A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  He did enjoy his noisy rituals with the boys, lifting their tough, squirming, slippery little bodies from the bathtub if he got home early enough, escalating their loud, goofy nonsense with his own at the breakfast table on stretched-out Sunday mornings. And he was content with Mary, who was not remotely like Sandra or any of the others he’d been with after Sandra. They did not very often have sex as he’d imagined a man and his wife might, on automatic, when they were tired at the end of a long day or just coming out of sleep in the privacy of early morning. Mary would do anything, go anywhere, but only when they had the assurance of an empty span of time, only after she’d been held for a long quiet time in his arms. And neither of them liked to talk as they waited for it to come to them, the peaceful energy that Mary in the middle of one long night had called their loving freedom, murmuring her satisfied and slightly smug conviction that, for her money, it was a far, far better thing than free love.

  Except for the absence of a decent garage that might actually hold a car, he had come to like the house on Piccadilly and to like what Mary had done with it. The oversized armoires and the odd corner cabinets and the heavy little tables and the several reupholstered chairs you could fall asleep in took comfortable hold in the house and in their lives.

  At their first cocktail party, which they gave the third year they were in the house, Patrick’s fifth year at the law firm, he’d overheard one of the senior partners’ wives say to another senior partner’s wife, casually, that she could not imagine surrounding herself with someone else’s worn-out junk. But Patrick did not look to such women for any kind of guidance. He didn’t look to such women for anything. When they came to him at his office with their husbands, usually to have new wills drawn up or sometimes to sign the papers on a bigger house at a more prestigious address, he pulled their chairs out for them despising their little downtown suits, their immaculate puffed-up hair, their expensive assumptions, their second-hand confidence. When he passed those particularly gruesome women in his own narrow hall with its sconces and its dark oak staircase, which he hoped to be climbing until he was a very old man, they pretended they had not been heard and he almost laughed, but knew better of course. Their husbands were standing just inside the kitchen talking about Expo and the possible implications for international trade. Lifting their almost empty glasses in Patrick’s direction, they too pretended the women had not been heard. As he poured the Scotch for his superiors he wondered whether this little bit of awkwardness would help him at the office or hinder him. From what he’d seen, he guessed it could go either way.

  It had been Patrick’s idea to add the screened-in porch at the back of the dining room. They’d replaced the wide window with double garden doors that, except for the hottest, muggiest days of high summer, were almost always wide open, May to September. Bill had found them an old wrought-iron patio set at a cottage auction, four chairs and a chaise that he’d carefully and thoroughly stripped and repainted white, driving up to Goderich with the cushions to have them recovered in the tough yardage used for boat cushions, realizing when he got there that he’d forgotten to ask Mary exactly what colour she wanted, deciding on his own that she would like the hunter green and she quite sincerely did, nearly as much as she liked Bill himself.

  The addition of the screened porch required attention to the garden, which was small but nicely proportioned, with good afternoon sun. Patrick and Mary concluded together that the only things worth keeping were the red maple and the crab apple and a few of the lilacs back near the garage. After Patrick and Paul cut down or hauled everything else out of the ground, the seven or eight too many lilac bushes and the walnut tree, which was dirty, and the old cedars, which had thinned and faded, the first order of business was a new wraparound euonymus hedge, for privacy. They left a good expanse of reseeded grass for the kids and built a sandbox close, but not too close, to the back door, drove out to the lake for a load of fine white play sand. They worked up the flower beds with topsoil and some of Paul’s Cadillac manure from the farm, put in a dozen peonies along the side and three climbing roses against the garage wall. They left the rest to Mary and she took her time with the perennials just as she had with the furniture. The first thing she did was paint the small garage door a dark cherry red to set off the roses, which would be white, which were by the seventh year of their marriage white and robust and almost glowing in the evening light when they sat with their drinks in the screened-in porch with Stephen and John at their feet, the boys revving their trucks in preparation for a big crash, their little mouths working hard, exploding with the sounds of carnage.

  * * *

  BOTH OF MURRAY’S parents died in May of 1970. His mother suffered a quick, entirely unanticipated fatal stroke while she was standing over her stove grating cheese into a sauce for the broccoli and two days after her funeral his father was gone. He had been sitting alone on the brocade sofa watching Archie Bunker berate Meathead on All in the Family when he had a mild heart attack and soon thereafter a second attack that was called massive and which killed him.

  Patrick had done their wills right after he joined his law firm. Mr. McFarlane told his own long-time lawyer at home that he wanted to give the will business to Patrick, just to help get him started, and this was understood as an ordinary gesture from one generation of men to another, a handing down. The McFarlane wills were not complicated. Everything to each other and then everything to Murray. The only exceptions were a bequest to the Anglican Church for new carpet and choir gowns and another larger bequest to the Cancer Society, because both of the McFarlanes assumed that if they lived long enough, they would become familiar with one kind of cancer or another. Some of their oldest friends had died of it, quite miserably.

