kids to finish and went inside for one of their quick Sunday naps. Pulling the bedroom curtains shut, Sylvia thought about the coming winter, the snow that would drift across the backyard, the dirty ice that would crust the creek, and she began to describe for Bill the work they had ahead of them that year.

  “First we have to get her properly healed,” she said, closing the door. “Everyone’s spoiling her now but that’s all right. We’ll spoil her for a time and then we can toughen her up again.” She curled into him, her smoky clothes already discarded over the side of the bed. “And there will be some guilt to get rid of. It’s guilt I’m seeing in the boys.” She played with the drawstring of his boxer shorts, pulling it again and again but never quite hard enough to release the small looped bow. “What matters most is that we get her back to herself somehow,” she said. “I don’t want her changed by this. I want her to be exactly what she would have been without the fall.”

  “Sign me up,” Bill said, pulling the drawstring open himself.

  “It’s her nerve,” Sylvia said. “We’ll have to help her get her nerve back.”

  A little later when Sylvia came downstairs to start the meal Murray was still there, sitting with Patrick on the back steps, so she invited him to stay and eat with them. He phoned home immediately to let his mother know, and after this day of raking and burning and a supper of pancakes and the premium bacon Sylvia always got from her butcher father, Murray started to turn up regularly to sit around the kitchen and talk to whoever wanted to take the time to listen to him.

  1955

  SYLVIA CHAMBERS GOT sick the year her kids were all in high school. She was forty. Miracle drugs, said to be on the horizon, were not readily available and, although she spent several weeks in hospital, surgery was thought to lack promise in her particular case, was thought finally to be too high a price for her to pay. Rescue was not anticipated. She just began to feel a little strange in January, got quickly worse through the spring, and died in late July.

  Bill didn’t put a name to his wife’s illness. He sat Patrick and Daphne and Paul down at the kitchen table and told them only that it was very serious. They heard their father’s word, serious, and they knew the word was meant to warn them, but they didn’t want warning. In these earliest months they put their faith in Doctor Cooper, who was old and lame and sure of himself, and in the strength of the prescriptions they picked up at the drugstore, and most of all in their mother’s resolute nature. They expected her to get better.

  At the end of February they took their parents’ cherry bed apart as they were asked and brought it downstairs piece by piece and they helped their father move some of the living-room furniture into the front hall so the bed could be set up facing the picture window. Bill had told Sylvia that he was moving down with her. He could have borrowed a bed for the living room, could have kept the cherry bed upstairs for himself, but he’d decided he would not turn away from her at night, he would not leave her to go up the stairs alone. Barbaric, he thought, imagining himself on those stairs.

  He knew what people around town believed, that Sylvia had married him because he was so obviously a reliable man, that she had simply made a sensible, level-headed choice. What people couldn’t know was how good they had it here. How calm she could be, how capable, in spite of the fact that she was always open to nonsense. How with her sweat still sharp in his nostrils she could come down to breakfast looking so serene, so unaffected, right away able to become whatever the kids or the rest of the world required her to be. She moved so fast from the one kind of woman to the other. She’d told him once that it was kind of fun and, besides, didn’t he realize, it was what a woman had to do. How else? she’d asked him. Against the odds, expecting almost nothing, he’d got it all. And now was going to lose it, was going to have to sit still and watch the step-by-step approach of his own loss.

  The kids soon got used to having their mother in the living room and they got used to manoeuvring through the crowded hall to get up the stairs but each time they squeezed past the sofa or banged a shin on the sharp corner of the coffee table they were thinking, This won’t last. This is just for now.

  Patrick Chambers was older than Paul by four years and, finished with his growth spurts, had settled in at Bill’s slightly-less-than-average height. He would never reach his brother. He shared most of Daphne’s facial features, although where her mouth was pretty his was simply firm and sharply defined. His eyes too were that bright, beautiful, Wedgwood blue, like Sylvia’s, like Sylvia’s father’s. In addition to his size, he’d got broad, heavily muscled shoulders from Bill and dark, thick hair that he wore slicked back in a carefully groomed duck’s ass, a D.A. When he compared himself to the other guys he decided it was safe enough to believe he was good-looking, the evidence seemed to be there in his school pictures, in the way some girls tensed up when he looked at them.

