The box garden

Chapter 3
“Well,” I whisper to Judith when we are finally alone.
“Well,” she answers back, smiling.
It’s midnight and we’re standing in our slips in our mother’s bedroom at the front of the old house in Scarborough. White nylon slips; Judith’s is whiter than mine and fits better. Is there something symbolic about that? No, I reject the possibility.
I love Judith. I had forgotten how much I loved her until I saw her standing with her husband Martin and our mother behind the chaste iron gate at Union Station. She and Martin had come from Kingston on the morning train; we would have a few days together before the wedding.
Judith looked larger than I had remembered, or perhaps it was the colour and cut of her floppy, red denim dress. She has even less fashion sense than I, but unlike me she’s able to translate her nonchalance into a well-meaning, soft-edged eccentricity which is curiously touching and even rather charming. She’s aged a little. I haven’t seen her since she and Martin were in Vancouver for a conference three years ago, and since then she’s had her fortieth birthday. And her forty-first. Her daughter is eighteen now and her son is almost as old as Seth. I find myself involuntarily listing the areas of erosion: a small but generalized collapse of skin between her nose and mouth, the forked lines like fingers of an upturned hand between her eyes which make her look not querulous, but worried and kindly, a detached dry point madonna. Her eyes are dreamier than I remembered. Our mother used to fret that Judith would ruin her eyes from so much reading as a girl, swallowing Lawrence and Conrad and Dreiser on summer afternoons stretched on a bath towel in our tiny back yard. Her eyes were sharper then, darting and energetic, the sort of eyes you would expect to harden with age, but they now show such softness. Of course, Judith’s life has been embalmed in a stately, enviable, suburban calm. She has a husband who loves her, healthy children, a large, airy house in Kingston, not to mention a respectable reputation as a biographer. And most important, she has a seeming immunity to the shared, sour river of our girlhood.
The house is quiet. Our mother with a long, shrunken, remembered sigh has surrendered to us her bedroom. Green moire curtains discoloured in the folds, a forty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture. And on the walnut veneer bed, a candlewick bedspread, here and there missing some of its fringe. There is a waterfall bureau, circa 1928, on which rests a precisely-angled amber brush and mirror set which has never, as far as I know, been used. This was our father’s bedroom too; how completely we have put away that silent, hard-working husband and father. His wages met the payments on this bungalow; his bony frame rested for thirty years on half of this bed, and yet it seems he never existed.
Since there are only three bedrooms in the house, there was really no other way to arrange the sleeping. No one, of course, had counted on Eugene, least of all Eugene himself who would have preferred a downtown hotel room. It is at my perverse last minute insistence that he is staying here in Scarborough.
Why do I need him here? Perhaps because playing the role of pathetic younger-sister-from-the-west places too great a strain on me. Maybe I am anxious to make a final defiant gesture and give rein to my self-destructive urge which relishes awkward situations—such as how to introduce Eugene to my mother. “This is a friend of mine. Eugene Redding.”
Friend? But in my mother’s narrow lexicon women don’t have male friends. They have fathers, husbands and brothers. Her face, meeting Eugene at the station, had dissolved into a splash of open pain. Had I intended to cause such pain? Why hadn’t I written ahead to explain about Eugene? But no one voiced these questions. Nevertheless she shook Eugene’s hand slowly as if trying to extract some sort of explanation through his finger tips.
“I really don’t want to put you out, Mrs. McNinn,” Eugene had insisted. “I told Charleen I would be perfectly happy in a hotel.”
There followed a small silence which could be measured not by seconds or minutes but by the cold, linear dimension of my mother’s hurt feelings.
“I’m sure we can find room for everyone,” she said at last, sounding half paralyzed, like someone who had recently suffered a stroke. “Of course,” she trailed off de fensively, “it’s only a small house.”
There was, naturally, no possibility of Eugene and me sharing a room. Anxious to please, I suggested sleeping with my mother and putting Eugene in the spare room, but she shuddered visibly at this idea. “I’d never sleep a wink,” she said, plainly vexed. “I’m used to sleeping alone.”
Another silence as we absorbed the irony of this statement; in less than a week she would be sleeping with a stranger called Louis Berceau.
Finally it was agreed that Martin and Eugene should take the twin beds in our old bedroom off the kitchen. Judith and I would occupy our mother’s double bed, and our mother, perhaps for the first time in her life, would sleep in the old three-quarters bed in the spare room.
“Couldn’t I sleep on the chesterfield?” Eugene suggested desperately.
We waited, breathless, for what seemed like the perfect solution. “No,” our mother said with finality. “No one on the chesterfield. That won’t be necessary.”
What Eugene didn’t know, what he couldn’t possibly guess, was that no one had ever slept on our chesterfield. Never. Years ago our father, exhausted after a day at work, would occasionally stretch out for a minute and close his eyes. She would poke him, gently but relentlessly. “Not here, Bert. Not on the chesterfield.” It was as though she saw something threatening in the way he spread himself, something disturbing and vulgar about the posture of ordinary relaxation.
