A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  Murray reached over to lay his free hand in her lap and she took it, touched her fingers to the warm, soft pad of skin on the back of his hand, lifted them away, waited a hard few seconds and then touched the skin again, over and over again giving herself the pleasure of his existence. Anyone seeing this, she thought, even from a distance, would recognize it as love. Easy love.

  But sometimes, most often those times when the bully guilt dislocated her ease, she wondered if the thing she had always been after, and still wanted, even now when she had no earthly use for it, was semen. Only his, but still, only semen. For a long time, from the first time, she had been able to feel her cervix moving in pleasure, the knowledge sent to her every time from just behind, just beyond the sweet delirium, and because she’d wanted an image of this mystery, a miniature image that might be worn in a gold locket, she had imagined a small, hidden, happy muscle yawning open like the mouth of a fish. But recently she’d seen a documentary, a film of a woman in orgasm, the woman on her back in some lab, the minuscule camera and light carefully inserted, this for the sake of science, of knowledge, and she had seen that it was not at all as she’d imagined. The cervix was not like a fish. It dips down into the pool of semen, again and again, like a small, thirsty dove.

  They hadn’t been together for three years. Two months before he married Kate, Murray had told her, in a rehearsed, controlled phone call, that it had to be over. He’d explained that while he probably could continue on alone, he didn’t want to, not any more. He needed someone who was ready to sign on full-time.

  A trusting soul, she’d thought, listening. Could this be what you want? What you’ve found somewhere?

  He told her he thought he might have fallen in love. It felt like that.

  He had tried something similar once or twice before, when it wasn’t true, hoping with his practised lies to shake her loose. But this time it was true.

  As she’d listened to him tell the truth, Daphne had recognized the change immediately. He had given himself away because the other times there had been a trace of bravado, a whiff of threat in his voice, and this time there was only a dull regret, only the quiet retreat of a man who had made up his mind.

  “Then I guess we go on,” she’d said, saving herself, “slightly altered.” She was sitting at her window overlooking the muddy Thames, with Maggie in school and Jill at her knees offering one of her storybooks. “This can’t come as a big shock to me. You have been more than generous. All this time you’ve been generous.” She waited for him to speak but he evidently wanted her to say something more. “What about this for a plan,” she said. “We go straight to remembering the best of it. Full bolt. No detours.” Still he didn’t speak. “And of course the girls,” she said. “They’re yours. No games will be played there.”

  Murray had not been surprised that her control was absolute, that she didn’t even ask who it was he thought he loved. He knew she wouldn’t fight for him. She didn’t have to fight for him. He didn’t push for any kind of guarantee about Maggie and Jill because Daphne did not waver, she did not say things she didn’t mean. Her promises were few and far between, but they were kept. And he didn’t ask what she would do, who she might find for herself, because if he’d asked, she would have said only that he was not to worry, she would be all right. And so, as easily as that, it was done. Twenty years, done.

  When they turned onto the airport road, she was holding his large hand completely in her own two smaller hands. “I like Kate a lot,” she said. “Everyone seems to.” She was quiet again for a minute, thinking of a way to convince him. “I’ve been trying to figure out why whenever she sits down at the table, the kids come alive for her, every one of them. I’ve decided it’s because she doesn’t make them nervous. She makes them the opposite of nervous.”

  “I’ve named the girls in my will,” Murray said.

  “Your will?” she asked. “Is something wrong?” She was staring at his hand in her lap, as if its strength had deceived her. “You’re not sick?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m fine. It’s just a normal update.”

  She lifted his hand to her mouth, briefly rested her lips on his warm skin. “Does Kate know about this will thing?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I told her it was because they have no father and I have no children. It’s fine with her. She has quite a bit of money of her own. And a very good pension plan with the university. She’s been there for almost twenty years.”

  “Will you tell them?” she asked.