  Daphne was Sylvia’s height exactly and it was obvious that if her jaw not been broken in such a peculiar way in that childhood fall, if the malformation of the healed jaw had not caused the alignment of her face to be noticeably and permanently askew, she would have been a ringer for her mother. She had the blue eyes and Sylvia’s
sturdy smile, the extremely pretty lips, the widow’s peak under her bangs, the healthy swing to her long hair, the sophisticated, arched eyebrows that already required attention from Sylvia’s tweezers.

  Only Paul would not have been placed with the rest of the family in a crowd, his difference so obvious it was an occasional suppertime joke. Although the youngest, he had just recently and finally become taller than any of them and much taller than everyone else in grade nine, with most of his length in his hockey-strengthened legs. He wore his regularly clipped sandy-coloured hair in a no-nonsense brush cut, and down the sides of his nose and across his chin there was a ridge of acne which he did his best to ignore. He had just started to take Bill’s straight razor down from the medicine cabinet and he would often come to the breakfast table temporarily patched with ripped-off bits of toilet paper, his blood seeping through and then quickly crusting up as he ate his cornflakes. His large eyes were an unusual grey-green, a colour previously unseen in any generation on either side, and the lashes that protected his large eyes were as long and thick and dark as a movie star’s. Two of the girls in his grade-nine homeroom had already told him they would kill for those lashes.

  If there was one trait the family shared, one thing that might have been locked in their genes and thus anticipated down the line, it was their extraordinarily beautiful, fine-boned hands. Bill’s hands too, or maybe especially, even taking into account the fingers that had been blasted off in the North Atlantic.

  Murray McFarlane, who was only an inch shorter than Paul but lanky and not so sure, not so deliberately physical in his movements, was in grade thirteen with Patrick and over the years since the summer of the circus he had gradually worked himself into the Chambers family. He had not disappeared after Daphne’s fall, as another boy might have. He ate with them if he was around when a meal was put on the table, volunteered to help Patrick and Paul with seasonal chores like digging out after a big snowfall, taking the storms down, raking and burning the leaves at the edge of the creek in the fall. He exchanged with all of them modest and unusual Christmas presents: an abacus, a bubble-gum dispenser, a brass nameplate for the unused front door, which Bill promptly nailed to the back door.

  In a nod to social convention, Patrick was sometimes invited to have dinner with Murray’s family but these invitations were always date-specific and issued well in advance. Murray’s parents were extremely devout Anglicans and quite a bit older, in their early sixties. Murray had been a last-chance baby. Both of his parents had been the only surviving offspring of very prosperous families and this misfortune allowed them many of the formalities and much of the ease of wealth. Mr. McFarlane’s younger, bachelor brother Brady, whose boisterous good nature had been admired by some, had lived a short life ruled and eventually ended by the bottle and Mrs. McFarlane had lost a very young brother before the first war, to meningitis, and after the war a sister, her twin, to what the doctors thought must have been a cancer of the breast. Along with a double portion of prime, leased-out farmland, the McFarlanes owned a good third of the buildings on Front Street and the biggest feed mill in the county, which Murray’s father continued to run, to keep himself occupied. They lived in Mrs. McFarlane’s family home. It was one of the houses with a modest turret and a wide wraparound porch and Mrs. McFarlane sometimes entertained a few friends on her porch, with card tables set up for an afternoon of bridge or a summer luncheon.

  Murray carried the loneliness common to his circumstances with no complaint. On a summer night he might take Daphne and maybe a couple of her girlfriends out to the lake to drive up and down the wide beach road in his father’s dark blue hardtop Buick, cranking all the windows down to make the car feel like the convertible his father wouldn’t buy. With no gears to shift and one hand light on the steering wheel, he would run his fingers back through his own severely trained D.A. and undo his shirt to his belt, exposing a narrow but nicely shaped chest. He always gave Daphne the front seat so she could control the radio and she’d find Bill Haley or Brenda Lee or Buddy Holly, turn them up full blast and sing her lungs out, sometimes hang out the window to sing her lungs out.

  Tired of cruising, he’d stop the car on the beach to talk driver to driver to some other guy from school, the girls quiet when this happened, watching, listening, and then he’d pull away and swerve into the shallow waves, leaving long brief arcs of tire tracks behind them in the wet sand.