“Not on the chesterfield,” she had said, giving us her final terms, and, like children, we accepted her decree. But inwardly I bled for Martin and Eugene in their forced awkward fraternity. I could imagine their inevitable stiff conversation—All right with you to open the window? Whichever you prefer. Maybe you’d rather have the bed by the closet? You don’t mind if I read for a while? Not at all, not at all.—Strangers, two men in their early forties, shut up from their women in a tiny back bedroom with no more than a foot or two between their beds, and nothing in common in all this world but a bizarre attachment to the McNinn sisters, Charleen and Judith; they might, for that matter and with good reason, be silently questioning that attachment at this very moment. Martin, an easy man, though somewhat remote, would accept the situation, but he could not help minding the separation from Judith. He had even pleaded for the spare room himself. He and Judith wouldn’t object to the three-quarters bed, he had said. But our mother, who seemed to feel that her hospitality was being challenged, had insisted on taking the spare room herself.
“Well?” Judith says again from across the room.
“How do you think she looks?” I ask.
That is always our first question when we’re together, how is she, how does she look. Our voices dip and swim with the novel rhythm of concern, childrens’ concern for a parent.
“Better than I expected,” Judith says.
“When did you see her last?”
“A couple of months ago. I came down on the train with the kids for the weekend.”
“She’s still getting treatment?”
“She goes every month now. But next year it will probably be less. Down to every three months.”
“You talked to the doctor?”
“Yes. A couple of times. He thinks she’s made a fantastic recovery.”
“What about a recurrence?”
“It could happen. That’s why they want her to keep coming to the clinic.”
“She looks so thin.”
“She was always thin, Charleen. You’ve forgotten.”
“Well, then, she looks old.”
“She is old. She’s seventy.”
“She’s so pale though.”
“Not compared to what she was after the operation.”
“How soon after did you see her?”
“A month. She never told me she was even having an operation. Which was odd when you think how she always used to complain about her aches and pains. She never told anyone. She just went.”
“I didn’t know until you wrote.”
“When I heard—the doctor finally phoned and told me—I came down and spent a week with her. She was feeling fairly strong by then and there was a nurse who came round every day to check up. She never talked about it. It. The breast. Just about the hospital and how rude the nurses had been and how thin the blankets were and how they hadn’t given her tea with her breakfast. You know how she goes on. But the breast—she never mentioned it.”
“Does it hurt do you think?”
“I don’t know. She never says.”
“What does she wear? I mean, does she have one of those false things?”
“It looks like it to me. What do you think?”
“She looks just the same there. With her dress on anyway.”
“Did you ever see her breasts, Charleen? I mean when we were little.”
“Never. You remember how she used to dress in the closet all the time. That was why it was so odd when you wrote me about the operation.”
“How do you mean, odd?”
“That she had a breast removed. It never seemed real to me. I just never thought of her as someone who had breasts.”
“What did she call them?”
“Breasts? I don’t know. She must have called them something.”
“Not that I can remember.”
We sit on the bed thinking. The house is still and through the window screen we can hear a warm wind lapping at the edge of the awning.
“Developed,” Judith says at last, “I think she just used the verb form. Like how so-and-so was developing. Or someone else was very, very developed or maybe not developed.”
Remembering, I smile. “She always thought Aunt Liddy was too developed. Poor Liddy, she used to say, she’s too developed to buy ready-made.”
Judith and I laugh together, quietly so no one will hear. This is the way it used to be. Lying in bed at night, laughing.
“Can’t you just hear her telling the doctor that she has a lump in one of her developments,” I say.
“And he says, sorry to hear that, Mrs. McNinn, but we’ll just have to remove half your development.”
We laugh again, harder this time, so hard that the bed rocks. Crazy Judith. I put my hand over my mouth but Judith lets out a yelp of the old girlish cackle. Now we are both shaking with laughter, but there is something manic about all this mirth; it occurs to me that we are perilously close to weeping, and for that reason I reach over and switch off the light.
In the dark Judith asks, “Were you absolutely stunned to hear about Louis?”
“Stunned!” I say. “I’m still trying to get used to it. Is that the way you pronounce his name? Looey?”
“Yes. Like Louis the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth.”
“Have you met him?”
“Last time I was down. But just for a minute. He’s coming over tomorrow though. To get acquainted with all of us.”
“Where on earth did she meet him? I mean, she never goes anywhere.”
“At the cancer clinic,” Judith says.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yes.”
“What exactly?”
“You mean what kind of cancer?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure. That is, she didn’t go into details. But he’s had three operations.”
“Three operations?”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Judith. Do you realize—that means he’s missing three parts.”
“Possibly.”
“What,” I speak slowly, “do you think they could be?”
“I don’t know. But he doesn’t look all that sick. At least not the quick look I had at him.”
“What does he look like, Judith?”
“Thin. Naturally. And I’m not sure but I think he may be a couple of inches shorter than she is.”
“Three operations! I can’t get over it. What I mean is ... don’t you think . . . I mean, imagine embarking on marriage when you’re in that state.”
“Maybe they were only minor operations.”
“Is he the same age she is?”
“Two years older. He’s seventy-two.”
“But he was married before. She wrote that—that he had been married before.”
“Yes, but I don’t know anything about his first wife, when she died or what.”
“Where does he live?”
“He has a furnished room. Not so far from here, just a few minutes. But he’s giving it up and moving in here. After the wedding.”
“After the wedding,” I repeat the words.
“Doesn’t it sound crazy? The Wedding.”
“And he’s retired. What did he do before he was retired?” I reflect suddenly that I’m not so different after all from Doug Savage; what did he do—that was what I had to find out.
“He taught manual training. In a junior high school.”
“Manual training?”
“You know, like woodworking. And metalwork. Like when the girls went for cooking and sewing. Remember?”
“And that was his job? That’s what he did?”
“Apparently.”
“And he lived in Toronto?”
