by Cecelia Frey
“Dear Esther, you’re so happy with George and the married state you can’t conceive of any other life for a woman.”
“Would you ever go back to him? Ben, I mean.”
“What makes you think he wants me back?”
“He hasn’t asked for a divorce. He must want you back.”
“It doesn’t necessarily follow. He’s such a peculiar person.”
“Do you still love him?”
“It goes beyond love. You must know that. You must feel that way about George. Love isn’t in question. You get so intertwined, so grown into each other. Ben went to see Amanda. He went and I didn’t. I hadn’t been to the Island for such a long time before … that last trip. Amanda actually thought I was mad at her. She told me that in the car that night. It tears me apart, that for the last few years of her life she thought I was mad at her.” Helena turned her head away. “Why didn’t I go to see her more often? Spend time with her? I ask myself that question a hundred times a day.”
“It made you ill. Her life made you ill. Her life was always in such turmoil. You can’t stand chaos. Especially emotional chaos. That’s why you left Ben and went to the Coast. Remember?”
“Yes. I’d forgotten. That is why, isn’t it?”
“You have a mind that demands clarity.”
“A terrible character flaw, to need clarity in this world. It makes one recoil from becoming involved with other people.”
“Perhaps you need to be that way to survive.”
“Yes, well, the irony is Amanda’s death has thrown me into total chaos. Which I deserve. Maybe I won’t survive.”
“Don’t talk like that, dear. You only need time. And I’m here to help you through. You must talk to me. Get it all out of your system.”
“To become involved in other people’s pain, to have the strength to endure it, that’s true goodness. That’s you Esther. You went often to see Amanda.”
“It didn’t make me ill. If it had, perhaps I wouldn’t have wanted to go, either. I’ve had such a regular life. I’ve never had to face adversity, not like Amanda, or you. Perhaps if I had, if I were tested … perhaps it would be a different story. Anyway, you’re through with all that. You’re here. You’re home. It’s a new life dawning for you.”
There was silence in the room. Helena closed her eyes and felt a familiar coldness start to creep along her veins. That was the way she went to sleep now, a coldness like death taking hold of her body.
The furnace came on with a thump. Warm air hummed through the vents. “You were always so good to Amanda,” Helena murmured. “Not like me.”
“Shhhh.”
“You’re so good and I’m so bad.”
“Even if that was true, which it isn’t …sometimes God loves most the ones who deserve it least. Perhaps because often those are the ones who need love the most.”
“Don’t change, Esther,” Helena mumbled. She clutched her sister’s hand. It was a strong capable hand, the sort of hand you could put yourself into and feel reassurance. “The world needs people like you.”
Helena was sinking into the dark, accompanied by her usual silent cries. If only we had stayed home that night. If only, if only. I should have let Amanda drive. I should not have drank so much. I should have … I should not have….
Through the dark shroud surrounding her she could feel Esther’s hand stroking her hair, her forehead. Her last sensation was Esther’s cooing, “That’s right dear. Sleep. You’ve had enough for now. We’ll take this up again tomorrow. You need to sleep. And rest. Rest your brain. That’s what you need. Lots of rest. And time to think things through. I’m so glad you’ve come home. It wasn’t good for you to stay out there so long.”
IV. GEORGE
MAYBE SHE’S RIGHT, thought George as he was jogging away from Veronica. He was conscientious about actually jogging during these escapades, although sometimes he did allow himself to slow it to a brisk walk on the way home. He had to.
As a rule, George did not think about his situation. He had made that rule for himself at the beginning. He had decided to suspend thought, to go with the flow, to simply enjoy whatever happened, enjoy Veronica. He knew that if he thought about what he was doing, the enormity of it, if he thought about Esther, about his standing in the community, he would spoil the experience for himself. However, on this particular stark morning George realized that he had to do something, one way or another. If he did not, Veronica would. It was only a matter of time before she contacted Esther.
How George longed to return to innocence. If only he could wipe out the last two and a half years. If only he could go back to that happier time. True, he had been having some sort of middle-age crisis, but he would have worked it through. With Esther’s help he would have emerged triumphant on the other side. Instead, he had gotten himself into an unsolvable muddle. If only he could return to the place in his life where he had been that evening before the telephone rang and changed all of their lives forever.
“We’re so lucky.” Had he said that or had Esther? It didn’t matter who had said it, they thought as one. Lucky. Lucky. The word reverberated now in George’s head. Yes, they, he, had been lucky. He had not known how lucky he was.
“Don’t answer it,” George distinctly remembered saying.
If only … thought George.
Esther had flown to the Coast that very night. He had followed a few days later for the funeral but had returned almost immediately because of his classes. Esther had stayed on, and Veronica had entered his life. In fact, he consoled himself, if Esther had not stayed so long at the Coast, Veronica would not have happened.
