A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  Daphne had joined them on the beach. She was jumping up and down on the hard wet sand, still in her bathing suit from her afternoon with the kids, wrapped in the quilt from the porch couch. She wanted someone to go walking in the storm with her. “Not very far,” she told them. “Just down to the Casino and back. Before it really gets going.”

  Bill shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said. He was looking back at the cottage, at Margaret and Mary. The sleeping porch was closed up tight and they had dropped all but one of the downstairs shutters and now they stood together at the one open screen watching, waiting for the men to come in out of the storm. Soon Sally was there with Krissy squirming in her arms and Neil beside her, standing up wide-eyed on a chair to see the action.

  Bill started back up with the wind behind him, pushing him. Patrick and Paul followed and Murray went to Daphne, put his arm out to direct her toward the cottage. But she ducked and pulled away. When she turned around and opened the quilt to him, he moved in beside her. “Not all the way to the Casino,” he yelled above the wind, taking some of the quilt over his shoulders.

  Margaret was not surprised to see them go. She stood at the screen and watched the wind as it tried to snap the quilt away from them and then she dropped the last shutter.

  Inside the cottage, although it was not yet cold, Paul was ripping and bunching newspaper for a fire. Mary suggested that they rearrange the heavy old maroon couches and the chairs into a circle around the fireplace and Patrick helped her, said they should have thought of it sooner, should have done it the first day. When they were finished, Bill sat in the corner of the smaller couch and Sally flopped down beside him, taking Krissy up onto her small lap. Neil ran across the room and started to climb the stairs, saying he wanted to have some more nap. Margaret scooped him up and cuddled him, knowing that he was both frightened of the sounds the storm made and lonely for his mother, although he wasn’t the kind of child who would want this said.

  Margaret always made a point of giving generous attention to the grandchildren. She wanted these two and all the ones that followed to get to know each other, to like each other, and later have a few memories of liking each other. She had told Bill she’d had nothing like that when she was young.

  They settled in to watch Paul’s fire. The wood had been seasoned and he’d stacked it carefully, correctly. Within minutes the bottom log appeared to be entirely on fire, the flames jumping out, stretching to lick the logs above it.

  The wind was fully up now. The rain was starting to come down hard on the roof over their heads and the sound of the waves was a pounding roar. Sitting watching the fire, Margaret allowed herself to wonder if Daphne and Murray had found shelter, and where. If the others shared one thought, it was that the two of them would likely come bursting through the kitchen door any minute, would likely come back laughing and drenched from their idiotic adventure.

  Looking around the room, from face to face, Margaret noticed that Sally was wanting something. “What is it, babe?” she said.

  Sally hugged Krissy close. “Shouldn’t we go find Daphne and Murray?” she asked.

  “They’ll be all right,” Margaret said. “Don’t you worry about them. They’re somewhere.”

  Satisfied with this answer, Sally turned to the fire to study the quick bursts of firelight that brightened the faces of everyone close to it and then she asked, “Shouldn’t we watch the storm?”

  Margaret looked over at Bill. “All right,” he said, getting up. “But if we lift the shutters, the porch will turn into a sandbox and that means in the morning it will be Sally and Dad who wake up really early to sweep it out.” He opened the door to the porch and closed it quickly behind him and they watched him through the big front windows. As he released the hooks the force of the wind pushed the shutters against his chest, pushed them halfway up to the ceiling. After he’d got three of them fastened he turned back to look at Sally, who was standing at the window holding Krissy, nodding her head. He went over to the picnic table and gathered what was left of Margaret’s jigsaw puzzle into the box, bent to collect a few pieces from the floor. Watching him from her chair by the fire with Neil snuggled close beside her, reaching back to knock on the window but then not knocking, Margaret said, “That doesn’t matter, Bill. My puzzle doesn’t matter.”

  The sky was as black as night. Every few minutes long branching forks of lightning pierced down through the clouds to the rolling surface of the slate grey water. Sheet lightning, broad and quick and unanticipated, lit the whole grey lake. The waves had thickened, they were moving in now like liquid muscle, breaking hard and sudsy white on the dark sand, throwing up driftwood and bits of garbage and stunned minnows and coarse sawdust from the mills on the far side of the lake, the Michigan side.