“I think so. He doesn’t speak a word of French, in spite of the French name; I asked him. But he used to be a Catholic.”
“A Catholic?”
“Uhuh.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me. When she told me about the manual training and all that.”
“She would never have told me that. She never tells me anything.”
“She doesn’t tell me much, either,” Judith says. “She writes every week, but it’s always about the same old thing: the weather and her aches and pains or how much everything costs these days. I had to pump her about Louis.”
“I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for running away with Watson.”
“Oh, Charleen, that was ages ago. I’m sure she never thinks about it anymore.”
“The scandal of it all,” I say bitterly. “Having all the neighbours think I might be pregnant.”
“Charleen, you exaggerate.”
“Well, she never tells me anything.”
“Actually, there’s something she hasn’t told me. And I’m dying to know.”
I can’t see Judith’s face in the dark. “What?” I ask.
“If she loves him. If he loves her.”
“I suppose they must. At least a little.” But I say this doubtfully.
“I’d give anything to know.”
“It’s your biographical urge coming through.”
“It could be. What I want to know is, do they say romantic things like ... well, like, ‘I love you’ and all that.”
“I can’t imagine her saying it.”
“I can’t either. But maybe he does. Anyway, I wish I knew.”
“I don’t suppose you could ask her?”
“God, no!” Judith says. “She’d have a fit.”
“What I’d like to know is why.”
“Why what?”
“Why she’s getting married. It just doesn’t make sense. She’s comfortable enough. Why on earth does she want to go and get married?”
There is a long pause. Perhaps Judith has fallen asleep, I think. Then I hear her short sigh, and what she says is: “Well, why does anyone get married?”

“What I’d really like,” I say into the darkness, “is some coffee.”
“So would I,” Judith says. “I wonder if she’s got any. She mostly drinks tea now.”
“Let’s look,” I say, slipping out of bed.
“We’ll wake everyone up.”
“Not if we’re quiet.”
We move down the darkened hall. Judith walks ahead of me in an exaggerated clownish prowl, her knees pulling up through her yellow cotton nightgown in a burlesque mime of caution. The door to the kitchen is shut; she turns the knob slowly so that there is no sound, and we close it behind us with the smallest of clicks, snap on the overhead light and breathe with relief. Judith faces me, her upper teeth pulled down over her lower lip, girlish and conspiratorial.
Here in the kitchen there is a faint smell of roasted meat. Lamb? A fresh breeze blows through the window screen and the mixed scent of dampness and scouring powder rises from the sink. A newspaper, yesterday‘s, is folded neatly under the step-on garbage can beside the back door so that there will be no rust marks left on the squared linoleum; it has always been like this.
Our room, the bedroom which Judith and I shared as girls, leads off the kitchen; it is the sort of back bedroom which was commonplace in depression bungalows. Eugene and Martin—it excites me a little to think of it—are sleeping there now. Their door, which stands between the refrigerator (a model from the early fifties) and the old cupboard, is shut; Judith and I freeze for a moment in front of it, listening, straining to hear their fused breathing, but all we hear is the stirring of the wind outside the kitchen window. The trees in the back yard are swaying hugely, and I picture their new green buds, not yet fully opened, turning hard and black in the darkness. “It looks like rain,” Judith remarks.
I find the jar of instant coffee at once; without thinking my hand finds the right shelf, reaches for the place beside the tea canister where I know it must be. A very small jar, the lid screwed tightly on. Judith boils water in the green enamel kettle and finds the everyday cups, and then we sit facing each other across the little brown formica table.
Suddenly there is nothing to say. We are uneasy; we are guilty invaders in our mother’s clean-mopped kitchen; we have disturbed the symmetry of her lightly stocked shelves, have helped ourselves to sugar from her blue earthenware sugar bowl with its two flat-ear handles and its little flowered lid. “Never leave a sugar bowl uncovered,” she always said. “You never know when a fly might get in.” It is as though she is sitting here with us now, measuring, observing, censoring, as though she is holding us forcibly inside the sudden, unwilled silence we seem to have entered. I try to drink my coffee, but it’s too hot.
Judith says at last, a little warily, “Eugene seems nice.” It is not a statement; Judith would never make a statement as banal as that; it is a question.
And I answer conversationally. “I wrote you about him, didn’t I?”
As always there is a kind of ritual to our dialogue, for of course I know that I have written to Judith about Eugene and she knows it too. I wrote to her long ago telling her I had met Eugene, that he was working on Seth’s teeth, that we had taken a holiday together in San Francisco. I can even recall some of the careful phrases I used in my letters to her. She has not suddenly forgotten, not Judith. It is only that she and I see each other so rarely that we are afraid we might misjudge the permitted area of intimacy. It is necessary to prepare the ground a little before we can speak. There is on Judith’s side a wish not to weigh too heavily what I might have written off-handedly and perhaps now regret. On my side there is a wish to project nonchalance and laxity, to preserve at least a shadow of that fiction she half-believes me to be, a runaway younger sister, a casual libertine who has the edge on her, but only superficially, as far as worldliness goes. West-coast divorcee, free-wheeling poet, and now a sort of semi-mistress. We talk in careful, mutually drawn circles.
“When exactly did you meet him, Charleen?”
“Two years ago,” I tell her, “two years now.”
“And?” Judith asks.
“Just that. Two years.”
“What about marriage?” she asks suddenly, recklessly, apparently tiring of fencing with me.
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
“He’s divorced too?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all final and everything?”