George knew what it seemed like, the older man seducing the young woman, professor seducing student. But it had not been like that at all. It had started so innocently — at home, in his home. He had answered the door one evening when Esther was away to find Veronica standing on the step. At first he did not know who she was. Then, through the bulky winter coat, the red scarf and toque, he recognized in the pale narrow face, the thin straight nose sloping down from a high forehead, the long narrow reddish-brown eyes and wide mouth, the student who had waited for him after class a couple of weeks previous, the one he had quite openly discussed with Esther.
“She’s not much older than Delores,” Esther had said. “We must help her. She shouldn’t be alone.”
George’s breath was coming in short ragged spurts. Time to walk. His path had taken him along the edge of a ravine that dropped down to a river. The world was black and white, white snow, black tree branches, white sky. A narrow passage of open water in the river snaked black through the still landscape.
He had given her an extension on her paper, and that evening, that fateful evening when Esther was away, she had come with the excuse of dropping it off. Naturally, he had invited her to step in out of the cold. What was unnatural, at least for him, the staid, stolid Dr. Martin, was that he found himself saying, “Look, why don’t you come in for a drink. I was just having one. My wife’s away visiting her sister and I hate to drink alone.”
He had taken her coat and hung it in the front closet. He still remembered his first smell of her, the subtly sweet smell of her body as she shrugged out of her coat, the clean smell of her hair as she took off her toque and tossed it on the hall bench, and something else, faintly fresh and minty, something like spearmint gum. He had watched her slide long leather boots from her thin legs. She was wearing tight jeans and a long-sleeved shirt almost the exact colour of her eyes. As she walked in front of him through French doors into the living room he could not help but notice her buttocks, firm, yet a little fleshy and pendant, like two ripe plums either side the deep crease of her jeans. Immediately, he corrected his vision.
She sat down on the sofa and folded her hands on her knees. Her face was more delicate than he remembered. He noticed how her hair fell across her forehead and how her
eyes peeked out from behind it like a small animal’s watching from behind a hedgerow.
A brisk fire was crackling on the grate. The cold weather had set in early that year and then had persisted, indeed, would persist all that long and dreary winter.
“Are you warm enough?” he asked. “Would you like to sit closer to the fire?”
“This is fine.” Her voice was quick, nervous, chittery. It made him think of the birds that flocked to the feeder that Esther was careful to keep replenished, especially during cold spells. “How do they manage to stay alive?” Esther was fond of saying, gazing through the window at them pecking away on the back deck railing. “With just that little bit of fluff between their beating hearts and the brutal weather.”
“What would you like to drink?” inquired George. “I was having whiskey.” Then it occurred to him that she was a child. “And pop, we have pop around some place. Or juice, tea, coffee?”
“Wine? Do you have wine?”
“White or red?”
When he came back with the wine, he saw that she had shifted position slightly. She was sitting now with one leg and foot up underneath her. He set a glass, one of Esther’s good crystal goblets, on the low coffee table and uncorked the wine in front of her. “I’m afraid this hasn’t breathed,” he said.
“It’ll be fine.” Her wide, generous smile softened the brittle intensity of her face.
He was going to pour a taster’s amount but then had the thought that she might not know what to do with it so he poured the glass half full and set the bottle on the table. He picked up his tumbler of whiskey.
“Cheers,” he said. They raised glasses. He turned to one of the wing chairs near the fire and sat down. “Such an early winter this year,” he commented.
“Benjamin told me about the accident. Is that why your wife is at the Coast?”
He must have looked startled. “You know Ben?”
“Yes. I met him at university. I believe his wife and your wife are sisters.”
“Yes.” George looked into the fire. “A terrible thing, terrible.”
“Ben told me how he sat with his wife in the hospital. He held her hand. At first she didn’t even know he was there.”
“Yes, she was having a bad time of it.”
“He went right away. To the Coast. That night. He took a plane in the middle of the night.”
“Yes. He and my wife were on the same flight.”
“They’ve been separated for so long. Still, he went, the minute she needed him.”
“I suppose so.”
“What’s she like? Helena, I mean.”
“Oh, she’s … intelligent,” he said and then wondered at how that was the first word that came to mind. “Yes, she’s very intelligent. That may be her problem. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Unlike Esther.” He added the last to himself and was surprised when Veronica’s response indicated that he had spoken out loud.
“Esther? Your wife.”
“Yes.” He suddenly realized that he should not be telling this stranger, this student, family secrets. He also realized that he was on his third tumbler of whiskey. He set it on the mantle, clasped his hands loosely and turned toward his guest.
“How are you?” he asked pointedly.
“Fine.”
“Getting things sorted out?”
“Yes. I’d like to thank you for listening to me that day. Likely I was overreacting, but at the time things looked pretty bleak.”
“No problem. That’s the way with most things, give them time…”
“I’m already over it.”
Youth, he marvelled. She was ready to take the bridge over a man and now, two weeks later, she seemed a different person.
It was only later she told him that the man had been Ben. Then, as he put it together, he realized that her real purpose in visiting him that evening was to get information about Ben, more specifically about Ben and Helena. Later, she openly admitted it. Later still, she told him that that was before she had fallen madly and inescapably in love with him, that what she had felt for Ben had been a pale facsimile of what she then felt for him. Ben had become a vague and distant memory, she said.