  The day after his father’s funeral, a Saturday, Murray drove into London to Patrick and Mary’s house on Piccadilly, which he’d never seen, to be told what he expected to hear. His parents had always ensured that he understood clearly the specifics of their wills. They did this even when he was a child, to give him confidence, they said. Although neither of them would have shared it with anyone but the other, they had been, in their old age, slightly disappointed in Murray. This materialized in three ways: his mother’s worried judgement that he was foolishly and dangerously resistant to his God, his father’s proud disappointment that he had deliberately sought a career that took him so very far away from home, and their shared amazement at his choice of a wife. But their disappointment did not in any way interfere with what they had always privately called Murray’s birthright. Money, his mother said, was money.

  After Mary had given Murray a brief tour of the house, and he did seem interested in the staircase and particularly in some of the cabinets, Patrick picked up both wills from the dining-room table and handed them over, explaining unnecessarily that because Mr. McFarlane had outlived her, his will negated his wife’s.

  Mary was glad to see Murray although she had never known him well. There was only the quick year before she and Patrick were married and Murray had pulled back that year, giving her room, giving her first claim, and then he more or less disappeared into his work, into his travelling around. Sometimes they heard from Margaret where in the world he was and once in a while they found something of his in one of the Toronto papers, but they saw him only irregularly and only at home if they happened to be at Bill and Margaret’s when he, too, was in town visiting his parents. Charlotte had stopped going home with him to see the McFarlanes while they were alive, although she was firmly present at both funerals, thoroughly composed in a severe, black, sleeveless dress. She had moved through the crowded church basement, chatting up the elderly church people and touching their age-spotted arms as she spoke to them, her transparently disciplined liveliness so false it clearly astonished them, left them shocked on her behalf and speechless.

  Standing in the dining room in her own very early middle age, Mary thought now that Murray was quite good looking, compelling in a way that Patrick was not. His hair had thinned bu
t this made his face unavoidable and she liked unavoidable faces. His cheekbones were his strongest feature, his cheekbones and his light-filled eyes. She attributed the thinking of these lusty thoughts, which were not at all normal for her, to altered hormones. She was always a bit randy when she was pregnant, a bit open. When she was carrying John, she had confessed this to her young doctor, mainly because she was curious to see if he’d say what he usually said, which was, “Oh sure, I hear that all the time, not to worry.” Lying on the table, conjuring fond thoughts about the pulsing baby just there under her thick, taut skin and about herself, her temporarily, she hoped, altered self, she did not pause long enough to realize that she was speaking to a man who probably assumed himself to be fairly good looking and who was just at that moment preparing to insert his gloved index finger into her vagina. When he frowned and offered the opinion that while he’d never heard of such a thing, he would guess that her feelings were likely just a slight aberration and certainly nothing to get excited about, she recognized with a thud her own stupidity and laughed so hard he had to stall his index finger and pretend to laugh with her. Later, when she replayed this scene for Patrick in their bed, snuggling into him, expecting raucous laughter, he just pulled back and lifted his eyebrows, waiting as he had waited before to be told just why this was funny. Disappointed for a week, she finally thought of telling Margaret, who was a better audience for almost anything anyway and who, hearing it, hooted most satisfactorily.

  When he’d arrived Murray had made a sincere and appreciated fuss over five-year-old Stephen, who was Stephen Murray, and then over John, who at two was still small enough to be lifted and swung up into the air, and now Mary called the boys back into the dining room to say goodbye. After Murray bent down to shake the boys’ hands he turned to her. “You were never in my mother’s house,” he said. “Patrick gave her a rose bowl once and I’d like you to have it. And she had a chest you might like. I think it’s walnut.” He held his hand at his own chest to indicate the height. “It has about a hundred drawers.”

  Mary smiled and nodded yes.

  “Come maybe Wednesday morning,” he said. “The auctioneers are going to be there Wednesday afternoon to look things over. I’ll hold back anything that catches your eye.”

  Moved by this unexpected generosity, Mary told him she would come Wednesday morning for sure, and thank you. And she decided she would definitely choose something. If there was nothing she liked, she could just pick something small, something she could tuck away in a cabinet.

  Before Murray arrived she had told Patrick she’d take off with the boys and it still looked like the right thing to do. She reminded him about all the ingredients available for lunch and then went out the door to settle Stephen and John into the car and take them the hour’s drive over to see Bill and Margaret and Sally. Bill in particular loved to look up from the cash register at the hardware store and see her standing there with his grandsons, come all this way to visit their grandpa at work. He always kept a stash of multicoloured Laura Secord suckers in the back of the register for his grandchildren and for all the other kids who came in, who were expected to stand stock-still and quiet while their fathers contemplated wrenches and roach poison.