“Yes. It’s not that. Actually he’d like to get married again. I like his two boys and they like me. There’s nothing to stop us really.”
“But you’re not quite sure of him? Is that it?”
“I just can’t seem to think straight these days.”
“What about Seth? What does he think of Eugene?”
“That’s no problem. He likes Eugene. And he gets on great with the two kids. Seth likes everyone.”
It’s so quiet in the kitchen. The red and white wall clock over the stove says five minutes past two. The refrigerator whines from its muffled electric heart and a very fine rain blows against the screen over the sink. Judith gets up and shuts the window.
“Seth likes everyone,” I say again. To understate is to risk banality, and these words echoing in the silent kitchen sound both trite and untrue. But they are true; he does like everyone, a fact which makes me feel—and not for the first time—a little frightened at my own child’s open, unquestioning acceptance. Is it natural? Is it perhaps dangerous?
Judith doesn’t notice. “That’s good,” she says. And waits for me to go on.
“I’m just waiting until I’m sure,” I tell her. “I’m not rushing this time. I’m going to wait.”
How can I tell her what it is I’m waiting for; I hardly know myself. But I feel with the force of absolute, brimming certainty that there is something bulky and positive in the future for me, a thing, an event perhaps, which is connected with me in some way, with me, Charleen Forrest. If I were superstitious I might say it was written in the stars, and if I were half as bitter as Judith believes me to be, I might say it is because I deserve something at last. I know it’s there. The numbers tell me: I lived in this brick bungalow for eighteen years. Then I was married to Watson Forrest for eight years. Now I have been divorced for twelve. The shapes, the pattern, the order of those random numbers spell out a kind of logic in my brain; they suggest the approach of another era, another way of being. I’m not a mystic but I know it’s there, whatever it is.

I tell Judith about Brother Adam.
She is, as I might have expected, skeptical. Though she prizes her tolerance, in actual fact the edges of her life are sealed to exclude the sort of human flotsam which I have always been able to embrace. The title Brother is not definitive enough for Judith; it is loosely and embarrassingly sentimental, hinting at imposed familiarity and chummy handshakes.
“What’s it supposed to mean exactly?” she questions. “Is he a priest? Or what?”
“I think so. I’m not sure.”
“You mean in all these letters you’ve written, you’ve never asked him?”
I pause; it’s hard to explain; some things do not yield to simplicity. “That’s the sort of question he might consider trivial. Too particularized, if you see what I mean.”
“But you think he might be a priest?”
“Well, he lives in a place called the Priory.”
“Which priory.”
“Just ‘The Priory’.”
“And it’s in Toronto?”
“Yes. In the Beaches area.”
“Are you going to see him?”
Another pause. “Maybe,” I mumble this ‘maybe’, chewing the side of my cup, trying to conceal the leap of sensation this ‘maybe’ excites in me.
“But he is a botanist?” Judith asks.
“Yes. In a way. Actually, it’s hard to tell.”
“What do you mean?”
“He seems to know all about plants. And he sent an article to the Journal. I more or less -assumed that only a botanist would submit an article to a botanical journal.”
“What was it about?”
“Grass.”
“Grass? Was it any good?”
“Yes. And no. I liked it. But Doug—you remember Doug Savage, you met him in Vancouver when you were there—he thought it was hilarious.”
“You mean actually funny?”
“It wasn’t funny. He wasn’t trying to be funny at all. It was a serious article, passionately serious, in fact. And scientific in a way. It was a sort of sociology of grass, you might say. He has this theory about the importance of grass to human happiness.”
“Maybe he’s talking about marijuana.”
“No. Just ordinary grass. Garden grass. He’s trying to prove that where people don’t have any grass, just concrete and asphalt and so on, then the whole human condition begins to deteriorate.”
“It sounds a little fanciful,” Judith’s old skepticism again.
“In a way. I don’t understand it all, to tell you the truth. But he writes with the most pressing sort of intensity, something much larger than mere eloquence. Anguished. But reflective too. Not like a scientist at all. More like a poet. Or like a philosopher.”
“But nevertheless the Journal turned it down?”
“Naturally. Doug thought it was just plain crazy.”
“And he gave you the job of returning it.”
“Yes. I send back all manuscripts we can’t use. And usually I do it fairly heartlessly. But with Brother Adam it was different. I couldn’t bear to have him think we utterly rejected what he’d written, that we sneered at what he believed in. I mean, that would be like saying no to something that was beautiful. And humiliating someone who was, well, beautiful too. Don’t look so exasperated, Judith. I know I sound fatuous.”
“Go on. You sent the manuscript back to the Priory?”
“Yes. But instead of the usual rejection card, I enclosed a little note.”
“Saying . . .?”
“Oh, just that I’d enjoyed reading the article, at least the parts I understood. I thought I’d better be honest about it. And I said I thought it was a shame we couldn’t use an article like that now and then to break the monotony. Everything we print is so detached. You wouldn’t believe it, Judith. I should send you an issue. It’s inhuman. The prose style sounds factory-made, all glued together with qualifying phrases. And here at last was an article spurting with passion. From someone who really loved grass. To lie on, to walk on, to sit on. Or to smell. Just to touch grass, he feels, has restorative powers.”
“Why grass? I mean, why not flowers or fruit or something? Or trees, even? Isn’t grass just a little, you know, ordinary? After all, there’s a lot of it around. Even these days.”
“That’s partly why he loves it, I think. The fact that grass is so humble. And no one’s ever celebrated grass before.”
“Walt Whitman?”