He noticed that her glass was empty. He rose, poured her another, this one a little fuller than the last, and returned to his chair.
“I haven’t found anyone else,” she volunteered. “I don’t want to jump into another relationship right away.”
Relationships. That’s what they called them nowadays. In his day they had said “going together” or “dating” or “having a thing.” Young people nowadays were so advanced in their articulation, in their ability to define life. It was quite frightening. “That’s smart,” he said. “Give yourself time to get your mind straightened around.”
“And emotions.”
“Emotions?”
“Get my emotions back on track. Settled down.”
“Yes, of course. It’s good to get out with friends. Don’t become too much of an introvert.” He felt that he was giving advice to his own daughter, he found himself using the same tone of voice. He said as much. “I have a daughter about your age.”
“Is that her?” Veronica was looking toward the piano.
He got up and crossed in front of the fireplace to the piano. From its top, he picked up a framed photo and looked at it. Delores smiled up at him. She was so like her mother, with that glowing quality, an inner light that turned an ordinary pert and pretty face into a beautiful one. “Yes, and that’s Esther, my wife, with her. We had it taken just before Delores left for university. Four months ago now. She’s in Toronto.” He passed the photo along to Veronica. Then he picked up a second one. “Here’s another of Esther. As she was when I first met her.”
“She was very beautiful.”
“Styles were different then, of course. Hairstyles. The short curly look was in.”
“She looks so … interested.”
“Yes, I suppose she was. Still is, for that matter.”
Looking at that old photo, he thought how Esther had kept that germ of wonderment alive in herself all those years, how her life seemed to be one long series of exciting happenings, the neighbour’s new baby, the old Chinese woman at the supermarket, the boy who carried out her groceries and wanted to marry his sweetheart but couldn’t afford to. How was it that Esther who went through her life half asleep until noon should get more out of it than he who each morning went forth into the jungle to face students, faculty, the bureaucracy, to study and define life, cells, organisms? Did he have no basic understanding of his subject, which was life itself? Esther decided that it was because he did not involve himself. He said he thought he did. She said she meant his deeper self. He said he involved all of the self that he knew about.
George suspected Esther of still being religious. How else could life be such an object of reverence and mystery. When they were first married, he had hoped that her religion would gradually disappear. That it hadn’t had not been a problem. She kept her own counsel on the subject, never foisted it on other people, did not attempt to influence him. She had not even insisted that Delores be raised in the Church. She knew how adamant George was about all that he called “hoodoo voodoo.” However, George suspected that her spirituality, if not her Roman Catholicism, was still there, perhaps even stronger than ever, as was so much repressed material in the human species.
By now George had brought out the album from where Esther kept it in a sideboard. He sat beside Veronica on the sofa, quite close. You can’t show another person photos from across the room. Veronica slid her foot out from under her and placed that leg across the other. Her knee accidentally touched his thigh. He felt that he had been burned on that spot of his skin, a burn that travelled through his veins to include his entire body.
“This is Esther again,” he said. “We were at a football game. I suppo
se those hats and pennants look a little ridiculous now. Do they still do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t go to football games.”
“Ahhh, here we are. In the Cave. That’s what we called the smoking room. It was downstairs in the Arts Building and a thoroughly unhealthy place. You could cut the smoke with a knife. Of course, we all smoked in those days. We didn’t know we weren’t supposed to. And coffee! We’d sit all afternoon and drink cup after cup. Or beer. We put away a lot of beer. And we’d argue. Politics, economics, literature, the meaning of life. Oh, we were full of ideas.”
“Ideas?”
“Ben was a wild-eyed radical. Look at him. A young Lenin, although his politics were quite different. He believed strongly in the democratic process, but he felt that his country had betrayed that process, that that process in his country, in the States, had been drastically demoralized. That was during the Vietnam business.”
“And that’s why he came here,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. Later, he realized that she knew Ben better than he did.
“Yes. Ben was an unusual person. He had a sense of self. Even then, when he was so young. Some might have thought him cocky, but he had something to be cocky about. He aced every course he ever attempted. He had a creative mind. Perhaps that was his downfall.” The last was said more to himself than to her, but she was quick to pick up on it.
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, a lot of things. But the long and short of it, to my mind, he lost confidence in his ability to make good decisions. He started questioning his decisions and therefore himself.”
“You mean about escaping the draft?”
“Amongst other things. And there’s Helena, sitting next to him. She was a radical too. Everyone said they were well suited. I think she saw herself a bit as an Anais Nin.”
“Anais Who?”
“Nin. She was a freethinker. Lived as she pleased. According to her own code. In Europe. She hung out with the likes of Henry Miller. Oh, she couldn’t be that wild, Helena I mean, being a Canadian, but she liked to think of herself as a free spirit. I doubt she ever indulged in free love, but she liked to think she could. Even then she was too smart for her own good. And there’s Esther. And there’s me, the good-looking fellow in the middle.”
