The box garden

Chapter 4
In the morning my mother’s bedroom is filled with sunlight. Someone has opened the curtains, and high above the asphalt-shingled roof of the house next door floats an amiable, blue, suburban sky terraced with flat-bottomed clouds, lovely. Shutting my eyes again I tense, waiting for fear to reassume its grip on me, but it doesn’t come.
The sun has brought with it a calm perspective, and suddenly I can think of dozens of reasons why Doug and Greta might not have been at home last night. They might, for instance, have had concert tickets; Doug is a music lover and never, if he can help it, misses the symphony. They might have gone to an exhibition at the university and taken Seth along; hadn’t I seen a notice about the opening of a pottery show or something like that in the Fine Arts Building? Or they might have gone out for a late dinner. (Greta frequently has days when, maddened by the world’s unhappiness, she cannot summon the strength to cook a meal.) Or taken in a movie. Or gone for a stroll on the beach. There were countless possibilities, none of which had occurred to me the night before.
And this morning, waking up, I yawn, stretch, smile to myself. Nine o‘clock. There is no reason to hurry. This evening I can phone Vancouver again; if I phone about ten o’clock I will be sure to catch them at home.
I dress lazily, savouring the rumpled feel of the unmade bed, the open suitcases on the floor, the faintly stale bedroomy air. Through the shut door a burr of lowered voices reaches me, my mother‘s, Martin’s, and whose is that other voice? Of course, Eugene’s.
A determined indifference is the perfect cure for anxiety. That’s what Brother Adam wrote me. I take my time. I unpack and hang up my clothes in my mother’s closet, arranging them next to her half dozen dresses—such dresses: limp, round-shouldered, jersey-knit prints, all of them, in off-colours like maroon and avocado, grey and taupe. They give off a sweetish-sourish smell, very faint, a little musty. Beside them my new orange dress appears sharply synthetic and aggressively youthful. I am sorry now I bought it. For today, I decide, I will put on my old beige skirt instead. And a blouse, a dotted brown cotton which is only slightly creased across the yoke.
In the living room I find Martin, hunched on the slipcovered chesterfield with several sections of the Globe and Mail scattered around him. After all these years I scarcely know him. He is an English professor, Renaissance, and as is the case with a good many academics, his essential kindness is somewhat damaged by wit. And a finished reserve. As though he had spent years and years simmering to his present rich sanity, his pot-au feu pungency. He is a little uneasy with me—I am so brash, so non-Judith—but his uneasiness has never worried me; our present non-relationship has a temporary, transitional quality; at any moment, it seems to me, we will find our way to being friends. For Martin is a man with a talent for friendship, and in this respect I once believed that Watson resembled him, Watson who knew hundreds and hundreds of people, whole colonies of them secreted away in the cities and towns between Toronto and Vancouver. The difference, I later observed, was that for Watson friendship was not a pleasing dispensation of existence but a means, the only means he knew, by which he could be certain of his existence.
“Well,” Martin greets me, “I hear you and Judith made a night of it last night.”
“We had a lot of catching up to do,” I say. “I hope I didn’t wear out her ear drums.” I add this apologetically, feeling that Martin might begrudge me a night of Judith’s companionship while he himself has been relegated to the back bedroom.
But he smiles quite warmly and says, “Why don’t you come and spend a week with us after the wedding and really get caught up?”
“I wish I could,” I tell him, “but Seth’s staying with friends. And there’s my job.”
“Surely you could take a few days?” he urges.
Does Martin think I have no responsibilities, nothing to nail me down? No life of my own? And what about Eugene? But I sense that his invitation is no more than a rhetorical exercise; cordial, yes, but mechanically issued. Martin grew up in a hospitable, generous Montreal household where the giving and receiving of invitations was routine, as simple as eating, as simple as breathing.
“Where’s Judith now?” I ask, looking around.
“She went out for a few groceries.”
I nod, remembering the few slices of bread and the half quart of milk in the refrigerator. “Has everyone had breakfast?”
“Everyone but you. Judith thought you’d prefer to get some sleep. Afraid we didn’t leave you anything though. She’s gone for some more coffee and bread,” he looks at his watch, “but she should be back in a few minutes.”
In the kitchen my mother stands washing dishes in the sink; Eugene in a well-pressed spring suit stands next to her, drying teacups and valiantly trying to make conversation. Seeing me in the doorway he almost gasps with relief. “Charleen!”
