by Ann Birch
“Married couples have ways of knowing each other,” Daddy had assured her. “Homer told us that.” He had smiled then at some private memory.
What were those ways? Robert had wondered. She had imagined it must be something they would recognize when they undressed. Did Odysseus have a birthmark on his bum? Or were one of Penelope’s tits bigger than the other? Though she hadn’t shared these speculations with Daddy, the possibilities had given her a buzz of excitement. And it had been somewhat of a disappointment when it turned out that Odysseus’s accurate description of the marital bed had been the clincher for Penelope.
“I always found it strange that Daddy wasn’t all that enthusiastic about Penelope.”
“Really?”
“He used to say to me, ‘Look, she wasted twenty years of her life doing nothing much, and when her husband returned, she didn’t even recognize him. He was having adventures all those years, while she was just waiting around. ‘Carpe diem, Roberta,’ he used to say to me. ‘Seize life now and live it.’”
“Well, your father was a great one for living in the moment, especially at the end of his life.” Before Roberta can comment on this sour-sounding remark, her mother continues, “And I’ve decided to live in the moment myself.”
She reaches for the sherry bottle again, fills her glass, takes a quick gulp, and clears her throat. “Gearing up for confession time, dear. I’ve got a boyfriend. Neville’s his name. We met at the Seniors Centre. He used to be an actor at Stratford, and he has a beautiful trained speaking voice.” She gives an embarrassed laugh and looks down at the rug. “He may be moving in one of these days. The only problem is the smelly Rottweiler he owns. I’m afraid my attraction to him might be challenged by that four-legged impediment.”
“For God’s sake, Mother…”
“Well, what’s wrong? I’m old enough, don’t you think, to know what I’m doing?”
“Yes … but … I’m trying to wrap my mind around it. Here I am, sitting in Daddy’s chair, and we’re talking about the stories we used to love reading, about Penelope waiting all those years for Odysseus to return … and you drop this bombshell on me.”
“Well, haven’t I been a good little Penelope? I’ve stuck it out for more than twenty years, haven’t I! Or am I pathetic? Is that what’s bothering you?”
“Not exactly. Oh, I can’t sort it out.”
“What’s wrong with wanting some male companionship at this point in my life?” Her mother’s voice has grown loud, and her face is flushed. “Are you worried about your inheritance or something?”
“Now that is an insult, Mother. It’s a stupid remark, totally unworthy of you.” Roberta gets up. “I think I’d better get to bed early. There’s no point in continuing this conversation. Not now, anyway.” She looks at her mother’s stricken face and leans over to pat her knee. “I’m sorry to be difficult.” She can’t explain, can’t say why this news about a boyfriend for God’s sake, has seemed like one more blow.
Her bedroom is basically unchanged from her childhood. There’s her maple bookcase opposite the bed, the tall bureau with the family pictures on top, the dressing table with the bench she sat on for her first try at lipstick. Her mother has made up the maple four-poster bed. Roberta crawls under the red-and-white quilt her great-grandmother sewed over seventy-five years before: A legacy of thousands of tiny stitches surviving multiple washings and three generations of use. The quilt smells faintly of the lavender sachets her mother stores in the linen cupboard. As she lies there, inhaling its fragrance, trying to put her mother’s revelation to the back of her mind, she looks at the bookcase and remembers something she hid there so many years before. It couldn’t still be there, could it?
She gets out of bed, goes to the second shelf where she reaches behind the Jane Austen novels in front. There, hidden from view but still familiar to her touch, is a tiny paperback. She pulls it out: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When she was thirteen or fourteen, she had taken this book from the bookcase in the living room and read the tale “Myrrha” to herself in bed. It had been her first foray into sex-themed literature and it had stunned her. She’d read it over and over, feeling dirty and excited at the same time. At night, she’d been unable to stop thinking about it and had often turned on her light to stare at its spine in her bookcase. Finally, she stashed it away hoping that it would be a case of “out of sight, out of mind.”
10.
