The Secret Life of Roberta Greaves

by Ann Birch

  She tells him, tripping over the narrative, going back to scoop up some detail she has missed, at times almost incoherent as she tries to sort out the day’s events.

  He puts his arm around her while she’s talking and steers her to the living room where they sit down on the sofa. He holds her cold hands in a warm clasp and listens, gnawing his lower lip.

  “It’s beyond me,” is all he says, before taking out his cellphone. “Let’s get Ed home early. Maybe he’ll have an idea of what happened and what we should do.”

  Ed arrives within an hour. His face is pale, and he seems tired. His articling at the Bay Street law firm — with the ridiculous name Roberta cannot remember at the moment — is demanding, and for a moment, Roberta wishes she had stopped Charlie from phoning him. “Dad got into some mess, right?” he says as he puts his overcoat into the closet and comes into the living room.

  Roberta tells the story again. This time around, she notices she has honed the narrative and is able to tell it with more dispatch and less emotion.

  “You are remarkably calm about all this, Ma. I worried all the way home. I was so afraid I’d find you having a major spaz.”

  “I am in a major spaz. Charlie got the brunt of it. But right now, I need to understand what happened to all those savings he had. Do you have any idea, Ed?”

  “I can guess. Online gambling. I knew something was up when I saw those graphs he had on his screen.”

  “What the hell is online gambling? I thought gambling always involved casinos and race tracks…”

  “One of the guys who’s articling with me is into the online stuff. There are hundreds of casinos on the Internet, he tells me. Some of them are even listed on the stock exchange. You just sit at your computer, pick out a casino or two or three or more, and download their software for free. Then you install the casino program onto your hard drive, register as a new player, and open your account. This guy at work is playing for fun. Apparently you can do that, no money involved, but he told me yesterday he may get into the real stuff.”

  “This is legal?”

  “Well, more or less. Knowing Dad, I don’t think he’d look into all the pros and cons. You can pay money into your account with Visa or some other form of cash transfer that you agree to. And if there are winnings—”

  “I think we can skip that part of it,” Charlie says.

  “Yeah. Well, another thing is, they often have promotional offers for new players.”

  “What does that mean?” Roberta asks, though she has a good idea what will come next.

  “They’ll offer you eight hundred dollars, say, to get started with. To put on whatever game you’re playing — blackjack, roulette, the slots — whatever. It’s their way to hook you.”

  “So, all this time when I thought your father was working on his essay for the journal, he was really hooked into some goddamn crap game? How could I have been so stupid?” She tries to laugh, but the sound that comes from her mouth is more like a sob.

  “You trusted him, Mom,” Charlie says. “That’s not being stupid.”

  “This isn’t the time to discuss stupidity or trust issues,” Ed says. “It’s a time to get practical. So why don’t we have a conference meeting — without the markers and flip charts. We’ll crunch the figures and sort out what we’re going to do next.” He gets up. “How about the breakfast room where we’ve got good light and a solid table to work on?”

  “Christ, Ed,” Charlie says, “you sound like Warren Buffett.” But Roberta is relieved to take some practical action.

  She shows them the bills, and for an hour, the three of them look at the hopeless reality. There are thousands of dollars of bills to be paid, and there is nothing left in James’s bank and investment accounts. The only sources of income left are her professor’s salary and the dribbles from her book royalties. There is little left in her bank account, since she has paid her sons’ tuition fees over the years, not to mention the horse hotel at Fair Hills.

  “I think we may have to sell the house. I won’t be able to swing the mortgage on my own. Your dad and I loved this place the minute we saw it, and for once, I took a gamble that we’d be able to pay it off. But it’s hopeless.”

  “Now that I’m articling,” Ed points out, “I can help out. You should have been charging me room and board for these past three months. I should have suggested it.” He looks at Charlie and attempts a smile. “Warren Buffett would have drawn up a balance sheet long ago.”

  “And I’ll be graduating at the end of the year,” Charlie says. “I’ve already been thinking about jobs. Chef work doesn’t pay much at the start, but there’ll be something.”

