A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  Once, after Murray and Kate had pulled out of the driveway to return to Toronto, Bill said to Margaret, “I never took Murray for an ass man but, then again, you can learn something new every day if you keep your eyes open.”

  * * *

  IN HIS BUSIEST years, Patrick had come only intermittently, sending Mary and the kids in his place, but he visited fairly often now. Although he had watched the disintegration from the beginning, it was all just small changes to him, first this, then that, too much of something, too little of something else. He decided it could be managed and he didn’t want to spend much time giving it a name. His experience with clients divorcing and squabbling over money and children had long ago convinced him that if people could just handle the small things as they came, complete breakdown could often be prevented. He used words on Margaret like adapt, thinking only to help her. She didn’t bother to try to spell things out for him.

  Stephanie, Patrick’s second wife, almost always accompanied him on his visits and once in a while they’d bring Teresa, Stephanie’s poised and beautifully made-up daughter from an earlier marriage, who called herself Tess and who was of all things a fashion model. Sometimes Margaret turned on the VCR and they watched Sarah’s tapes from the coast. The movies, Bill called them.

  And Stephanie, too, was asked to sit down to look through the old pictures from Florida, even though she was not the tanned and voluptuously pregnant wife who stood beside Patrick on a balcony in the sunset, brilliant in a white linen dress that exposed her bare and bony Jackie Kennedy shoulders. Not much effort had been made to eradicate this first, much-admired wife and Stephanie understood how this could happen with a woman who was the mother of grandchildren. She understood, too, that Mary had experienced some bad luck with her health and she was careful to take no offence when her name came up, naturally and casually, as if she were just someone they used to know.

  Looking through the pictures with Bill, she said what a good idea it had been, going away together for a big holiday, and as he turned the pages she put a name to everyone, pointing to this person or that as if the others didn’t know who they were. “There’s Sarah,” she said. “What a pretty teenager she was.” And, “Daphne always tans so well, I envy her.” And, “I can’t believe Murray would be caught dead in those ridiculous sandals.” She said she could see an easy resemblance between Bill and Paul, whom she had never met, she said anyone would see it. No one corrected her. Paul had never looked like any of them, least of all Bill, although his long tall son Neil was clearly his own.

  If Mary had still been involved, still the one coming to visit an elderly father-in-law, she would have put up a resounding struggle. She would have talked to her own doctor and to a specialist or two, she would have read every recent article on dementia and stroke she could get her hands on, and not in the Ladies’ Home Journal. She would have called Bill’s doctor up at the clinic, made an appointment for herself, talked to him frankly about the evident debilitating strain on Margaret and about the possibility of a drug regimen to take the edge off. But, although one or two or all three of Patrick and Mary’s grown kids still arrived once in a long while, Margaret and Bill no longer received visits from Mary, understandably.

  Mary had come up to see them the last time on her own. It was in 1987, the summer after Paul died, just when Margaret, at least, was beginning to adjust herself to his terrible absence, to accept his absence as an ever-present, always visible scar across all their lives. She had known there were people who had to live that way, people who grieved daily. And now she and Bill were among them.

  Although neither of them had formed even half a sentence to indicate their concern one to the other, for some time Margaret and Bill had both noticed, had separately believed, something was very wrong in Patrick’s marriage, something worse than the usual kind of thing that people had to live through.

  In the ten minutes before Mary stood up from her favourite lawn chair to leave them herself for the last time, she’d said what she’d driven an hour to say.

  “Six months ago,” she said, “I found an earring in Patrick’s car. A big cheap earring. So I cornered him, I nailed him and made him tell me who she was. She is twenty-two. He met her when she came into the office for a job interview. A job for which she was not even slightly qualified.”

  “Oh, Mary,” Margaret said, thinking, This is going to be an awful story.