“Well, you had yourself a good sleep,” my mother says, not turning around. (Couldn’t she even turn around? Does Eugene notice this greeting, this lack of greeting?)
“Yes,” I say, determined to remain unruffled. “I thought I’d be lazy today.”
She turns around then, carefully assessing me from top to toe, hair, blouse (creased), skirt, stockings, shoes, and says tartly, “Mr. Berceau—Louis I should say—is dropping by this morning to meet you.”
“Good,” I answer, rather too lightly, “I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
“In that case it’s too bad you picked this morning to sleep in. Because you haven’t had your breakfast and he’s coming at ten o‘clock. He’s always right on time, right on the dot. We all had breakfast at eight o’clock. Toast and coffee. I told Dr. Redding,” she nods sharply at Eugene, “that I hoped he wasn’t expecting a big breakfast. We never were a bacon and egg house here. I can’t eat all that fried food for breakfast anyway. We just have toast and coffee and always have, guests or no guests. But there’s no toast for you. We just completely ran out of bread. That’s something I never do normally, run out of things. I plan carefully. You remember, Charleen, how I always planned carefully. There’s no excuse for waste, I always say. Of course, I didn’t know Dr. Redding would be here, you didn’t write about him staying here, or I would have bought an extra loaf. Martin always eats at least three pieces of toast. Not that he needs it. I told Judith this morning he should watch his starches. I never have more than one. I’ve never been a heavy eater, and a good thing with the price of food. Well, we’re right out of bread. Martin even ate the heel, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Waste not. Then Judith said, never mind, she’d go down to the Red and White. You’d never know the Red and White now. The floor, it’s filthy, just filthy, they used to keep it so clean in there; you remember, Charleen, it used to be spotless when the old man was alive. Spotless. And they let people bring their dogs in, and I don’t know what. I thought Judith would be back by the time you woke up but she isn’t. I don’t know what in the world’s keeping her. She always was a dawdler, it’s only a block away and it shouldn’t be crowded at this time of the morning. And here you are up already. Judith thought you’d sleep in until she got back and here you are and there’s nothing for breakfast. You should have got up with the rest of us. And here’s Dr. Redding wiping dishes, he insisted, and he’s in a rush to get downtown. But Judith said the two of you were up half the night talking away. I thought I heard someone up banging around in the kitchen. You and Judith need your sleep, you don’t need me to remind you about that, and here you are up to all hours. How do you expect to get your rest when you sit up all night? You’ve got all day to talk away. The rest of us need our sleep too.”
Eugene, rose-stamped teacup in hand, listens stunned. I have to remember that he has come unprepared, that he has never met anyone like my mother, that she has always been like this. Nevertheless I feel an uncontrollable tremour of pity seeing her this morning in her exhausted, chenille dressing gown, white-faced, despairing and horribly aged, her wrists angry red under the lacy suds.
I watch Eugene standing by the sink, slightly stooped, tea towel in hand, looking at once humble and affluent with his well-trimmed, wooly hair and faintly anxious and uncomfortable expression. It isn’t difficult for me to imagine the questions taking shape in Eugene’s head, questions he would never voice or perhaps even acknowledge as his own. Questions like: Why is Mrs. McNinn angry with Charleen? What has Charleen done? Why don’t these two women, mother and daughter, embrace? Why don’t they smile at each other? Why doesn’t Charleen ask her mother how she’s feeling? Why doesn’t Mrs. McNinn ask if Charleen slept well?
As I imagine the questions, the answers too spring into being, the answers which Eugene would almost certainly formulate: Mrs. McNinn is angry because she is not in good health; she is possessed of a rather nervous disposition; it is probable that she slept poorly last night. She is, in addition, confused about who I, Eugene Redding, am, and she is somewhat bothered by the fact that she hadn’t been expecting an extra guest. She is unused to house guests and is now embarrassed because she has run short of food. But it is nothing serious; it will pass.
I am able to frame these answers because I know Eugene and trust him to find, as he always does, the most charitable explanation, the most kindly interpretation. Kindness, after all, comes to him naturally; he was hatched in its lucky genre and embraces its attributes effortlessly. Gentleness, generosity and compromise are not for him learned skills; they have always been with him, wound up with the invisible genes which determine the wooliness of his hair and the slightly vacant look in his grey eyes. It may, for all I know, have existed in his family for generations. He is not at the frontier as I am.