  The first of the thunder cracked just as Bill was coming back in from the porch with the puzzle box in his hand. The lights, two in the kitchen, one above the big oak table, and three in a floor lamp beside Patrick’s chair, flickered twice as one light and then died. Mary had been sitting holding the flashlight, ready for the darkness, and when it came she pushed the switch and pointed the cone of light at Bill as he walked back to the kitchen to get a towel to dry his head. Paul was fiddling with the transistor radio by the light of the fire, turning the dial back and forth through the static, searching for the voice of a weatherman. “They’ll have a generator at the hospital,” he said.

  “They’ll have a generator for sure,” Bill called from the kitchen. “Likely several.” After he was dried off he came back to sit down again beside Sally and Krissy on the couch, put his feet up on the hassock, and locked his hands behind his head. “Let’s talk about Florida,” he said.

  This is what they did when there was nothing else for them to do. They talked about going south for a winter holiday, driving down in two or three cars but staying together on the road, finding a nice stretch of ocean, renting some kind of cottage for a couple of weeks. Bill always started the talk. And they had discussed it so often and in such detail, the details always presenting some kind of problem and then one way or another getting sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction, that it seemed almost possible that one day they might actually get themselves down there. They would buy loud American bathing suits and jump ocean waves under a hot February sun and when they were tired of jumping waves, they would lie back in black-and-white striped beach chairs, the stripes being one of Daphne’s contributions to the dream, to drink perfectly chilled glasses of cheap American gin.

  * * *

  AFTER THEY’D MADE love in the small unlocked shed behind the Casino, Murray and Daphne waited out the worst of the storm with Mary’s parents, drinking Canadian Club.

  They had just started back to Dunworkin when it really broke loose. They’d thought it was likely almost over, but running down the Casino hill they could hardly see their feet in front of them and the crosswind coming off the lake soon slowed their running to a hard walk. Their hair was blown wild and plastered wet to their faces and everything that covered them, the quilt, and their clothes and skin under the quilt, was quickly, thoroughly drenched. When a flash of sheet lightning created a brief, queer daylight under the black clouds, they were able to recognize Mary’s parents’ cottage and they left the beach thinking just to take shelter under the broad eaves around at the back where they would be protected from the full fury of the wind. But Mary’s father heard them and opened the kitchen door with a flashlight in his hand. He knew them immediately and ushered them inside, his only comment a surprised but cheerful, “Good grief, Mother.”

  Mrs. Wilson pointed them to separate bedrooms and brought towels and dry clothes, a sundress for Daphne and a pair of Mr. Wilson’s best shorts for Murray, telling them in a pleasant, straightforward way what fools they were. “Here,” she said, tossing them their towels, “get yourselves dried off, for God’s sake.” She gave them a few minutes and then knocked on the doors holding a plastic basket for their wet clothes. Daphne told Mrs. Wilson if she could
please just have a garbage bag, that would be great, and then she went to the bathroom to fix her hair in the candlelight, to search her face for giveaway signs of joy. Murray went out to talk to Mr. Wilson, who was standing in the kitchen pouring the rye with his flashlight tucked under his arm.

  The four of them carried their drinks to the fire in the living room, which was furnished much more formally than Dunworkin, the sofa and chairs obviously just one generation off new, likely brought out from the house in London when a better suite there displaced them. The floor was carpeted and there was a new open kitchen with a breakfast bar. Several oil lamps had been lit and placed on stable-looking tables.

  Earlier that afternoon, before they’d arrived at Dunworkin, Mary and Patrick had come to tell Mary’s parents about their honeymoon, about all the historical sights in Boston and the drive back through New York State, and after the Wilsons got Daphne and Murray settled into comfortable chairs with their drinks and a sincere assurance that they had both enjoyed the groom’s dinner just so much, travel was what they wanted to talk about now. They wanted to know had Murray had the chance to broaden his experience with travel? Had Daphne? They themselves had travelled a lot and hoped to do more of it now that Mr. Wilson could take some time away from work. They had been to Florida many times of course and twice to Europe, once to California, to Jamaica, to Banff, to Washington.