  “I tracked her down last month,” Mary said. “I interviewed her myself. She was appallingly confident for someone so unqualified, sitting in her tawdry little apartment with the sentimental posters taped all over the walls, the pink walls that matched the pink coverlet on the bed that matched her rosy cheeks. She was very soft-spoken, very polite as she advised me that I do not really know my husband, that if I’m not careful, I am going to be his wife in name only, and perhaps not even that. She isn’t even pretty. She is a plain, sentimental, stupid little mouse of a girl. I don’t know why I didn’t slap her down. I don’t know how I stood it. But apparently he can cry in her capable arms. He rides up her elevator to cry in her arms and she gets to pretend that she is a wise young woman. Theirs is not a very complex affair.”

  “Perhaps the loss of a brother…?” Bill said, dropping his head back heavily, staring straight up at the empty sky.

  Sitting between them in her lawn chair, Margaret concentrated on the willows moving in the breeze above the creek. For days she had been watching a pair of cardinals settle in, although there was no sign of them now.

  “Miss Rosy Cheeks was keen to share with me something Patrick should have told me himself,” Mary said. “I think in fact it might be the one thing, the only thing, he’s never told me. She said it should be obvious to me that he has worked so hard and so long because he wanted so badly to live up to his mother’s wish that he use his time and energy, his life, to help people. She told me that in her experience, her experience, men like Patrick almost never get the credit they deserve. And she was kind enough to reassure me that I don’t really have anything to worry about because he is going to continue on, he doesn’t even want out. He is just very tired. She said he needs a place for himself. A safe, separate place where he is not needed.”

  “She said that to you?” Margaret asked, lifting the pitcher to refill Bill’s glass and then her own.

  Mary appeared to be winding down a little and very soon Margaret would be expected to have something to say to her about this business, something useful perhaps or, at the very least, not hurtful. But sitting there so close to Mary, waiting for the cardinals to appear, and where did they go when they stayed from their nest so long, out to the fields for grain, for the simple pleasure of the flight? she could think of nothing honourable to say.

  At the time, after the war but before Sylvia’s death, before she’d imagined the possibility of Bill, when for almost three years she herself had so gladly comforted and taken comfort from a man who had a perfectly good wife, a wife he never spoke of because she would not allow it, she had believed that what she’d given and received truly was, in its essence, a kind of love. She had believed that even in its secret, sneaky, rushed articulation, there was a legitimacy to what she’d done. That those heavy, middle-of-the-night footsteps on the stairs that she’d listened for with such patient, sympathetic hope had been legitimate steps. That there had been a necessity.

  Although she had been more than old enough to fear the possibility of consequences, there had been no consequences. Certainly she’d felt heartache when it ended but she’d understood from the start that it would have to end, and the heartache was only for a time, and it was as nothing against his presence in her narrow bed. She could not have known then that the only cost to her would be the requirement for a difficult, respectful silence on an afternoon such as this, an afternoon that could not have been anticipated.

  “I’ve invited him to cry at home,” Mary said, “where the rest of us cry. Apparently it’s not going to happen.” She shook her head to Margaret’s offer o
f more lemonade. “But really,” she said, “she is nothing. She is only the thing I can describe.”

  Oh, Margaret thought, she is not nothing. Such women are rarely as little as that. You could ask Daphne, for instance.

  “I am asking him to leave,” Mary said, “not because he’s been soft and weak and stupidly self-serving. I’m almost sure I could have lived with that. But because of the thing that must have driven him, the thing that prompted the recklessness of his needing such a vacuous, stupid young woman, which is not nothing, not at all. Of course he remembers whatever it was his mother said to him, of course he has been a helpful man, an extremely strong, cold-blooded, steadying influence on his miserable clients, hundreds of them, year after year after year, but he has taken his pay-off. He has taken the right to stand tall on his own self-satisfied moral high ground. And he’s very much enjoyed overlooking everyone, judging everyone. I am sure you’ve noticed that Patrick and I have both been playing around at righteousness, for years. And now he’s got himself locked in. Even with his own kids. Often with his own kids, who should not be expected to bear it.”