“That was different. That was more of a symbolic passion.”
“What happened after you wrote to him?”
“Nothing at first. A month at least, maybe even longer. Then I got a parcel. Delivered to the Journal office.”
“From Brother Adam.”
“Yes. But you’d never guess what was in it.”
“Grass.”
“Yes.”
We both laugh. “It wasn’t really grass, of course.” I explain. “It was only the stuff to grow it with. There was a sprouting tray. And some earth in a little cloth bag. Lovely earth really, very fine, a kind of sandy-brown colour. It was clean, clean earth. As though he’d dug it up especially and sieved it and prayed over it. And then there was the packet of seeds. Not the commercial kind. His own. He does his own seed culture.”
“And a letter?”
“No. No letter. Not even instructions for planting the seeds. Just the return address. Brother Adam, The Priory, 256 Beachview, Toronto.”
“How odd not to send a note.”
“That’s what made it perfect. A gift without words. As though the grass was the letter. As though it had a power purer than words.”
Judith laughs. “You always were a bit of a mystic, Charleen.”
“But what really touched me, I think, was the parcel itself. The way it was wrapped.”
“How was it wrapped?”
“Beautifully. I don’t mean aesthetically. After all, there’s a limit to the power of brown paper and string. But it was so neatly, so handsomely done up.” With such touching precision. The paper, two layers, that crisp, waxy paper, every corner perfect, and the knots were tight and trimmed and symmetrical like the knots in diagrams. And the address was printed in black ink in lovely blocky letters. “I hated to open it, in a way,” I risk telling her.
Opening it I had had the sensation of being touched by another human being; I had felt the impulse behind the wrapping—and the strength of his wish, his inexplicable wish to please me. Me!
Judith smiles and says nothing, but from her amused gaze I see she thinks I am absurd. Nevertheless she’s waiting to hear more. My account of Brother Adam cannot really interest her much—though she is currently writing a biography of a nineteenth-century naturalist and is somewhat curious about the scientific impulse—but she listens to me with the alert probing attention which she has perfected.
“At first I thought of planting the grass at the office, but I was worried it would go dry over the weekend. Besides I didn’t want to answer any questions about it. Doug Savage has a way of taking things over.” And besides it would have given his imagination something to feed on; he and Greta cherish my eccentricities as though they were rare collectables.
“Go on.”
“So I took the whole thing home on the bus. Seth thought it was a wonderful present, not at all peculiar, just wonderful. And we put in the seeds that same day. There’s quite a lot of sun in the living room. At least for Vancouver. Anyway you don’t need strong sunlight for grass. One of the things Brother Adam likes about grass is the way it adapts to any condition. It has an almost human resilience. He hates anything rigid and temperamental like those awful rubber plants everyone sticks in corners these days.”
“I like rubber plants.”
“Anyway grass can put up with almost anything. I have it in a box by the window and it does well there.”
I have to hold my tongue to keep from telling Judith more: the way, for instance, I felt about those first little seeds. That they might be supernatural, seeds sprouted from a fairy tale, empowered with magical properties, that they might produce overnight or even within an hour a species of life-giving, life-preserving grass. How that night I fell asleep thinking of the tiny, brown seeds lying sideways against the clean, pressing earth, swelling from the force of moisture, obeying the intricate commands of their locked-in chromosomes. Better not tell Judith too much; she might, and with reason, accuse me of overreacting to a trifling gift. She, who has never doubted herself, couldn’t possibly understand how I could attach such importance to a gift of grass seed or the fact that it placed a burden on me, a responsibility to make the seeds sprout; their failure to germinate would spell betrayal or, worse, it would summarize my fatal inability to sustain any sort of action.
“Was it any good?” Judith asks. “The grass seed, I mean?”
“Within three days,” I tell her, making an effort to speak with detachment, “the first, pale green, threadlike points of grass had appeared. I watered them with a sprinkling bottle, the kind Mother used to dampen clothes on the kitchen table. Every morning and again at night. Sometimes Seth took a turn too.”
“And then you wrote to thank Brother Adam for the grass and that was the start of your friendship?”
“Actually I made myself wait two weeks before I wrote. I wanted to make sure the grass was going to survive. By the time I wrote, all of it was up. Some of it was over an inch high. And I cut two or three shoots with my manicure scissors and Scotch-taped them to the letter.”
Judith smiles dreamily; I have managed, I can see, to delight her. “But what,” she asks, “does one do with a box of grass?”
“It’s strange, but I’ve become very fond of it. It’s divinely soft, like human hair almost. And brilliant green from all that water. I have to trim it about once a week with sewing shears. Sometimes I sprinkle on a little fertilizer although Brother Adam says it’s not really necessary.” I also like to run my hand over its springy tightly-shaved surface, loving its tufted healthy carpet-thick threads, the way it struggles against the sides of the box, the industry with which it mends itself.
“And you’ve been writing to each other ever since?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“Often?”
“Every three or four weeks. I’d write more often but I don’t want to wear him down.” There is also of course, the fact that an instant reply would place Brother Adam in the position of a debtor—and to be in debt to a correspondent is to hold power over a creditor, a power I sensed he would not welcome.
“What do you write about, Charleen?”
I have to think. “It’s funny, but we don’t write much about ourselves. He’s never asked me anything about myself—I like that. And I don’t pester him either. He usually writes about what he’s feeling at the moment or what he’s seeing. Like once he saw a terrible traffic accident from his window. Once he wrote a whole letter about a wren sitting outside on his fire escape.”