For me kindness is an alien quality; and like a difficult French verb I must learn it slowly, painfully, and probably imperfectly. It does not swim freely in my bloodstream—I have to inject it artificially at the risk of all sorts of unknown factors. It does not wake with me in the mornings; every day I have to coax it anew into existence, breathe on it to keep it alive, practice it to keep it in good working order. And most difficult of all, I have to exercise it in such a way that it looks spontaneous and genuine; I have to see that it flows without hesitation as it does from its true practitioners, its lucky heirs who acquire it without laborious seeking, the lucky ones like Eugene.

Louis Berceau arrives precisely at ten o‘clock in a small, dark-green Fiat which he parks at the curb in front of the house. When he knocks at the back door, Judith is making fresh coffee, and Eugene has just left by taxi for the dental convention downtown, an extravagance which both shocked and impressed my mother. (“Doesn’t he know we have a subway? Well, I know it’s pokey, but it’s good enough for most people.”)
Judith has been mistaken about Louis’s height; he is considerably shorter than our mother, perhaps as much as six inches. And he is thin—certainly I had not expected that he would be robust—with enormously wrinkled, whitish-yellow skin; his gnarled peanut face—how humble he looks!—and his thickish, wall-like eyelids make him look like a dwarfed, jaundiced Jesus. This man has had three operations, I chant to myself. Three operations.
Judith puts down the coffee pot, and he takes both her hands in his and presses her warmly, a warmth which takes Judith by surprise; they have met only once before. Then he turns to me and I see him hesitate an instant before speaking. He has a choked and gummy voice—did tumors nest in that plugged up throat?—but friendliness leaks through. “So this is Charleen.”
For a man, he has a tiny hand, harshly-formed, dry and papery as though the flesh were about to fall away from the gathered bones. His clothes, too, seem curiously dry, an old, blue suit, far too hot for today, with faintly dusty seams and buttonholes.
Martin comes into the kitchen to be introduced, and with his hearty “How do you do, Mr. Berceau,” we all breathe more easily. My mother, like a minor character in a play, has frozen during these introductions, literally flattening herself against the refrigerator door, nervously observing Louis’s presentation of himself to the “family.”
“I’ve just made some coffee,” Judith announces.
“Exactly what I need,” Louis replies from the top of his strangled, phleghm-plugged throat. “I’ve been up for hours.” And with a rattling sigh he sinks down at the kitchen table.
“We could go into the living room,” my mother says with the pinched voice she uses when she wants to be genteel.
“The kitchen is fine, Florence,” Louis says, breathing rapidly. Florence! Well, what had I expected?
We sit down at the table while my mother finds cups and saucers in the cupboard. There is a moment’s silence which I rush to fill; it seems so extraordinarily painful for Louis Berceau to speak that all I can think of is the necessity of sparing him the effort.
“I’m really very happy to meet you,” I rattle away in anely. “At first I thought I wasn’t going to be able to come. But I managed to get a week off work, and some friends offered to keep an eye on Seth—my son—and I thought, why not?”
Louis stirs his coffee and lifts his eyes in a disarming, skin-pleated smile. Gasping between spaced phrases he manages, “We are so grateful—both of us—your mother and I—that you could come all these—thousands of miles—to be with us—on Friday. We are—we are—” he searches for a word, then with a final burst says, “we are honoured.”
Honoured! Honoured? I glance at my mother, take in her tightly shut lips, and look away. Louis is honoured—how touching—but only Louis.
“It was Mr. Berceau’s idea,” my mother explains sharply, “to have a proper wedding. And invite,” she pauses, “the family.”
“Well, you see,” Louis chokes, “I never ... never had a family.”
“Well, now you do,” Judith says with firm cheerfulness. (How easily I can picture her performing at faculty receptions.) “The children, my two kids that is, have exams this week, but they’ll be coming on the train Friday in time for the wedding.”
“I hope,” Louis says, his thick lips cracking puckishly, “that I’ll get to know them well in time.”
He drinks his coffee with a long, pleasurable slurp, leans back in his chair—such tiny shoulders—quite amazingly relaxed. Again he strains to speak, and we lean forward, Martin, Judith and I, to catch what he says. “Do you mind ...” he whispers raspily, “if I smoke?”