  “We should maybe let it wait,” he said. He slowed to make the turn into the airport parking lot. “And I want to sell you the house,” he said.

  “The house in town?” she asked. “I don’t live in town.”

  “It’s been rented out. You could continue to rent it out.”

  “Even so,” she said, “I don’t really have the money. I haven’t been able to save very much. Sweet-shit-all is how you might describe what I have been able to save.”

  “The price would be negligible,” he said. “A dollar, just to make it a legal sale. Patrick is going to send you the documents for your signature, the deed of land.”

  “And we tell no one?” she asked.

  “We tell no one now,” he said.

  “All right,” she said. She reached into her satchel for her wallet, got out a soft one-dollar bill, and tucked it into his pants pocket. “I love that house,” she said. “Maybe I’ll retire there. I could grow roses in my dotage and give them to people. Buckets of fresh-cut roses from the odd, old woman who lives alone in that big house with the wraparound porch. Who wears earmuffs and high heels and overalls. Whose nails are too long.”

  “Or you could live an ordinary life there,” he said. “Another option.”

  When they approached the terminal they could see Sarah and Stephen waiting with their bags at the pick-up curb. Stephen already had his suit on, he had apparently worn it on the plane from Montreal. As she was getting into the car Sarah told them she’d been able to make an earlier connection at Pearson because the flight from Vancouver had got in a bit ahead of schedule, so she and Stephen had waited together in the coffee shop. She said she had called the house from Toronto but the line was busy. Except for her eyes, which were without make-up shadowed and puffy, she looked fit and healthy and strong. She was wearing a dark green maternity jogging suit, the material stretched taut over her high, broad belly. Daphne was a bit surprised at the jogging suit because Sarah had always been a disciplined, slightly flashy dresser. She would not normally have been caught dead in this outfit, not in public.

  They put her in the front seat with Murray for the ride home. Stephen rode in the back with Daphne, his head turned toward the passing outskirts of the city, the small industries, the packaging plants, the car dealerships. Sarah didn’t break down until they were on the highway, after they had answered some of her questions.

  Paul had been fifteen when Sarah was born and four years later he was married and gone out to the farm, but of all of them he had been the one closest to her in age. Before Andy married Paul, before her own kids were born, she had pretty much taken over with Sarah, dressing her up in little sunsuits, taking her out to the lake on her days off to play in the sand with bright plastic pails and serving spoons from the kitchen drawer, colouring with her at the kitchen table, cutting out paper dolls from one of Daphne’s old books. Daphne guessed that Sarah was remembering some of this. She stopped talking to let her remember in peace.

  * * *

  MARY AND KATE had gone back over to the house to stay with Meg while the others went in to the airport because Margaret had to get some sleep and Bill was still in very bad shape, it was all he could do to stand up from his bed and get to the bathroom. The two of them switched off, took turns, one of them lying down with Meg up in Daphne’s bed while the other answered the kitchen door. Mary didn’t recognize many of the men and women who arrived carrying gifts of food but she bluffed it through, claimed to remember meeting them somewhe
re when it was suggested that she had. The people who stood at the door had the advantage of course.

  Kate wasn’t expected to recognize anyone because she and Murray had not been married very long. She was understood to be the second wife, a wife who wouldn’t know much. But she was not unfamiliar with the gestures, the nature of the gestures, the men slowly shaking their heads, saying almost nothing, the casseroles in their hands wrapped thickly in newspaper, still warm from someone’s oven, the pies and all the desserts recognizably made from scratch because the women who sent them were careful to send only the very best ingredients, the very best effort.

  Although her parents had moved to Oakville after she and her sister left for university, which turned out to be for good, Kate had grown up this way, in Dresden, a town not far away and almost this small. Her great-great-great-grandparents had been brought up north just a few months before the Civil War, when slaves were pouring across the border. Dresden was where they’d ended that trip, where they’d built their lives. As she took the warm dishes into her hands she watched the friends and neighbours stare briefly and discreetly at her pink upturned palms.