  Driving down the highway trying to find some music on the car radio, Mary found instead a report of a shooting at Kent State University. Four American students had been killed by troops from their own National Guard. The troops had shot into a crowd of protesting students. That was the phrase the reporter used, shot into the crowd. Listening to the reporter go on about Nixon and rallies and demonstrations and Cambodia and casualties, the word casualties sounding as always like very much the wrong word, she thought, not for the first time, how good it was to be Canadian, to be alive in this country now. A Canadian in 1970 didn’t have to fear her own armed government. Patrick and Murray and Paul were not required by law to hand their lives over to fight someone else’s war.

  She hoped Patrick would take the trouble to get to know Murray again, that Murray would stay around for a while, that they’d drink beer in the sun porch all afternoon, listen to some of Patrick’s jazz, to John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, get themselves loosened up. They had not seen much of each other for years but this could be understood as simply an ordinary interruption caused by jobs and marriages, distance, Murray’s constant moving around. She remembered watching them, especially that summer at Dunworkin, thinking that she heard in their casual, sometimes nasty banter an oblique male commitment, a kind of contract. They seemed to have been steady, easy, dependable friends and why not resurrect that? She didn’t know how grown-up men survived without it, or why. Her own friend Joan, who was married now, too, and living on the far side of Toronto, had become indispensable, like a sister who didn’t slow things down to a crawl with the need for context or background or explanation.

  * * *

  IT MIGHT HAVE been better if Mary had stayed with Patrick and Murray in the porch. She might have been able to give Murray more of what he’d come for.

  With the wills out of the way, Patrick’s intention was to ask briefly about Charlotte and then to take the chance to get Murray to talk if he would about journalism. He thought he might be able to feel that he knew him again if he understood more about his working life. And he had a lot of questions, starting from the almost nothing that he knew about the job and from the assumption that anything Murray could tell him would be at least slightly interesting. But the one question about Charlotte, the simple, She looks good, how is she? took them straight down Murray’s line of thought, which apparently had been the plan from the start.

  “Oh, Charlotte’s fine,” Murray said, answering the question with a nod and then adding quickly, as if it were part of the answer, “I’m going to leave her.” He tilted his head back toward the wills on the dining-room table. “There is substantial money now. She could live well enough on half of it.”

  Patrick eased himself back from the edge of the reinvigorated friendship. He didn’t like divorce. Not at all. There was nothing to like about divorce. “Why now?” he said. “Why not earlier, before you got the money?”

  Murray laughed. “Once a lawyer…”

  “No,” Patrick said. “It’s just that, well, why would you want her to have any of that money?”

  “Because it was not her fault that I married her. I married her because she has the best legs and the finest breasts I have ever seen. And I sincerely believed that would be enough to last me.”

  “She is a very good-looking woman,” Patrick said.

  “But you’ve never liked her,” Murray said, watching closely for a reaction that was not forthcoming. “Nobody has ever liked her. And now I don’t.”

  “Charlotte must be similar to the rest of us,” Patrick said, getting up from his chair to get a couple of Pilsners from the fridge, calling back, “She must be made of all the usual stuff. Strengths. Weaknesses. Needs.” Coming out to the porch again with the beer, he said, “I admit I didn’t like her much at first, but I decided some time ago this was probably only because I was used to a different kind of woman. We were unfair to Charlotte, I’m sure.”

  Murray waited until Patrick was comfortably stretched out in his wrought-iron chaise. “I hope you haven’t wasted a lot of your time feeling guilty,” he said. “She has never liked any of you. Almost right from the beginning, she had vicious nicknames for everyone.”

  “Which I don’t want to hear,” Patrick said. “Not today or any other day. Anyway. I think everyone pretty much came around. I just assumed I couldn’t see what you saw.”

  “And indeed you couldn’t,” Murray said, taking a long drink. “The fact that she’d been with quite a few other men has always been a bit of a turn-on but I never did get to like the idea that someone like you, for instance, might look at her and imagine her naked.”

  Patrick laughed a low male laugh, the kind women get to hear only by mistake. “You are deluding yourself a bit there,” he said. “I have never imagined the
good Charlotte naked.” He had, of course. He caught Murray’s skeptical gaze. “Call it friendship,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Call it taste. Yours. Mine. Not necessarily the same.”

  “If you say so,” Murray said. He had rested his foot on Stephen’s beat-up dump truck and was rolling it back and forth in front of him. “And you’re right, she does have needs. What she needs is to feel superior to everyone on the planet. What she needs is to have received a good swift kick in the ass when she first started to strut her mind-boggling vanity, whenever that was. Before my time.”

  “This sounds a bit like hatred,” Patrick said.

  “The problem has become more about what it isn’t,” Murray said, “than what it is.”

  Patrick started to run his thumbnail down the sweaty label of his beer bottle, shredding it. Murray dug round in his pockets and found his lighter but no cigarettes because he had purposely not bought any. “I’ve been smoking,” he said. “And now I’m quitting. Everybody I know smokes,” he said. “My car stinks of it. My clothes stink of it. Can you smell it on me?”