  They look at her, their faces showing lines she has never noticed before. Charlie wipes the back of his hand over his eyes. Ed is tapping his pencil on the row of figures he’s scribbled on a page. Roberta makes an instant resolve not to burden them with any more worries. There’s got to be a solution out there somewhere. Whatever comes, she’s got to see it through by herself.

  “Know what?” she says. “I think I’ll go up to Summerton for a few days. Your grandmother wants me to visit, and a change might help me cope better, see things from a different angle.”

  “Good idea, Mom,” Charlie says. “Maybe Granny can lend you some money? But anyway, you’ll suck in some fresh country air.”

  “Yeah,” Ed adds. “It’ll be the equivalent of getting out of the country. The bills can wait, and if they try to extradite you, my boss can take it to litigation.”

  Roberta finds herself laughing for the first time all day.

  Charlie decides to go to the corner store for lard. “I’m going to adapt the bannock recipe for breakfast,” he says as he puts on his jacket. “Got to get my mind off this mess.” She hears the front door slam. She remembers his impossible Grade Five assignment on “The Space Age.” He had put it aside and made peanut butter cookies.

  Ed seems always in control. Roberta expects him to get a beer from the fridge and turn on the TV or go to his room to read a book or work on a case, but he lingers at the breakfast-room table. He licks his bottom lip and starts to speak, looking not at her but at the wall. “Got to tell you the truth, Ma. It wasn’t a pal at the law firm that gave me the info on online gambling.”

  She can feel her face flush. “Ed,” she says, twisting her hands, “you haven’t got into this mess yourself, have you?”

  “No way. It was Dad. Let’s have a reprise of the night of your book launch. Remember we picked him up at his office and he had something on his computer screen that he didn’t want us to see? The next day, he told me he was gambling online. I think I was pretty upset, but he made it seem like a joke, just something to fill in a few idle moments. So I didn’t think much about it, until that night at the morgue.”

  “But how do you know so much about it if it was just a casual comment he made?”

  “Trust me, Ma. I Googled to find out about what he was talking about. And right away, I found a site that gave me all the info on online gambling.” He looks straight at her now. “You need never worry about me. I’m not going to get into Dad’s messes.”

  Roberta is suddenly so tired she can scarcely think. “I need a hot bath now,” she tells Ed. “I’ve had enough for one day.”

  The heat of the water numbs her for a half-hour, but then the angst returns. She goes to her purse and retrieves James’s letter for the umpteenth time. She needs to read again the phrase that leapt into her mind when Ed was telling her about his father’s confession: “I tried to be someone else all the years of my adult life. I tried to be like that perfect father you were always talking about.”

  Her father had been everything admirable in a man. When he had died, she had been bereft. And then she’d met James in one of her Trinity courses. Handsome, intelligent, loving, he’d seemed perfect — like her father. He hadn’t even seemed to mind that she kep
t her father’s name when they married. But perhaps, over time, he had been hurt or harboured a grudge he had never told her about. And was she to blame? Had she always measured him against her father, as he claimed?

  When was it that she had begun to notice his flaw, the obsession with thrill-seeking? Perhaps at Carrick-a-Rede all those years ago. But she had prided herself on her ability to tolerate all the crazy things he had got into over the course of their married life: the rock climbing at Vulture Point, the marathon bike races, his snowboarding over crevasses at Whistler, the weekends with Bucephalus. Still, he had felt himself able to tell their son things he couldn’t tell her. Had she shut him out, made it impossible for him to confess when he had needed her to listen?

  Does she goddamn care?

  No, she cannot forgive James for what he has put her through on this day particularly. Still, it is her own part in the fiasco that nags her as she tries to sleep.

  9.

  THE GO TRAIN FROM DOWNTOWN Toronto slips past the huge mall on Summerton’s outskirts and stops at the station at the head of the village’s main street. Roberta retrieves her bag from the luggage rack and steps down onto the platform. A cold wind snaps at her face.