  Meg could not be consoled. Margaret had said she was to be kept at home, that she was not to be taken back into London before the funeral, that they should be able to calm her down somehow. But Meg could not or would not sleep. She was wide awake crying for days and nights running. She could not cry herself out.

  After Andy was settled into the boys’ room, quiet and clearly needing quiet, Neil and Carol tried to take Meg home with them but she wouldn’t stay, Neil had to get dressed in the middle of the night to bring her back to Andy. Margaret waited up with Meg until dawn and then she called the doctor at the clinic and asked him please to prescribe the biggest belt of whatever he had in his arsenal because it simply could not go on. One of the two new druggists, a young East Indian with a red Mustang and large, calm eyes who had been in town long enough to know that he should come to the back door at a time like this, brought the prescription over himself and Meg took the first capsules standing at the sink, asking as he handed them to her with a glass of water why was she the only one, why was she always the only one?

  After the druggist left, Kate, whose field was chemistry, lifted the capsules to read the prescription and then Krissy said that she would do it. When the funeral was behind them she would arrange to take her holiday time and go back into the group home with Meg and stay there with her for as long as it took.

  Although most of the flowers had been sent to the funeral home, a few plants, mostly mums, were delivered to the house and there were already over a hundred sympathy cards. Meg, who was calmed by mid-morning and sluggish, decided that she should be the one to open the cards and with her fine-boned, beautiful hands she opened and arranged them in larger and larger circles on the dining-room table. She took great care with this, did not swear or punch herself when one card knocked another over.

  * * *

  THERE HAD TO be two afternoons and two nights of visitation because one way or another Paul had known so many people. The funeral director, who was almost ready to take over the business from his father, was very considerate, very attentive. At Patrick’s request he had not tried to darken Paul’s high forehead to match his tanned-from-the-fields face.

  Andy’s mother stood just inside the doors with her sister and brother-in-law, Don, who had come down from Barrie where Don had been for all these years a cop. Their job was to greet people as they entered the main room, to ask that they sign their names in the book. Neil and Carol and Krissy and Meg took their places beside their mother, Meg securely wedged between Carol and Krissy. Andy stood closest to the casket, braced to take the brunt of it. Her face and neck were sliced with small stitched cuts but otherwise, thanks to Carol’s steady hand, she was properly made up, her lips and her eyes. She was dazed and sick with sorrow but soon grateful too, for the kind words, for the extravagant praise she was accepting on Paul’s behalf. She had gone through lines like this herself, many times. She knew people struggled.

  The rest of them flanked the casket on the other side, Bill first. Not many people had ready phrases for Margaret and Bill. Margaret guessed this was because they hadn’t had nearly as much experience offering their condolences to the parents of the deceased, and she thought, Wasn’t this a good thing. She recognized clearly what she saw passing in front of her. One by one by one, these people made the larger circle and most of them knew to keep a certain distance, to come just so close and no closer. Standing in that one place, Bill sometimes seemed to stagger a bit and when he did he reached back to touch the glossy wood to steady himself. He had not yet cried. His eyes were still firmly focused on the thing that didn’t exist.

  Except for Daphne, the others were able to fall back on their social graces, to smile and thank people they hadn’t seen for years, even ask them brief questions about their own lives. Daphne said nothing to anyone. Standing in this room with the body of her brother, with the masses of flowers and the syrupy music, hearing over and over all the useless words of comfort, she had found God, she finally had God squarely in her sights. Her head was packed solid and the hate seeped through to her unruly face, was recognized by the people who took her hand and then quickly moved on past her down the line to the others.