ROBERTA KNOWS THE STORY WELL now from a scholar’s point of view, of course. Ovid is a major part of her Classics in Translation class at Trinity College. But the details still unsettle her as she rereads the plot. There’s the young princess, Myrrha, whose father, King Cinyras, lines up an array of suitors for her to choose from. But Myrrha cannot love any of them. When Cinyras asks who she could love, she tells him, “Someone like you.” Cinyras is touched by his daughter’s answer, unaware of what Myrrha is really telling him.
Roberta turns the pages rapidly to the part that tormented her most. When the feast of Ceres is under way and the queen must remove herself from Cinyras’s bed for nine nights, Myrrha, aided by her old nurse who acts as a go-between, creeps into her father’s bed and indulges her passion for him. Roberta comes to the phrase that once perplexed her: “Cinyras filled her with his seed.” She reads on. Since the affair takes place under cover of darkness, the king believes that the girl in bed with him is just an admirer, perhaps a lady-in-waiting, who has seized the opportunity to sleep with him. On the ninth night, curious to see her face, he lights a lamp and discovers the wretched truth. In his anguish, he seizes a dagger and attempts to attack Myrrha, but she escapes. Consumed by guilt, she prays to the gods for a solution to her grief, something that will remove her into some mindless limbo. They respond by turning her into a tree.
Roberta puts the book back into its hiding place, but she cannot sleep for thinking of the fascination the story once held for her. An idea slips into her mind. It’s an absolutely crazy idea, but it stays with her nonetheless. “Most little girls adore their daddies.” Her mother said that. Well then, if that is true, this idea, crazy as it is, could be the answer to her nightmare.
She could rewrite the Myrrha story as an erotic novel, couldn’t she? Set it in modern times? Make the father figure not a king — that wouldn’t work — but a crusader, perhaps a man like Barack Obama, on whom the hopes of a nation could rest. Or perhaps a lesser figure, a man who influences the people around him. Her own Daddy had been a crusader. A village doctor, he had fought for the rights of women to birth control information and hospital abortions.
She remembers how she’d gone into Budge’s Pharmacy one day to get something or other and seen her father deep in conversation with Mr. Budge. “Look here,” she heard him say, “probably every teenaged boy in Summerton is having sex in the front seat of his father’s Studebaker. Get those condoms out from under the counter, damn it. Put them right out with the Listerine mouthwash and the Vitalis. I thought we’d agreed on that.”
“I tried to oblige, Doc,” Mr. Budge had said. “But the Eastern Star ladies gave me a lot of flack. Not to mention the IODE. I got to think of my business.”
“You’ve got to think about what’s right, man, and…” He’d seen her then and stopped in mid-sentence.
Later, as they drove home together in the Oldsmobile, she’d asked, “What’s a condom, Daddy?”
He’d thought for a moment, as he manoeuvred around a couple of corners. Then he said, “It’s a rubber cover that slips over a boy’s penis and keeps him from impregnating the girl he’s with.”
“How would he get it on, Daddy?” Any penises she’d seen on statues in books seemed to be limp like rolls of playdough.
When they got home, he’d taken a prescription form and drawn an erect penis on it and explained how it got that way.
At that point, she had at last understood what Ovid meant when he wrote that King Cinyras had filled Myrrha �
��with his seed.” And she had gone upstairs and reread the story with new insight.
“Most little girls adore their daddies.” Her mother’s words resonate in her mind. If it’s true, there might be a huge female readership for an erotic novel based on “Myrrha.” Of course, modern readers would be uncomfortable with the story’s theme of incest, but she could make the Cinyras figure a stepfather rather than a father. It might be a way, perhaps a surefire way, to cover some of James’s debts.
Roberta tosses and turns as she spins ideas. She hears the neighbours’ car pull into the driveway next to her mother’s house. Mrs. Baldwin and her “cousin” — the younger man who lives with her — are back, no doubt, from an evening of euchre at the Legion.
She remembers waking from sleep to the throb of her father’s Oldsmobile turning into the driveway under her bedroom window. She had her arms around the teddy bear she still took to bed with her, even though she was twelve years old.