  Here on Victoria Street, Summerton looks much the same as it did when she was a child in this village north of Toronto. Of course, the nineteenth-century brick stores have been cleaned and the windows artfully “restored” with bits of stained glass made in Taiwan. New owners have replaced the old-timers from Roberta’s day, and they have a whole new flock of customers.

  Even now, in late October, Roberta sees a busload of retirees eating lunch in Thelma’s Front Veranda (formerly Paterson’s Dry Goods). They are undoubtedly enjoying Thelma’s “home-baked pastries.” The woman’s an out-and-out fake. Early Monday morning, according to Roberta’s mother, Thelma cruises the aisles of Loblaws in the mall, filling her shopping cart with pastry shells and cans of pie filling. But she does add some spices, and she puts it all together in her own kitchen. Charlie would be disgusted.

  Roberta passes Olde World Antiques, which offers junk from local basements and attics. Beside it is Nora’s Nimble Needle where several elderly women are buying stitchery kits, probably of the cute puppies featured in the shop window. Their husbands seem to have taken refuge next door in Finnegan’s Pub where the barmaid serves Guinness in pottery steins painted with shamrocks. When Roberta was a child, the pub was the Chinese restaurant whose proprietor served sausages, mashed potatoes, and tinned peas. Daddy used to buy her favourite snack here: candied ginger in boxes with big pink chrysanthemums on the top. He’d make green tea, and the two of them would sit in the garden and eat a whole box in one go.

  As Roberta passes the cenotaph, she hears a friendly voice. “Hi there, Roberta. Here to see your mother?”

  It’s Nora — she of the Nimble Needle. An attractive woman of her mother’s age with a Roman nose, imposing eyebrows, and a tall, full-bosomed figure. “Put in a word with Sylvia, will you? She’s a good knitter, and we could sure use some help getting ready for the Christmas bazaar.”

  Roberta knows that “we” refers to the women of the Eastern Star. Her father had been a Mason, as had all the business and professional men in the town, and the Eastern Star became its female branch. “I’ll certainly ask her if she can help,” she tells Nora, though she has a good idea of what her mother’s answer will be.

  “I know she spends most of her spare time at the Seniors Centre. Nothing wrong with dancing and playing bridge, mind you, but there are more important things in life. The bazaar is our big money raiser. It helps fund a lot of worthwhile projects in this town.” As Nora speaks, she fingers a brooch pinned to the Persian lamb jacket with which she has faced early frosts for many years. There’s some significance to this piece of jewellery, but at the moment, Roberta has forgotten what it’s all about.

  “Got to get back to the shop now,” Nora says. “My daughters are a big help, but I like to keep an eye on things.”

  Roberta turns left into Osborne Road, a quiet street of venerable houses, big trees, and old churches. She passes Wesley United, a nineteenth-century brick edifice with an inspirational sign out front that she stops to read in the fading light of late afternoon: “GOD ANSWERS KNEE MAIL,” is the message. Roberta sighs. Oh God, if you are up there getting mail, don’t you get sick of the stupid jokes?

  At the end of Osborne Road, she turns up the flagstone walk leading to the big stone house that was home until she married James. As she opens the front door, the scent of sage and onions wafts into the vestibule.

  “Hello there, dear,” her mother calls as she walks down the oak-panelled front hall, her arms open for a hug. Her mother, at seventy, reminds Roberta of Lauren Bacall at the end of her career. She has the same elegant outfits, drop-dead stare, beautiful long legs, and pageboy hairdo. All she lacks is the cigarette holder.

  “You look fine, Roberta, but I’ve been worried. How are you coping?”

  “In survival mode at the moment, Mother, but I’m okay.” Roberta has always addressed her mother in this formal mode, though her father was always “Daddy.” James used to laugh at her whenever she referred to her “Daddy.”

  “I cooked stuffed spareribs for you, dear. Let’s sit right down now and eat. I thought you might want some of your favourite food.”