  Murray was relieved beyond measure that there was nothing to do between the cracks of thunder but drink rye and listen, or appear to listen. He had thought about it so many, many times and now here it was. In all his imagining he had never once imagined it unexpected or clumsy or rushed, or on the rough cement floor of some anonymous cement-block shed in a banging storm. The metal roof above them had been so roaring loud he couldn’t hear or understand most of what she’d said to him, and because he was afraid to raise his voice in case someone heard and came to rescue them, he’d had to try to speak with his hands, had to let his hands say what he might have said if it had happened some place else, some place safe and quiet. Near the end, near the brilliant end of it, he understood that his hands were not moving kindly, they were not soothing her flesh and her bones and her muscles as he had imagined they would, given their chance. He was bruising her with questions, the questions being, Why does this have to come to me now? and, Why do you decide you want me now?

  Daphne drank her rye and smiled her misaligned showmanship smile. She was not thinking about the trips she might make. She was thinking about the sheet lightning that had filled the high shed window. In its intermittent flash she had seen that he was as fine as she’d discovered, just this evening discovered she had imagined him to be. She’d looked down at many men lying naked or nearly naked, bruised and broken and suffering or healing or dead. But this was a man as he was meant to be seen, and a man’s moving body, all bones and angles and shadows, was a lovely thing. She could feel his hands on her face and on her body, all over it and all over it again when they were finished, much harder when they were finished. And her body knew her mind. Her body had known enough to brace itself. Her mouth had gone to his skin, to the rain on his shoulders, to his damp belly, instinctively. She could no more have stopped this than she could in other times have stopped her aching arms from reaching for a sweet bundled infant or her mangled jaw from opening wide in unanticipated laughter.

  When it had become clear that he should not be asked to wait any longer she had wrapped herself around him and he held her exactly as she wished to be held, and when he broke through into her it wasn’t hurt she felt at all. Or it was hurt with a fine new name.

  And even so, even with all of this ringing absolutely true through her comforted, thankful body as she sat there watching the Wilsons’ fire and drinking their warming rye, when they’d finally got themselves hidden from the storm, safe under the eaves, when Murray asked her, “Did that happen?” she could only try to look at him squarely and say, “I might be the last person to ask.”

  1970

  PATRICK AND MARY bought their house in 1964, the first spring after they were married. Mary had roamed north London with a real estate agent for two months before she decided on tree-lined Piccadilly Street and then it was just a matter of waiting and watching for one of the big old square-jawed houses to come on the market.

  Most of their friends and certainly all of the men at Patrick’s law firm were buying out in the suburbs, big brick splits with two-car garages and bay windows, shake roofs and two fireplaces and lower levels to be finished soon with shag carpet and wet bars, but Mary had grown up in a once-modern fifties ranch over behind the university, every solid inch of which, the walls, the baseboards, the doors, the ceilings, had been painted a creamy off-white, and now for her own life she wanted some character. She wanted natural wood and high baseboards and thick plaster walls you could sink a nail into and deep windowsills and the muted, unobtrusive yellow brick that had been the preferred brick when the old part of the city was built. Although she would never have said so, the first time she saw Bill and Margaret’s white frame house, the house Patrick had grown up in, which was so much smaller, so much the lesser house, she decided that she liked it better than her own family’s. From the look of things, Margaret had neither the inclination nor the time for the pristine demands a woman could make on a house. She had moved in with Bill and his kids and more or less maintained what Patrick’s mother had begun. This was the kind of house Mary wanted for her own kids.

  Because Patrick still had the last half of Alex McFarlane’s note to take care of, Mary’s father had loaned them the five-thousand-dollar down payment, telling them to go ahead and buy big, buy what they’d need down the line, because waiting was not nearly as wise as it was assumed to be. Moving up was an extremely costly undertaking. He further advised that it would be worth their while to forgo holidays and a new car for a while in order to put every loose dollar they had against their mortgage. Somehow he knew what was coming, knew that the housing market was just on the brink of the kind of growth not seen since the years after the war. He was obviously disappointed to see his money sunk into such an old house but Mary told him she was convinced it would outlast the new houses being thrown up so fast on the outskirts of the city, and besides, the trees alone and the park just a few blocks away and the settled, closed-in feel of the street, these were the things she and Patrick valued. And Patrick’s office was so close he could walk and that would save them the expense of a second car, forever.