The ignition died, but instead of the sound of the driver’s door opening, there was silence. She crawled down from her bed, went to the window, pulled back the curtains, and looked out. She could see her father’s dark outline in the car. She watched while he took off his fedora and threw it on the seat, ran his fingers through his hair, laid his head against the steering wheel.
She had known then that someone had died. Who? He hadn’t mentioned anyone being deadly sick. Must have been unexpected, one of those sudden midnight calls to a heart attack, a stroke, or a gunshot wound for which he could do nothing.
Still, he slumped in the driver’s seat, while she danced from one foot to the other, wanting to go to him, but afraid. Afraid of the stickiness of the blood on his coat or the stink of vomit. Then, she heard her mother go down the stairs. Heard the screen door slam shut and watched her mother open the car door, reach in, and put her arm around her father’s shoulders and draw him out.
Screen door opening and closing. Murmuring. Running water. Bang of the liquor cabinet door. She tiptoed to the head of the stairs, looked down through the banister where her father was sitting, glass in hand, opposite her mother, their knees touching. Roberta took a seat on the top step where she could see and hear.
“It was one of the Dorsey girls. Janeen. With her mother. They were sitting in the dark in the waiting room outside my office. I don’t know how long they’d been there. I had no idea they needed me. Nora was wearing an apron, and Janeen was in her school tunic. They were both crying. It took me forever to get them calmed down before I could find out what was wrong. Finally, Nora blurted out that Janeen was pregnant. And she wanted me to do something about it.”
“Oh Robert, she can’t be more than fifteen years old.”
“Just turned sixteen. And Nora said to me, ‘If my husband finds out about this, he’d make her get married. I won’t have it. The boy who did this is seventeen years old. You and I know about marriage. Kids are not ready for it.’“
“So you…”
“Right there on my office examining table. It was a fully formed foetus. Probably seventeen weeks. It had tiny fingers, like the claws of a chickadee. I rolled it up in bags and put it into the garbage….” Roberta could hear her father’s voice breaking.
“Will Nora’s husband find out?”
“I hope not. The girl will have to stay in bed for a day or two, but Nora intends to make up some sort of explanation. I told her to phone me right away if there was any bleeding.” Her father was hunched forward in his chair, staring down at the floor.
“You did the right thing, Robert. Think of what would have happened if you hadn’t got involved.”
Her father sighed then, set down his glass, and turned toward the staircase. Roberta got up from the top step and started to scamper back to her bedroom, but he must have seen her shadow against the wall.
“Wait, dear,” he called to her. He trudged up the stairs, his footsteps dragging. “You must never tell anyone what you heard tonight. I killed a baby, but someday you’ll understand why.” He took her hand and held it. “Sometimes, you have to do things that are wrong in order to set the world right again.” Then he turned away, back towards her mother who was coming up the stairs.
Her father’s last words on that evening stay with Roberta as she drifts into sleep.
11.
ROBERTA GETS UP EARLY the next morning with the resolve to get back to Toronto as soon as possible and get started on Project Sleaze. It can’t be that hard to write an erotic novel, she tells herself. I don’t have to be back at Trinity until after the Christmas break. I’ve even been able to sign off on my obligations as a volunteer at the Christian Mission. But right now, I need to have my study, my computer, and my privacy.
She phones home and leaves a message for Ed and Charlie: “Plans have changed, boys. I’ll be back sometime this afternoon.” If they’ve made arrangements to have their girlfriends over in her absence, they’ll be warned.
The smell of coffee and other good things — pancakes, maybe? — wafts up into the bedroom pulling her down the stairs into the large kitchen with its maple cupboards and big window. Perhaps the sunshine signals a good day, Roberta thinks, as she sits in a Windsor chair watching Mrs. Baldwin’s mate use his finger and thumb to empty the contents of his nose onto the driveway next door.