  The walnut table in the dining room is set with blue placemats, silver candlesticks, and blue-and-white dinner plates. Old furniture, good china, heirloom silver, and a solid dinner: It’s what Roberta remembers as “home.”

  Roberta gives her mother an expurgated account of James’s financial career. She doesn’t mention online gambling, and simply says that he made some “bad investments.”

  “Like so many other people, Roberta. It’s all part of this unfortunate recession. I’m so glad that I never got into the speculative stuff. Will you be able to manage?”

  “Not at the moment, unless I can come up with something. I may have to downsize and Charlie and Ed may have to find their own accommodations.” Roberta looks at the spareribs left on her plate. “Sorry, these were good, but I have no appetite. I’ve been thinking … could you put me up here for a week or so? I need a change of scene for a while.”

  “Of course, dear. Take as long as you need. And I’ve got a five-thousand dollar GIC coming due. I could let you have that, if it would help.”

  “Thanks, that’s so kind.” But Roberta knows she will not take the offer. Her mother has an independent life, but at seventy, she needs to face up to the monetary stresses of old age.

  After dinner, she and her mother relax in front of the fireplace in the living room with their sherry and coffee. “I’ll sit in Daddy’s chair,” Roberta says. It’s a big comfortable recliner that has been reupholstered a couple of times since her father’s death, but the wrought-iron floor lamp beside it, with its pleated silk shade, is just the same.

  She tells her mother about Nora’s request.

  “Fat chance I’d do anything for that woman. Can you actually see me knitting toilet tank covers for their wretched Christmas bazaar?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have to be toilet tanks. How about covers for their Depends packages? Come on, Mother, you could help out. Daddy was a Mason, and you could give them a few hours of your time. I don’t know what you have against Nora.”

  “Plenty that I won’t tell you about. Except to say she’s one of the town’s worst hypocrites. I suppose she was wearing her Widow’s Brooch?”

  “Well, her husband is dead, isn’t he? What’s wrong with the brooch, anyway?”

  “As brooches go, nothing. It’s how she got it that bothers me.” Her mother pours herself another glass of Bristol Cream. Roberta tries not to count, but she’s aware it’s her third. Sylvia’s voice is a bit slurred as she continues: “What does the Masonic rule book say anyway? Your father and I used to laugh about it.” She thinks for a moment, the
n quotes from memory: “‘The Widow’s Brooch, crafted in sterling silver and gold plate and set with a .07 cubic zirconia, is to be conferred on all worthy Masonic widows by the Masonic brothers.’” She gives a snort of laughter. “‘Worthy Masonic widows’––that’s a good one.”

  “Okay, so she was playing around. You’ve made your point.” Roberta decides not to mention Nora’s reference to her mother’s evenings of dancing and bridge playing at the Seniors Centre. She begins to wonder if she’ll be able to stand a week of the gossipmongering that seems to fuel Summerton’s activities.

  Across from Daddy’s chair is the tall oak bookcase with glass-fronted shelves still filled with his medical texts except for the bottom shelf, which contains the mythology books he read to her when she was little. She gets up, goes over to the shelf, slides back the glass cover, and takes out a well-worn illustrated version of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

  “It’s probably dusty,” her mother says. “I haven’t really done much with those books in quite a while. But I remember how you and your father would sit for hours while he read to you. You loved him so much. I think most little girls adore their daddies.”

  Roberta leafs through the book. “Oh boy, the memories this one brings back: ‘The Adventures of Odysseus’ was our favourite tale. I always imagined that Odysseus looked like Daddy. Perhaps he’d be more wind-beaten from his years on a sailing vessel, but he’d be essentially the same.” Her father’s image comes alive in her mind: tall with curly ash-blond hair, blue eyes, a dimple in his chin, and laugh lines around his mouth.

  “I liked the last part the best,” Roberta says. “I liked the idea of Penelope being faithful all those years while she waited for her husband to get back from the Trojan War.” But she remembers being upset when she’d found out that Penelope scarcely recognized Odysseus after twenty years of separation. She had wanted them to fall into each other’s arms, but Penelope had been wary at first.