“A whole letter about a wren on a fire escape!”
“Well, yes, it was more on the metaphysical side.”
“And you do the same?”
“Sort of. I don’t so much write as compose. It takes me days. I’ve hardly written any poetry lately. All of it seems to go into those letters, all that old energy. Writing to him is—I don’t know how to explain it—but writing those letters has become a new way of seeing.”
“Therapeutic,” Judith comments shortly, almost dis missively.
“I suppose you could call it that.”
“I wish you wrote to me more often.”
“I wish you wrote to me too.”
“We always say this, don’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Charleen?”
“What?”
“What does Eugene think of your ... your relationship with Brother Adam?”
Judith has always been clever. A bright girl in school, a prizewinner at university; now she is referred to in book reviews as a clever writer. But her real cleverness lies not in her insights, but in her uncanny ability to see the missing links, the ellipses, the silences. Like the perfect interviewer she asks the perfect question. “What does Eugene think?” she asks.
Eugene doesn’t know, I tell her. He doesn’t know Brother Adam even exists.

After a while Judith asks me if I’m feeling hungry. “We could make some toast,” she suggests.
I nod, although I’m not so much hungry as emptied out; a late night hollowness gnaws at me, the grey, uneasy anxiety I always feel in this house. The rain is coming down hard now, leaving angry little check marks on the black window, and the house has grown chilly.
In the breadbox we find exactly one-third of a loaf of white, sliced bread. The top of the bag has been folded down carefully in little pleats to preserve freshness. “A penny saved ...” our mother had always said. Meagreness.
A memory springs into focus: how I once asked for a piece of bread to put out for the birds. “They can look after their own the same as we have to,” she replied. Ours, then, had been a house without a birdfeeder, a house where saucers of milk were not provided for stray cats. This was a house where implements were neither loaned nor borrowed, where the man who came to clean the furnace was not offered a cheering cup of coffee, where the postman was not presented with a box of fudge at Christmas. (Such generosities belonged only to fairy tales or soap operas.) In this house there was no contribution to the Red Cross nor (what irony) to the Cancer Fund. Meagreness. I had almost forgotten until I saw the bread in the breadbox.
“Maybe we’d better not have any toast after all,” Judith says, tightlipped. “She’ll be short for breakfast.”
Instead we make more coffee, stirring in extra milk and sugar. I turn to Judith and ask if she has bought a wedding gift for our mother.
“Not yet,” she says clutching her hair in a gesture of frenzy. “And it isn’t because I haven’t thought and thought about it.”
“I haven’t bought anything either,” I admit. “Not yet anyway.”
“Do you have any idea what she’d like?”
“Not one.”
“Why is it,” Judith demands, “that it’s so hard to buy our own mother a present? It isn’t just this damned wedding present either. Every Christmas and birthday I go through the same thing. Ask Martin. Why is it?”
I’m ready with an answer, for this is something about which I’ve thought long and hard. “Because no matter what we give her, it will be wrong. No matter how much we spend it will be either too much or too little.”
“You’re right,” Judith muses. (I marvel at her serene musing, at her willingness to accept the way our mother is.)
“She’s never satisfied,” I storm. “Remember when we were in high school and put our money together one Christmas and bought her that manicure kit. In the pink leather case? It cost six dollars.”
“Vaguely,” Judith nods. (Fortunate, fortunate Judith; her memories are soft-edged and have no power over her.)
“I’ll never, never forget it,” I tell her. “We thought it was beautiful with the little orange stick and the little wool buffer and scissors and everything all fitted in. It was lovely. And she was furious with us.”
“Why was that?” Judith wonders.
“Don’t you remember? She thought we were criticizing her, that we were hinting she needed a manicure. She told us that if we worked as hard as she did we would have ragged fingernails too.”
“Really? I’d forgotten that.”
“And the things we made at school. For Mother’s Day. I made a woven bookmark once. She said it was nice but the colours clashed. It was yellow and purple.”
“Well,” Judith shrugs, “gratitude was never one of her talents.”
“Eugene suggested I give her an Eaton’s gift certificate. But you know just what she’d say—people who give money can’t be bothered to put any thought into a gift.”
“That’s right,” Judith nods. “Remember how Aunt Liddy used to send us a dollar bill for our birthdays, and Mother always said, ‘Wouldn’t you think with all the time Liddy has that she could go out and buy a proper birthday present.’ ”
“Poor Aunt Liddy.”
“I thought of a new bedspread,” Judith says, “but she might think I was hinting that her old one is looking pretty beat up. Which it is.”
“And Ithought of ordering a flowering shrub for the yard, but she would be sure to say that was too impersonal.”
“On the other hand,” Judith says, “if we were to get her a new dressing gown that would be too personal.”
“There’s no pleasing her.”
“Why do we even try?” Judith asks lightly, philosophically. “Why in heaven’s name don’t we give up trying to please her?”
This is a question for which I have no answer, and so I say nothing. I drink my coffee which is already cold. We’re on a psychic treadmill, Judith and I; we can’t stop trying to please her. There’s no logic to it, only compulsion; even knowing it’s impossible to please her, we can’t stop ourselves from trying.

I hadn’t intended to talk about Watson; my divorce is a subject I’ve never really discussed with Judith. It should be easy these free-wheeling days to discuss ex-husbands, but it is never easy for me. In spite of the statistics, in spite of the social tolerance, there is nothing in the world so heavy, so leaden, so painfully pressing as love that has failed. I rarely talk about it—I make a point not to talk about it—but somehow Judith and I have got onto the subject.