  He studied with Daphne at the dining-room table, taught her how to write a convincing essay, challenged and praised her because he could see, anyone could see, that she was way above average. And he sat tight beside her at hockey games watching either Patrick’s or Paul’s team take on some other town. He didn’t touch her or try to, didn’t watch for a chance to shove her off balance or ruffle her hair or take one of her small expressive hands into his own. He had not yet outgrown his awkwardness, but he had a kind of skinny, lanky strength. One evening in the spring after Sylvia’s illness had got a hold on her, after everyone understood her need to conserve what was left of her stamina, she called to Murray to say it was likely his turn to carry her out to the kitchen for supper. At her call, he hurried into the living room and scooped her from the bed easily, taking a firm grip on her back and her thin thighs so she would feel his confidence through her housecoat. He held her tight to his chest as he turned to get her through the door.

  * * *

  IN THE TIME before Sylvia died the family often sat around after supper talking, their empty plates pushed toward the middle of the table to make room for their elbows or their folded arms. All her life Sylvia had been a better-than-average mimic. From the time she was a very young girl she had been able to cancel her own voice and bring someone else into the room, someone with an easily recognized cadence, an easily scoffed opinion. Although her face was thin now and her Wedgwood-blue eyes unnaturally large, she could still do a few people dead on, among them Katharine Hepburn and the town’s shy young mayor and, with relish, her hopelessly cheerful sister-in-law, who had firmly established herself as the kids’ least favourite aunt. All of the impersonations brought applause.

  If Paul’s height was mentioned, and it often was mentioned as one way to lighten the talk, Sylvia would say he must have been a foundling, a switch, brought to her hospital bed by mistake. She would describe some very tall mother somewhere puzzling over her short kid. But no one believed that this had actually happened because it was Paul and Paul alone who could do his mother’s trick. Like a monster from a horror movie he could claw his hands, he could bend the top knuckles of his long fingers and keep the other knuckles locked straight. Paul and Sylvia often performed their trick together, smiling across the table at each other, pleased to be giving the others the creeps.

  Two or three times in these months Sylvia called up some energy and tried to say what was actually on her mind. One night, with a deliberation only partially camouflaged by her casual approach, she said she was going to describe each one of them, their skills and their particular talents. She was going to explain why they’d been put on this earth.

  After she said, “Patrick is quiet but steady. He can steady other people when they most need it. This has always been true and always will be,” Patrick stood up from the table and bowed.

  After she said, “Daphne has a mystery about her, something to remind people if they are capable of being reminded that things are not necessarily what they seem,” Daphne got out of her chair to stand in the middle of the room and curtsy in all four directions, as if an attentive crowd surrounded them.

  After she said, “Paul moves fast and thinks fast. And he is funny, and that is a wonderful and useful thing, never to be underestimated,” Paul assumed the exaggerated modesty of a truly humble man, lowering his head solemnly, which made them snort with laughter because what Bill sometimes called his newfound cockiness had once or twice prompted a necessary reminder to Paul that his glorified status as the centre on the Bantam hockey team didn’t automatically carry over.

  No
t finished, because under no circumstances would she have left him out of this, Sylvia turned to Murray. “Murray,” she said, “is just good. Good as in, born that way.” Believing he knew the truth about himself, Murray stayed right where he was, turned his face away, and shrugged his narrow shoulders.

  Bill had been nodding yes while Sylvia spoke, as if they’d talked it over and decided together what was true. The kids knew full well that this kind of testimony was rare. Other kids whose mothers had not been moved down to the living room didn’t get to hear themselves described so kindly. But in spite of their clowning they soaked it up, believed what their mother told them, took the words and stacked them away for future use against other words, a few of which they’d already heard.

  Sometimes when supper was finished everyone would drift into the living room to surround Sylvia on the bed and talk. They would begin with shamelessly enhanced reports of recent events: somebody’s drunk, raging brother-in-law evicted from a dance at the arena, a wedding already planned for July with the bridesmaids to be decked out in dark red velveteen, the highest stained-glass library window unaccountably broken on Thursday night, likely in the middle of the night by a book-hating cult, Daphne said.

  From there they would move on to casual, recreational gossip, to conjecture and guesswork. When the momentum picked up they would home in on the oddest people, the misfits, or the ones they knew the least about, or the ones they didn’t like. In full swing they encouraged and contradicted and interrupted and accused one another and lied as much as they had to, to keep it going. Sylvia still knew everyone they talked about, she hadn’t been in bed long enough to forget how the world worked, and she egged them on and sometimes topped them with mildly nasty but apparently precise accounts from a distant past.