Her mother sets blueberry French toast in front of her. It’s always been Roberta’s favourite breakfast. She even copied out the recipe once upon a time, but she has never made it. It’s labour-intensive, involving an overnight soaking of the bread in eggs and milk, and fifty minutes in the oven in the morning. Who’s got time for that? But as she asks herself this question, she remembers that James used to make it for special occasions: for their anniversaries, for the boys’ birthdays, for Valentine’s Day. It’s one of the happy memories that keep surfacing, bringing on the tears and pushing back her anger over James’s betrayal.
Her mother hands her a tissue from a box on the windowsill and sets a pitcher of maple syrup in front of her. “Have some syrup, dear, and indulge yourself with good things whenever you can.”
And now, as she pours the maple syrup over the toast, she remembers that in Summerton, food is always the way of saying “sorry” or “cheer up.” She thinks of the funeral-baked meats going up and down the street to neighbours after the death of loved ones, of the fifty cents her mother used to dole out to her when she’d had some childish sorrow, like a painful session with the orthodontist or a bad exam. “Go get yourself a banana split at Mr. Yu’s,” she’d say, and Roberta would go down to the Chinese restaurant and devour three flavours of ice cream with pineapple, strawberry, and chocolate toppings. The banana that supported it all remained on the plate. And she always came home feeling better.
“Delicious, Mother,” she says now. “Just what I need. You shouldn’t have gone to all this bother.” She watches her mother’s face light up with a smile. “But I’m glad you did.”
“I wanted to do something special.” Her mother pours the coffee. Even at this early hour, she’s wearing a nice pair of tailored black pants and a bright red sweater.
There’s a moment of silence. My turn, Roberta acknowledges. “It’ll be a quiet Christmas this year, but I want you to come and have it with us. Why don’t you bring … Neville?” She hopes she’s got the name right.
“What a lovely idea. Are you sure?”
“Perfectly. I’ll even put up with the smelly Samoyed if necessary.”
“Rottweiler. Not that it matters. Stink is stink.”
Roberta is glad to have a moment of laughter with her mother. They linger over their coffee, and then Roberta goes upstairs to pack.
Back in Toronto by mid-afternoon, Roberta goes straight to her study to make out an outline. She turns on the computer and gets down to work.
But after an hour, she stops and goes to her bookcase to get Writer’s Market from the top shelf. She reads through the
section on erotica, which has an article offering pointers on writing a bestselling novel that will appeal to readers “who enjoy vivid storytelling and sexual content.” It urges writers “to seize your most vivid fantasy, your deepest dream, and set it free onto paper.” There are several caveats: “No horror, rape, death, or mutilation.” Inverted incest is not on the list. Well, that’s something.
Then there is a list of magazines and book publishers that buy the crap. She decides to query George Korda at Mayhem who describes his audience as “daring, open-minded adults.” Daring and open-minded she can handle, maybe — as long as they are not buying porn videos or ogling big-breasted girls in strip joints. Further thought: Okay, I’m a hypocrite. I’m going to write a nasty little novel, and I’m being picky about the mindset of people who read it. And at the same time, I’m hoping for large sales because I need money. And to sink even more deeply into hypocrisy, I’m going to need a nom de plume.
Back to the computer. She decides to set the Ovid story in New York in the sixties, make the father figure the crusading editor of a popular left-wing magazine, something like Harper’s, but she will probably have to call it something else. Her agent, Marianne Blackman, can tell her about libel problems. And Myrrha will be his teenaged stepdaughter. She will give her a modern name. Mira, perhaps. The first chapter will have Mira looking out of their Greenwich Village apartment, waiting for her stepfather to come home. What will she call him? Hmm. Babbo, maybe, or Papino, Italian names for a father figure. Papino will probably work. It will fit in nicely with Ovid’s Roman ancestry, not that any of the people who’ll read this sleaze will know or care.
And she will have to change the ending. Have Mira remorseful, yes, but maybe have her run away to the rain forest where, instead of turning into a tree, she could become a tree hugger.
So get down to it, she tells herself. She takes a half-hour to make a cup of coffee and then types four sentences and deletes them. The whole idea is just too much.