He puffs contentedly on a Capstan, using, to my astonishment and horror, the rim of my mother’s saucer for an ashtray. The smoke curling from his lips and rather oily nostrils makes him look exceptionally ugly. He has always—I feel certain of this—been ugly; he wears his ugliness with such becoming ease, as though it were a creased oilskin, utilitarian and not at all despised. And as he smokes, he talks, a light and general conversation, faintly paternal with a scattering of questions, the sort of conversation which has rarely filled these rooms. I feel myself grow tense at the obvious exertion of his voice, its separate sounds eased out of the creaking wooden machinery of his throat, dry, high-pitched, harshly monotone, a voice pitted with gasped air as though his windpipe is in some dreadful way shredded and out of his control.
Judith and Martin and I attend scrupulously to his questions, making our replies as lengthy as possible in order to relieve him of the torment of speaking. Turning deferentially to Martin, he inquires about his position at the university, and Martin, not quite blushing but almost, tells Louis that he has recently been appointed chairman of his department.
I am startled. Judith has never mentioned Martin’s promotion to me; indeed, at that moment, listening to her husband describe the duties of his new office, Judith fidgets, rises, reheats the coffee, even yawns behind a politely raised hand. She has never pretended to be a standard, right-hand wife, but her nonchalance about Martin’s success seems excessive, almost indifferent.
Is Martin himself pleased about his promotion? I wonder. It is difficult to tell because, with his academic compulsion toward truth, he outlines for Louis the enormous liabilities of the position, the toll it takes in terms of time, patience and friendship. Never have I heard Martin so expansive, never so carefully expository, and it occurs to me that he is deliberately prolonging his explanation out of an inclination to break through the aura of surrealism which possesses us, to flatten with his burly, workaday facts the sheer unreality of our being gathered here around this particular kitchen table on this particular late May morning.
Louis turns next to Judith—I am becoming accustomed to his dry-roofed rasp—and asks her whether she has read the biography of Lawrence Welk, a question which disappoints me somewhat by its banality. (Already I am investing Louis with wizened, cerebral kindli ness.)
No, Judith answers, she hasn’t read it but she respects those who discover ways, whatever they may be, of uncovering currents of the extraordinary in even the most ordinary personalities. Actually, Judith protests, she doesn’t believe there is such a thing as an ordinary person, at least not when examined from the privileged perspective of the biographer. What consumes her now, she tells Louis, is her investigation into the scientific impulse—no, not impulse, she corrects herself; in the case of scientists, impulse becomes compulsion. Louis nods; his twisted muzzle face registers agreement. Judith continues: science, she says, often drowns men with its overwhelming abstractions, snuffing out human variability and hatching the partly true myth of the cold, clinical man of science. Human whim, human dream if you like, become obscured, and for the biographer, Judith admits, not unhappily, the scientific life is the most complex of all to write about.
Louis questions me next—I wonder if he has rehearsed the pattern of our discussion—asking me if dreams inspire the poems I write. (It is a morning for speeches, each of us taking a turn, except, that is, our mother who sits in one corner of the table, peevishly sipping her coffee and filling the dips and hollows of our phrases with nervous, trailing “yes‘s” and “well’s”). No, I tell Louis, I never write poems inspired by dreams.
“Why not?” he creaks.
I shrug, thinking of the Pome People who treasure their dreams as though they were rare oriental currency blazoned with symbolic stamping. For me dreams are no more than rag-ends caught in a sort of human lint-trap, psychic fluff, the negligible dust of that more precious material, thought. To value one’s dreams is to encourage the most debilitating of diseases, subjectivity. (Watson nearly died of that disease; our marriage almost certainly did.) To pretend that dreams are generated whole out of some vast, informing unconsciousness is to imagine a comic-strip beast (alligator, dragon?) slumbering in one’s blood. The inner life? I shrug again. The poet has to report on surfaces, on the flower in the crannied wall, on coffee spoons and peaches, a rusted key discovered in the grass. Dreams are like—I think a moment—dreams are like mashed potatoes.
Martin awards me a yelp of laughter. Louis smiles a yellow, fish-gleam smile, and Judith, smiling approval, refills my cup. She is flushed with her own impromptu eloquence and proud of mine. And puzzled too. Is it Louis’s questions that have stirred us? Or our desire to make him understand exactly how far we have travelled from this cramped kitchen?
After this it is Louis’s turn to speak.
“With your permission,” he begins hoarsely, “I would like to invite each of you—you, Judith and you, Charleen—to have lunch with me.” He stops; a coughing fit seizes him, shaking his thin shoulders with wrenching violence. We watch helplessly, tensely, listening to the dry, squeezed convulsions of his heaving chest.