  Mary was just pregnant with Stephen, didn’t even quite realize she was pregnant, when she got almost exactly the house she wanted and they asked one of Patrick’s colleagues to draw up the papers.

  Bill and Margaret said nothing one way or the other about the choice of a house but when Bill saw that the kids were serious about the place on Piccadilly he did bring Archie Stutt in to look over the hot-water furnace and the wiring and the plumbing. Archie’s diagnosis was that the wiring was a bit suspect and should likely be tackled some time in the next five years, the plumbing, being copper throughout, was that much better than new and the old boiler could probably fire the Queen Mary across the Atlantic, if in fact the Queen Mary still existed.

  After they signed on the dotted line, but before Paul came in with his half-ton to help bring over what little they owned from the apartment on Oxford, most of it cheap, leftover university stuff, Margaret and Mary stripped all the downstairs hardwood with a rented sander. Then they waxed and polished, both of them on their knees for long hours, their stiff joints screaming because Mary wouldn’t have urethane, which she said looked phoney. They went down to Kingsmills to pick out material for drapes, decided together on good understated linen that was neither in fashion nor out. Margaret didn’t offer to sew these herself, although she did find someone at home who was an experienced seamstress, to run them up.

  A year later, after the drapes were hung and the floors buffed to a soft glow by the socks and slippers that moved across them, Margaret drove into the city more than s
he normally would have to watch Stephen while Mary took herself off to estate auctions to try to find the furniture she imagined filling all her rooms. Stephen was a good, pudgy baby, happiest when put on the kitchen floor with the pots and pans and a couple of big spoons. Sometimes Margaret brought Sally in with her for company, to dispel the hollow sound of the rooms that was caused, she knew, not just by the absence of furniture but by the extremely high ceilings that Mary liked so much. At nine, Sally appeared to have lost every ounce of her earlier maternal inclination, although she would agree to hold Stephen while Margaret spooned him his pablum. Usually Sally just wanted Mary to hurry up and get home and said so.

  It took Mary three years to find all the big pieces she wanted and she was careful not to rush it, not to be swayed from her master plan, which she never did articulate to anyone.

  Now they were almost a houseful. The boys were in the second biggest bedroom, Stephen up in the top bunk and John, who was born the day after Stephen’s third birthday, just recently coaxed into the bottom bunk. The crib had to be freed because at the end of March Mary had discovered she was carrying her last baby. If it was a girl, and Mary and her doctor both claimed to be sure this time that it was, she would be Rebecca. Rebecca Sylvia.

  Patrick was working ten-hour days almost all the time and they hadn’t had a holiday since the big family trip to Florida two years earlier, just before John was born. If he’d stopped to think about it, Patrick would have had to say that he was exhausted but he was still only thirty-three and hungry for promotion, for the added income and the status and the responsibility, for the meat a man like him was expected to sink his teeth into. You didn’t get a promotion in a firm like his if you allowed yourself to appear tired. The walking to work helped. He believed it did. And often in good weather he donned sweats to jog the route he’d laid out for himself, changing it sometimes in response to traffic patterns, finishing off with the seven blocks to his office, cleaning up in the small men’s washroom and changing into the suit and shirt and dress shoes he’d parked behind his office door. This routine was the source of edgy amusement for some of his colleagues, many of whom paid exorbitant fees to belong to a downtown gym that had a weight room and a sauna and a pool. While his jogging precluded his taking part in most of the jock talk and in the much more significant rounds of boasting about paying so damned much money for fitness, his thirty-minute run down the quiet morning streets, through the large, heavily treed central park, past the tank from the Second World War and the cannon from the Siege of Sebastopol and the larger-than-life soldier high on a concrete pedestal ignoring in perpetuity the larger-than-life woman reaching up to him, became an essential, head-clearing part of his day. Perhaps because it gave him his only privacy.