  She stood up from her chair. “I think it’s a simple addiction,” she said, “like any other. And now that I’ve said the word, I would guess you have noticed he’s drinking more than he should.” She leaned down to kiss Bill’s forehead. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the drinking is only a predictable, secondary repercussion.”

  The cardinals had returned to the willows, had soared in, the male arriving a few long minutes behind the female, and with their return, with the evidence of their deep red devotion so plain, Margaret was able to understand things differently. She understood that if all of this had happened before Paul’s death, before the ground had shuddered and then gone out from under them, she and Bill might have tried to help Mary change her mind, or counselled her to at least give it some time. They did like her so much and they certainly did not have to be convinced that Patrick was not perfect. If Paul had been still alive, still among them with his laughter and his long legs and his quick movement from a chair to a door, from a truck to a back porch, they might have invited Mary to settle into her lawn chair for the afternoon and just let it pour out, hoping as mothers and fathers almost always do that the difficulties could be examined, could be broken apart and fixed one by one by one. If everything had been different, without a moment’s hesitation she would have turned traitor to her own past self, would have argued for the rightness of Mary’s cause just as fiercely as she’d fought for the rightness of her own when she herself was a proud, young bit-on-the-side. And she would not have wallowed, as some might, or paused to deplore the slippery nature of her fidelity. She would not have slowed down to acknowledge the fraud.

  But neither of them had the strength for it, not that year. Soon after Mary’s kiss, Bill left them to go into the house alone, to go up to bed, and Margaret, hearing Mary’s rage fade from humiliation down to a mute, humbled grief, felt only regret for her own exhaustion. She was ashamed of her exhaustion.

  Walking out to Mary’s car she’d thought, It’s true what they say about timing. So much in this life depends on timing. And then, believing that, whatever had transpired in their marriage, which surely was, like any marriage, beyond the comprehension of those outside it, Patrick had a very large responsibility to this woman, and believing too that perhaps this was the one way she could help, she asked Mary a normally never-asked question. “Will you be all right for money?” she asked. “Will you keep your wonderful house?”

  But Mary assured her that money would probably be the least of her worries. She said she was going to dust off her M.A., and if it turned out to be as useless as she suspected, she would go back for another, more relevant degree. She said Patrick had agreed to help until she had established herself.

  “I think the kids are old enough to live through this,” she said, opening the car door, assuming that Stephen and John and Rebecca would be on Margaret’s mind, would be claiming their proper place there. “You and Bill will still see them,” she said, “as often as always. I promise you that.”

  When she turned away to get in behind the wheel, Margaret pulled her around and hugged her tight, aware as she patted the thick Jackie Kennedy hair that she took the embrace not for Mary but for herself, both for the young, loving, deliriously happy adulteress she’d briefly been and for the lifelong wife she had so unexpectedly, so thoroughly become. When she said goodbye, for the first time in her life she used the word dear, thinking, I’m an old woman now and I’ll never be anything else. Except dead.

  “I came because I thought you and Bill were entitled to an explanation,” Mary said. She was not even close to tears. “I’ve worked as hard as he’s worked. I have a right to be happier than I am.”

  “Yes,” Margaret had said, helping Mary close the door and then standing back from the car. “I agree.”

  And so, eight years later, they had in their midst Stephanie, a lovely, grown-up woman who was all you could ask for in a second wife. Neither Bill nor Margaret had ever spoken of Mary’s visit that last afternoon, not to each other or to Patrick or to anyone else, and the soft-spoken girl who had been nothing, who had no name, had disappeared without a trace, had sunk like a stone, had become by now, possibly, some young man’s affectionate, trusting young wife.

  Stephanie appeared to be more even-tempered, more relaxed than Mary, but maybe this was because they didn’t know her so well. They would never have the time now to know her so well. She seemed to assume, not quite correctly, that everything that could be done for Bill had been done. Patrick told Margaret that she had watched a favourite aunt go in some similar way.

