Driving back to the house with Bill at the wheel because he had insisted and Stephen and John in the back seat, Margaret told the boys that she remembered when she was a young girl that men would carry the coffin all the way from whatever church it was and down the rutted road to the cemetery, with the mourners following behind them on foot. “And there was no backhoe,” she said. “What you got in those days was a hand-dug grave.”
Stephen gave no indication that he’d heard anything at all. He was quiet, and watchful, proud enough of the way he’d handled himself but afraid too that more would be required of him. John leaned forward slightly at Margaret’s words because he was interested in history, especially the small particulars of history, the way things worked, the odd things people used to do.
Margaret was thinking about her parents’ graves on the far side of the cemetery, which she did not very often visit. When her mother died in 1941, her father had bought just the two plots, telling Margaret there would be another place for her somewhere some day, meaning there would be a husband so why in hell should he waste his own hard-earned money. When Sylvia died Bill had bought a package of eight, apparently and mysteriously imagining that his kids would marry but have no children, would not reproduce themselves right out of consideration. Now two of the eight plots would be marked with headstones. Andy had agreed to let Paul go beside his mother, it was almost the only thing Bill had said in four days, the only sentence he could put together, but she had insisted that he have his own separate headstone because, and she’d had to say it just once, he had been a husband and a father as well as a son.
Two years earlier, when Margaret and Bill had updated their wills at Patrick’s office, Bill had announced that whatever happened, if it became necessary, she was to go below him or above him. He said he’d checked it out and they sometimes allowed this in special circumstances. He said he wanted her as close as Sylvia because why shouldn’t she be?
Margaret was not at all convinced about the likelihood of this arrangement. Recently, Bill seemed to have no compunction about claiming something was true when it clearly wasn’t, when he simply wanted it to be true. But she’d let it pass. To tell the truth, she didn’t much care any more where they put her.
She turned in her seat now to look at Stephen and John and thought, These are Sylvia’s handsome grandsons. “There used to be a bank of trees on either side of this road,” she said. “They were as massive then as these few are now.” She pointed out the five old remaining maples. “All the men who could would take a turn carrying the coffin,” she said, “relieving each other as they got tired.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It was just the way people thought it should be done.” Facing the front again, she told them, “You did a good job today. Your grandfather and I are proud of both of you.”
She was thinking finally about Paul when he was a very young man. About his attentiveness to Andy, their easy affection for each other, their complete and amazing lack of shame. About his climbing up on a kitchen chair to unscrew the light fixture when Sylvia was dying, simply because he had been asked to, because she couldn’t think of any way to be useful except to clean and cook and wash and tidy. About his Grandmother Ferguson taking him aside and scolding him quietly in the dining room, for his tears. And about her own cowardice. She was a grown woman. She could have gone to him after his grandmother had left to go home. She could have told him tears were exactly the right thing.
1995
MARGARET ASSUMED BILL called her Sylvia only because he could clearly see how it aggravated her. In all these years it had never once troubled her that he might sometimes remember Sylvia and their life together in the privacy of his thoughts, because how could he not, but when he said, “Thank you, Sylvia, that was very nice,” or, “Why don’t you drive down and get us some corn for supper, Sylvia,” she would flinch in spite of herself, never expecting it, never quite getting used to that one thing. She had indeed adjusted to the rest of it, as you would adjust to anything that happened with such regularity.
She had read things, pamphlets from the young nurse up at the clinic, magazine articles slipped to her by her old friend Norma Fawcett, who had more time for such things now that her own husband had succumbed to Parkinson’s. These were serious articles written by apparently qualified people. So she did have the queer comfort of knowing she was just one among many.
And she’d watched the talk-show carnival on television, wondering as she watched what she might think to say if she found herself up there on the platform with Bill beside her, wondering how they could possibly capture the idiotic attention of the audience, how they could make their own peculiar lives sound satisfactorily sad or terrible or ridiculous in the short time allowed between commercials for Rogaine and adult diapers and Walk Fit machines.
She had learned from her reading and watching that there were specific words to put to her situation, passive aggression, codependency, patterns of negative behaviour, dementia, victim, but she was not at all sure of their meanings. Lots of words seemed to her to have taken on new meaning, or they were used differently now, to mean new things. She much preferred an old word, one she remembered from her first years here with Bill when the kids were studying Shakespeare at the dining-room table, asking each other the hardest questions out loud, looking up and defining words like melancholy and gentlewoman and equivocation, repeating the definitions over and over, back and forth, memorizing them. The word was tragedy. It was a plain word and it told you plainly that there was no solution in sight.
When she could manage, to lighten her day a little or to pull herself right up out of her day, she thought of his attacks on her simply as a suddenly compelling new hobby, like black-and-white photography or car mechanics taken up late in life.
* * *
THEY’D BEEN MARRIED now for thirty-nine years and Bill had had all that time to discover ways to get under her skin, as had she, under his. But where he thoughtfully used to avoid doing so, for the last few years, and with more and more relish, he had been spending his time sitting in his chair in the living room going haphazardly back in time to collect scattered bits of ammunition.