We’ve crept back into bed, and shivering under a light blanket, I ask Judith if she minded turning forty.
“Yes,” she answers thoughtfully, “but only a little.”
“You didn’t feel threatened or anything?”
“Not really. Of course, it helps that Martin gets to all the terrible birthdays first.”
“But what about Martin? Didn’t he mind?”
“I don’t know,” Judith says, sounding surprised. And then she adds, “But he doesn’t seem to mind.”
“Eugene is forty,” I burst out.
There is a pause; Judith doesn’t know what to do with this information.
“Is he?” she says politely.
“And he doesn’t mind a bit. He insisted we go out and celebrate it. Cake, candles, the works.”
“Well, why not?”
“He likes being forty. I think he’d even like to be older. Forty-five, fifty maybe.”
“That’s nice for him,” Judith comments.
“It’s a little worrying, don’t you think, rushing into old age like that?”
“Maybe his youth wasn’t all that marvellous,” she suggests.
I think of Jeri and agree.
“Anyway,” Judith says, “the saving grace of reaching forty is that most of your friends get there about the same time.”
“I suppose that’s a comfort.”
“It helps.”
“Watson is forty-two,” I say. “Imagine!”
“That’s right,” Judith says, “he was about the same age as me.”
“It must have killed him turning forty.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Remember how he went berserk at thirty? Forty must have been a funeral for him.”
“Of course,” Judith says slowly, “I never knew Watson very well, but it’s hard to believe that a mere birthday could hit anyone so violently.”
“It did though. I saw it coming, of course. Even when he was twenty-seven he was starting to get a bit shaky. Once I even heard him lie about his age. He told some people we met, for no reason at all, that he was only twenty-five.”
“Strange.”
“He seemed to take it into his head that he could go backwards in time if he put enough energy into it. And that was the same year he started hanging around with his students all the time, especially the undergraduates. And talking about the university as ‘they.’ He even had me go and get my hair straightened so I’d look like one of his students.”
“Poor Char,” Judith says softly.
Her sympathy is all I need. Now I can’t stop myself. “Then he really began to get desperate. The first time I saw him wearing a head band I was actually sick. Literally. I went into the bathroom and was sick. I wouldn’t have minded if someone had given him the head band, one of his students maybe, but what killed me was the deliberation of it all, that he woke up one day and decided to go to a store—it was Woolworth‘s—and buy himself an Indian head band. And then picking it out and paying for it and then slipping it on his head. And looking at himself in the mirror. That’s the moment I couldn’t live with, the moment he looked in the mirror at his new head band.”
Judith sounds puzzled. “Lots of people wore head bands at one time.”
“But don’t you see, other people sort of drift into it. They don’t suddenly make a conscious decision to hold on to their youth by running out and buying some costume accessories.”
“And then what happened?” She is right when she says she scarcely knew Watson. She met him only twice and all she knows about the divorce is that Watson suffered a breakdown. A breakdown?
Perhaps not really a breakdown, although that was the term we used at the time, since it was, at least, medically definable. It was Watson’s breakdown which made him a saint to Greta Savage: she saw it as a powerful link between them, as though their mutual lapse from the coherent world spelled mystical union, impenetrable by those of us coarsened by robust mental health.
But what Watson suffered was something infinitely more shattering than poor Greta: more of a break-up than a break down. He broke apart. At the age of thirty he fell apart. Watson broke into a thousand pieces, and not one of those pieces had any connection with past or future.
“When he was twenty-nine,” I tell Judith, “he decided we should sell the house so he and Seth and I could walk across Europe.”
“Walk across Europe.”
“With backpacks and sandals, a sort of gypsy thing. He had this crazy idea that he could earn enough money by playing the recorder, you know, in the streets of Europe.”
“Did Watson play the recorder? I didn’t realize he was musical.”
“He wasn’t. It was another of his delusions. Oh, he could play all right, about three tunes, and one of them was ‘Merrily We Roll Along.’ It was awful. I don’t know where Seth got his musical ability but it wasn’t from Watson.”
“How odd.”
“Doug Savage says he became totally detached from reality. In fact everyone we knew told him he was crazy, but he wouldn’t listen. He actually had this image of himself tootling away in cute Greek villages with all the fat, red-faced fishermen loving him. I was supposed to write poems, Joan Baez style, and he would set them to music. And if this scheme fell through, he wasn’t worried. He was into brotherly love—remember love-ins?— and he was convinced that love was a commodity, like cash, that could take us anywhere. All we had to do was project it.”
“What do you suppose would have happened if you’d actually gone?” Judith asks.
“I’ve asked myself that a hundred times. What if I’d said okay, I’ll come. What if I’d taken him at his word, bought myself an Indian skirt and a guitar and followed him. At one point, you know, I had almost decided to go.”
“Why didn’t you then?”
“Two reasons. First, he stopped wanting me to come. By that time he’d already quit the university. Just walked in one day and told Doug Savage he was finished with Establishment values. He used the word ‘establishment’ all the time as if it was a hairy, yellow dog nipping at his heels. And then, overnight, it seemed I was part of the Establishment too. Wife. Kid. House. We were all part of it. He stopped talking about walking across Europe with us. We just weren’t in the picture any longer. For that last year, in fact, I was his wife on sufferance.”
“So he left alone?”