  * * *

  PATRICK HAD BEEN the force behind the garden, which they’d just put in that spring. Years before, when all but one of the big hickories had come down, soon after Sylvia’s death, a garden plot had been marked off and worked and Margaret had laid out her rows of potatoes and corn and broccoli and tomatoes and lettuce and cukes. Then everyone but Sarah was gone and the three of them simply didn’t need all that food. And it was hard work, Margaret told Bill she found it lonely work. Over time, because no shape will hold forever, because lawn grass like any grass will want to spread, the hard garden rectangle had been reduced to a barren, rounded pond of earth. No one had put any effort into taking it back, it had never been rolled and properly reseeded, although Bill did go at the weeds once or twice a summer with 2,4-D.

  And Margaret had found a use for the old plot. Soon after the town council had invoked the new bylaw against any kind of private burning, tired of raking the leaves all the way down to the burn patch at the creek, she had begun to gather them onto the plot and put her match to them there, usually taking the trouble to sink a few chestnuts, listening like a kid for the hot pops in the smouldering piles. And almost every fall a small pack of neighbourhood kids who had smelled the smoke in the air would arrive with their rakes to help her, to watch her break the law, and when it was finished she would hand out quarters or, more recently, loonies, from her apron pocket.

  It was her habit too in very late winter to watch from the kitchen window for the pond of brown earth that always appeared a week or so before the sun took the snow from the grass, and a little later, in the true spring, she watched as the plot became a mucky, muddy mess, a good measure of the rain they’d had, and, more enjoyably, a soft brown platter that drew the birds to worms.

  Patrick had arrived on a May Friday afternoon with a second-hand wagon hitched to his newest Lincoln. In the wagon he had a Rototiller and a wheelbarrow, two bags of sheep manure and three of peat, and a bunch of long-handled garden tools, which were not made of ordinary steel but some kind of hard green plastic.

  Margaret and Bill went out to the gravel driveway to meet him, and when he began to explain that they had discussed this the last time he was up, putting in a good garden, sharing both the work and the results, Bill insisted that he had no memory of any talk about a garden. “You talk
ed maybe,” he said.

  Unloading the tools while Patrick and Margaret set up a make-do ramp to get the Rototiller off, holding up the business ends of the shovel and the hoe and the fork for inspection, he proclaimed them too damn weird for words.

  “No rust,” Patrick said.

  When he asked just how much was all this going to cost him, Patrick told him, “Zilch, Dad. Father’s Day.”

  Patrick was fifty-eight. His very short hair had lost all traces of colour, it was no longer mottled but pure steely grey, and the creases on his face, deep rays of them back from his eyes and two sturdy grooves from his nose down to his jaw, were set, he could no longer erase them with a change of expression. He claimed he had earned the lines. “Those lines and a few hundred thousand more than you’re worth,” Bill was fond of telling him.

  This was one of Bill’s steadiest rages, the amount of money Patrick made. “I cannot comprehend,” he announced one Sunday, “where all this money is coming from.” When Patrick talked about proportions, the high price of housing and cars and insurance and education and hospitals, Bill said the real problem was that people were being educated beyond their intelligence. “Can you tell me who’s going to do the shit work?” he asked. “Can you tell me who’s going to be satisfied living on the wrong side of the tracks?” When Patrick ignored him, left the living room for the kitchen, Bill raised his voice and made sure it carried. “If there ever is another war,” he called out, “no one will be willing to go. No one will be able to go, everyone’s so blessed soft. Then we’ll see where all this improvement got us.” He loaded everything he had on the word improvement.

  Patrick had held on to a squash player’s fitness, which Bill said was a city fitness that fooled no one. He liked to remind Patrick, as he sometimes reminded other men, that his hands hadn’t been dirty in thirty years.