  Several times throughout the two afternoons and evenings, Patrick moved out of his place in the line to go across to Andy or to Neil or to the girls. Going to them, to encourage and reinforce their strength, their forbearance, he would stand straight with his head high and reach to put a firm hand gently on a shoulder. “You are doing just fine,” he’d say, or, “Hang in there. Only another half hour and then we can go home.” And once, to Krissy, who was having some very bad moments, especially after her girlfriends had come through, wrapping his arm around her small, quivering back, “Honey, it’s only harder for people when you cry.” It had to be done. Someone had to do it.

  Although he had insisted that, to the extent possible, Paul’s skin should be left alone, that the pale high forehead should ride as it always had above a ruddy, bronzed face, and although he escorted several of the older aunts and uncles to the casket and stood waiting with them there as they blotted their eyes, and although he had several times counted the profusion of baskets which had been placed around the casket and on the closed bottom lid, and could have described in some detail the stems and leaves and petals of the robust arrangements of flowers held in those baskets, he did not once look directly at the body. Two afternoons and two evenings and not once did he look. Because Paul was gone. Not dead but gone.

  Late on the second afternoon Charlotte arrived with her condolences, alone. She moved down the line to take their hands in her own, embracing only Andy and then Bill, who would not remember her thin arms encircling him. She spoke to no one at any length, certainly not to Murray or to Kate, whom she had never properly met. Watching everyone give Charlotte the courtesy of a disciplined, civil greeting, Margaret thought, You could part water with that woman.

  On the third day the young United Church minister conducted the funeral service. He was a very sincere man. He hadn’t known Paul but this was not unusual now, ministers buried people they hadn’t known all the time. And he had done his research. He tried to capture some part of the kind of man Paul had been. He told the mourners that so many people had mentioned Paul’s sense of humour, how much they had come to enjoy it. And what a good father he’d been. And how he had borne his burden, meaning Meg, with courage.

  The tone of his delivery was friendly, familiar, his phrasing casual. The words he used were everyday words, even a bit slangy. He talked this way at all his funerals because he was a city man who mistakenly believed that rural people preferred a less formal approach, that they wanted to be talked to this way, appreciated it. For his text, he turned to John, Chapter 11, to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and when he spoke about the sisters, the distraught Mary and Martha, he called them “the girls.” He finish
ed his lesson with Verse 23: “Thy brother shall rise again,” and for the rest of her long life, whenever she thought about Paul, before she could get the words stopped, Margaret would think, Thy brother.

  After the story of Lazarus resurrected, Patrick went to the lectern to read an Updike poem, “A Pear Like a Potato.” Although she had never before mentioned it, it was Mary who had stored the poem in her head, who had called the library in London to have it found and read so she could copy it down. Patrick had no words of his own. He held the lines of poetry in his shaking hands and read quickly, aware as he read that it was Krissy who sobbed so loudly. Krissy and Mary beside her.

  Four of the pallbearers were friends of Paul’s, men he had curled with, played hockey with when they were kids and who still played for the Stonebrook Oldtimers, as had Paul. The other two were nephews, Patrick’s Stephen, who was twenty-one, and his John, who was eighteen. When it was time to lift the casket up onto their shoulders the older men put the younger men in the middle, one on each side, giving no specific instruction but watching them and patting their backs when they looked to be all right with it.

  On the way out to the cemetery, which was a slightly rolling twenty acres of very well treed, nicely maintained land beyond sturdy stone gates just at the edge of town, across the creek, the mourners’ cars followed so slowly behind the steel grey hearse there might have been the beat of a drum in the air. As was the custom, when other drivers saw the headlights they stopped at intersections or pulled over to the side of the road to wait quietly while the procession passed, some of them with their heads bowed, some of them holding kids still in their laps.

  The interment was over quickly. Just ten minutes before they’d come out of the service to get into their cars to form the procession, there had been a brief, early summer sun shower and all the headstones shone with rain. Although it had been chosen, Paul’s stone was not yet placed. They gathered tight together under the green canopy at a grave that was not yet a grave, not yet a small part of the world grassed over and marked with a chiselled name, with chiselled dates to mark a time on the earth.