“The day after his thirtieth birthday. Which we did not celebrate, needless to say. He must have got up at dawn. Later I reconstructed the whole thing—I used to torture myself with it. He probably wanted to see the sun rise on the first day of his new life. He was like that you know, very big on symbols. I could just picture how he must have stood in the doorway of our house, very theatrical, with the sun coming up over the hedge. And the note he left! It was like the head band, very studied, very deliberate. A big, fat gesture. I tore it up. Oh, Judith, it was so terribly dumb. I’ve never told anyone about the note. It was just page after page of youth cult hash. Abstractions like freedom and selfhood, you know the thing. I’ve never had any stomach for words like ‘challenge’ and ’fulfillment’ anyway, but from Watson ... I could have died. I was so embarrassed for him.”
“Oh, Char.”
“I tore it up. And I wanted to burn it but of course we didn’t have a fireplace in that house. And bonfires are illegal in Vancouver, so I burned all the little pieces in the habachi out in the yard. And all the time I was burning them I thought how he would have relished the symbolism. He hated barbecues. He always thought they were the altars of North America where people gathered to worship big pieces of meat. He was already into vegetarianism, of course. In fact—and that was what I hated most—he was into everything. Name any branch of the counter-culture and Watson had swallowed it whole. Oh, it was all so desperate. And so badly done. Do you know what I mean? If only he had done it ... gracefully.”
For a minute Judith says nothing. Then she says, “You said there were two reasons.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said there were two reasons you didn’t go with him to Europe. What was the other one?”
“Because,” I say with a short, harsh laugh, “because I was afraid of what Mother might think.”
“What about Seth?” Judith asks after a long pause.
“What about him?”
“I don’t suppose he remembers Watson. He was only three, wasn’t he?”
“No, he doesn’t remember anything. Not even the house we lived in.”
“He must be curious about him. His own father. You’d think he’d want to meet him.”
“No, it’s funny but he’s never mentioned wanting to meet him. But once he told me he was going to write him a letter. He was about ten then, I think, and it was just after the monthly cheque came. Just before he went to sleep he told me he had decided to write a letter.”
“And did he?”
“Yes, he did, and he spent a long time on it. I helped him a little. And it really was a nice kid-like letter all about school and sports and hobbies and his favourite TV programs, sort of a pen pal thing.”
“And did Watson ever write back?”
“No. Months and months went by and I kept thinking any day it’ll come. I figured Watson couldn’t be so cruel as not to write to his own son—after all, he does drop Greta a line now and then. Finally I said to Seth how strange it was his father hadn’t answered his letter. And do you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He just laughed and said, ‘I never mailed that letter.’ ”
“Why not?”
“I asked him why. I asked him two or three times why he hadn’t mailed it. But he would never tell me.”

Three-fifteen. The luminous dial of Judith’s travel clock announces the hour. She is asleep, lying on her side facing the wall with one arm slung awkwardly, almost grotesquely, over her shoulder. I’m jealous of her ability to sleep, but I am also irrationally pained that she has been able to fall asleep just minutes after I have recounted the miserable story of Watson’s breakdown.
My breakdown too; that’s the part I didn’t confess, the part I conceal even from myself except when I am absolutely alone in the middle of the night as I am now. The day Watson left, everything more or less fell apart for me too. The world, which I was just beginning to perceive, was spoiled. Everything ruined, everything scattered.
Scattered like me, the way I’m scattered through this house: in the spare room where my aggrieved mother sleeps her thin, complaining sleep. And here where Judith lies drugged on my wretchedness. And in the silent back bedroom where Eugene dreams of us riding into Toronto on the Vistadome. In Weedham, Ontario, where Watson Forrest lies amidst the welter of his strange compulsions. And in Vancouver where my son Seth—think of it—I have a fifteen year old son who is sleeping safely in a strange glass and cedar bedroom in the corner of the Savages’ house.
But it is not three-fifteen in Vancouver. A rib of joy nudges me. No, it is not three-fifteen. In Vancouver it is late evening. There is probably a soft, grey rain falling. It is not even midnight yet. The TV stations are going strong; the late show hasn’t even begun. Doug and Greta almost certainly are still awake; they never go to bed until one or two in the morning. Greta likes to read in bed—she is addicted to crime thrillers—and Doug likes to smoke his pipe and listen to Bartok on the record player. True, Seth may be asleep; he is usually in bed fairly early, but it isn’t as though this were the middle of the night.
I’ll telephone. I can dial direct; I know the number by heart. It’s long distance, but I can keep track of the time and leave money to cover the call. My mother will object—the thought of the charge on her monthly bill will be grievous to her—but it will be too late then. I should have thought of phoning earlier, but there’s no harm in calling now, not if I go about it quietly. In fact, this is a good time to phone because the Savages are sure to be at home.
The telephone is in the hallway, a black model sitting on my mother’s gossip bench, a spindly piece of furniture from the twenties, half way to being a real antique. I need only the light of the tiny table lamp, and I dial as quietly as I can, marvelling at the technology which permits me, by dialing only eleven numbers, to sift through the millions of darkened households across the country and reach, through tiny electronic connections, the only person in the world who is really and truly connected with me.
But in Vancouver no one answers. I hang up, wait five minutes and try again. The phone rings and rings. I can picture it, a bright red wall model in the Savages’ birch and copper kitchen. It rings twelve times, twenty times. No one is home. Can they possibly sleep through all this wild ringing? Impossible. No one is home.
Why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I be calm like Judith, why can’t I learn to be brave? Why is my heart thudding like this, why can’t I sleep?