He conjured incidents that no one else could quite remember, or home in on, and when he told things, he told them with a twist. His little stories were such a tangled mess, such a chaos, that no one could even begin to sort them out. He revised scenes and comments and behaviour to make everyone but himself look not very good. And he would not be corrected. If he sensed correction coming, he’d just say, “Now, I’m sure about this,” or “I remember that a little differently.” His sentences were brief and shaped, had been carefully shaped before he spoke them, always with a bite on the best words and a cocky challenge to anyone who would dare contradict a man who had lived so long and seen so much.
Although most of the other surviving vets still donned their navy blazers and their proud grief on grey November 11 mornings, and although he was as physically capable as any of them, Bill refused the observance of the walk to the cenotaph now, and when a small, informal delegation, the men who still could be heard to say that they had come of age together, the men who missed his presence in their thinning ranks, came over to the house to try to boost his spirits, he refused the gift of their faded camaraderie. He did talk as he had never talked before about the specifics of the war, about the North Atlantic, the soaking cold and the black distance, which he said was utterly unimaginable to the rest of them, the rest of you, he called them. He unearthed his stiff wool uniform, which had been buried on its half-a-century-old wooden hanger at the back of the upstairs hall closet, displayed it for admiration on the swinging dining-room door, where it stayed for a week, tainting all the rooms with the bitter smell of the mothballs that had been dropped, each of fifty springs, into its pockets. He pulled Sylvia’s old atlas down from its shelf and traced his war through the wide blue ocean with a red Magic Marker, circled quarter-sized areas of water off Iceland and at the entrance to the English Channel. He talked about
his ship, its size and its smell, explained to them how steel could hold the cold forever. He could not remember the ship’s name. Didn’t matter, he said. He could and did name several of the men who had been over there with him, an Alex, a George, a Frank, and he named without fail the men who had not gone overseas at all, many of whom were still alive. He called these men the untouched.
He had concrete evidence that the people closest to him were idiots. He slammed his fists on the upholstered arms of his chair, they were flattened with his slamming. He said wisdom would never be given its due, not in his lifetime, said the truth was evidently not valued, that he was a fool to think it would be. He said he was ready to vote Reform, just give him the chance, and he cursed Margaret when she told him she was equally ready to cancel his vote.
Sometimes he was sly, sneaky, oblique. When he complained to visitors about Margaret’s stupidity, how she couldn’t seem to stop blowing fuses, how she would use nothing but cushy expensive toilet paper, how she wasted his gas making small trips back and forth all over town, he couched it all in a late-twentieth-century concern for waste. He looked right at Margaret and called her she.
Standing at her sink or sweeping the back porch or sitting waiting for Doctor Mang to save two more of her teeth, Margaret was very thankful for the healthy function of her own brain, which she could still count on to click into gear more or less as it was meant to. She would rather be dead a thousand times over than live on the way he did. But of course that’s what he would have said too, before. When she thought these words she heard his young man’s voice, content again with an ordinary young man’s strength, speaking them, “I’d rather be dead a thousand times over.”
As it was, he didn’t mean to die at all. He talked about death’s avoidance matter-of-factly, as if the ending of a life was a virus that smart people could protect themselves from, given enough common sense. He gathered what he called the relevant information. He went to the doctor almost weekly, had himself thoroughly checked over even if it was only heartburn that had got him his appointment. He boldly printed the number 911 on a piece of cardboard he’d stapled to the cupboard above the phone in the kitchen, in case he was struck, he said, when she’d left him on his own. He told her that her main job was to protect him from stress, from other people’s nonsense. He said it could kill him.
After Paul was gone they had faded off in their nighttime attentions to each other, settling instead for the occasional comfort of sleeping warmly bum to bum. When he’d started up again, started to grab at her like some randy kid, snorting when she tried to settle him down, apparently propelled by her resistance, she left their bed to sleep in Daphne’s room. And then she had decided it might help. She returned to him, tried to teach him his own forgotten style, the ways and means. He would have none of it. When she tried to cuddle into him, as he used to urge her to do, he took her by the shoulders and pinned her to her pillow, his strength recalled abruptly, as if he’d had it just yesterday. He prodded her and moved her limbs around to suit himself, turned her over and over again, slapped her rear not playfully but hard.
Margaret had lived a very long time without a rough hand on her body and now here it was. She moved permanently into Daphne’s room, bought herself a new, firm mattress and a thick duvet, filled the empty closet and the dresser with her clothes and her mementoes, with the few pieces of nice jewellery she hardly ever wore now, most of them gifts from the kids. She slipped away during a shopping trip to Sarnia with Andy to buy a dead-bolt lock, which she kept in its box under the bed until one day she got the nerve to take the drill and the screwdriver upstairs. Bill followed her up, sat on her bed and watched her struggle with the instructions until the thing was secured on the door. She kept the key on a long string around her neck, wore it wet in the bathtub.
He had struck her only once, otherwise. She’d told him she was taking the car down to the garage to get the oil changed, that she was going to leave the car and they would bring her back right away. When he called from his chair to say that it was his car, he would decide when the oil needed changing, she picked up the keys from the basket on the counter and said he mustn’t worry about it, she had arranged that they would keep the car for only an hour or so, and then she heard him leave his chair. He came into the kitchen and charged her. When he grabbed the keys, she’d told him, only firmly, she thought, kindly, “I’ll take those keys, thank you.” And then the slap.
It was the sound that would stay with her, loud for a simple smack, that and the heat of his open hand on her cheek. The pain wasn’t much. She’d banged her hip bone harder on the counter going out the door too fast, many times. But she could feel her skin burning with the rush of blood and she expected him, seeing it, to feel her shock, perhaps to cry. When he didn’t she pried the keys loose from his clenched fist, digging her nails into his flesh to give him something else to think about. At the door she turned back, said, “You go and sit down.” And he did.
Uptown she stopped at the grocery store to buy him a half gallon of Butter Brickle ice cream. When the Vanderlinde boy dropped her off home she quickly presented it to him, soft in the bowl the way he preferred it, and he reached for it eagerly. “How nice, Sylvia,” he said. “Just the thing for a day like today.”
For the first while, old friends still came to see him with some regularity. A few men, a few women. He was during that time unaccountably affectionate, generous, and false. He began to kiss women on the cheek when he shook their hands, women he had just seen the week before, women who had never been particularly important to him but who had the time now to visit around town. No one knew where he’d seen this gesture or why he took it as his own.
After the kiss he would graciously offer a chair and then sit down himself and begin to talk, looking, as he talked, up at the ceiling as if it was all recorded there to prompt him. If visitors interrupted him with a possible change in direction for the conversation, mentioning perhaps their own grandchildren, or a recent, unusual trip, or a slight variation on something he’d said, he would resume, undaunted. “Anyway,” he’d say. If he was interrupted once too often, he would stop talking altogether and listen intently, hating every word spoken, and at the end of it, before the door was fully closed, he would call out to Margaret in the kitchen, “Lock up if you see that particular battle-axe coming my way again.”
Once the McKellars from down the street brought over their only great-granddaughter, who was a nurse in training in Kitchener. She had driven two hours to see them because the McKellars always helped her with a small cheque at Christmas. This pretty young nurse in training sat down beside Bill on the couch to look at the Florida pictures and, perhaps thinking that what she offered was compassion, perhaps thinking that here was the chance for a practical application of what she’d learned, she took his hand. When she called him “honey,” Margaret wanted to lean over and slug her. Because there was absolutely nothing else she could do to stop it.
The first two times the young woman said the word, Bill stopped talking, stopped turning the pages altogether, which was meant to be a clue, and after the third time he threw her hand off his own, looked directly at Stan McKellar, and said, “Honey, my ass.”
Oh, Margaret thought, you bet, Bill. This one you can have. Then she made an offer of more tea, which the McKellars gratefully took as their chance to go home.
* * *
PATRICK AND MURRAY and Daphne and Sarah believed it was Paul’s death. They had said this to Margaret alone and in pairs and all together. They said psychological shock was a phenomenon that was little understood and they seemed happy to take their comfort from this. But she knew it was not Paul’s death. It was Bill’s brain cells, so minuscule they couldn’t even be imagined, his brain cells collapsing inside his skull, dying off, exploding as silently as the stars she had seen dying on television. It was his death, enjoying itself coming slowly.
At eighty-one Margaret understood death’s ways and means with a clarity she would never have anticipated
and she half surrendered herself to this understanding, as if the surrendering could go some way toward appeasement. Death could come hard and fast, as it had come to Paul, ensuring that nothing could get done, nothing could get said before and not much after that was any use to anyone. Or it could come over a few decent months, as it had come all those years before to Sylvia, giving everyone time but not too much of it, not so much you couldn’t get through it. It could come with the thunderous, bloody repetition of slaughter on the other side of an ocean, having itself a heyday in the muddy fields of France. Or it could come in slow time, taking show-off, brazen, slow-march strides. It could let you watch, knowing with cocky confidence that you wouldn’t look away.
Margaret missed Sarah. Sarah’s absence was almost the hardest thing on her plate. After their first few years out west, unable to discipline herself to silence, she had asked about the possibility of a transfer back for Rob, his company was national and had sent him out there in the first place, but Sarah had said no, it didn’t look like they could come back. They were going to make their life in Vancouver.
They did return every two or three years to visit and Sarah came immediately for Paul of course. And Margaret still had her open invitation. But she had never gone, never flown out, never flown anywhere in her life. They’d got to Florida all those years ago on their own, driving, and they had taken the car to Expo, too, just the two of them, she and Bill fighting through the Montreal traffic, staying at the private home of an older French couple who had opened very pleasant rooms to paying visitors. Although they had liked what they saw, especially liked trying all the food, some of which they had never even heard of, when they got back home, very tired and disorientated, they decided they weren’t really travellers. The crowds especially had got to Margaret. So those two were the only trips they’d taken, except for a half-dozen times over to Detroit to see a ball game and of course once in a blue moon in to Toronto.
A Good House Page 25