“It’s just the asthma,” our mother tells us calmly, almost flatly, sipping again at her coffee. “It happens all the time.”
Three operations and asthma!
At last Louis’s coughing stops and he pulls out a handkerchief and blows his nose noisily. Half choking, he begins again, explaining how he hopes to get better acquainted with us by taking us in turn, Judith today and me tomorrow, out for a nice, long lunch. (The order, I can only think, is dictated by our relative ages; Judith being older has priority, and I cannot help smiling at the thoroughness of his planning.) When he has finished his arduous invitation, he sits back again, smashes his cigarette in my mother’s saucer, and asks “Well?”
Judith—brave, kind, curious Judith—leaning over the table and placing her hand on Louis’s amber-stained fingertips, repeats the word Louis used earlier, a word which has never before, as far as I know, been used in this house and which is now being spoken for the second time in a single morning. “I would be honoured,” she pronounces.
“In that case,” Louis says rising, “I think we should be on our way.”
“You mean right now?” Judith stammers.
“I know a nice quiet place,” he rasps, “in the country. It’ll be after twelve o‘clock before we get there.”
Turning to me he says, “Tomorrow then, Charleen? We can ...” he coughs his parched, tenor cough, “we can talk some more about poetry.”
Judith, a little bewildered, picks up a sweater and her handbag and they leave by the back door, walking together around the lilac tree at the side of the house. My mother rises at once to place the cups in the sink. Martin returns to his newspaper and I, following him into the living room, watch the two of them move toward the car; Judith is a full head taller than Louis; she seems to lope by his side.
It is very strange watching Louis walk to his car. Louis, sitting in the kitchen and puffing his cigarette, seemed dwarfed and bleached and freakish, like an aged, yellowed monkey, but Louis walking to the car is close to nimbleness; with his lightsome step, his short, little arms swinging cheerfully, and his head tossing as though he were searching out the best possible breath of air, he appears, from the back and from a distance, like a man in his prime.

We have scrambled eggs on toast for lunch, Martin, my mother and I.
In this household, guests have never been frequent: occasionally when we were children my Aunt Liddy, my mother’s older sister who lived in the country, would come to spend a day with us. And there was a second cousin of our father, Cousin Hugo, who owned a hardware store, a large, fat man with wiry black hair and curving crusts of dirt beneath his fingernails. And once a neighbour whose wife was in the hospital with pneumonia had been invited for Sunday lunch, an extraordinary gesture which remained for years in my mother’s mind as the “time we put ourselves out to help Mr. Eggleston.” Always on these occasions when guests were present she would serve scrambled eggs on toast.
Doubtless she considered it a dish both light and elegant. She may have read somewhere that it was the Queen Mother’s favourite luncheon dish (she is always reading about the Royal Family). Certainly she is convinced of the superiority of her own scrambled eggs and the manner in which she arranges the triangles of toast (side by side like the sails of a tiny boat), for she always compares, at length, the correctness of her method with the slipshod scrambled eggs she has encountered elsewhere.
“Liddy doesn’t put enough milk in hers and I always tell her that makes them rubbery. If you want nice, soft scrambled eggs you have to add a tablespoon of milk for every egg, just a tablespoon, no more, no less. And use an egg beater, not a fork the way most people do. Most people just don’t want to bother getting out an egg beater, they’re too lazy to wash something extra. They think, who’ll notice anyway, what’s the difference, but an egg beater makes all the difference, all the difference in the world. Otherwise the yolk and white don’t mix the way they should. Liddy always leaves big hunks of white in her scrambled eggs. And she doesn’t cut the crusts off her toast. She thinks it’s hoity-toity and a waste of bread, but I always save the crusts and dry them in the oven to make bread crumbs out of them afterwards so there’s no waste, not a bit; you know I never waste good food; you’ll have to admit I never waste anything. Most people won’t bother, they won’t go to the trouble; they’re too lazy; they don’t know any better. And I always add the salt before cooking, that makes them hold their shape, not get hard like Liddy’s but just, you know, firm. But not pepper, never pepper, never add pepper when you’re cooking, let people add their own pepper at the table if that’s what they want. Me, I never liked spicy food like what the Italians and French like. And Greeks. Garlic and onions and grease, and I don’t know what, just reeking of it on the subway these days, reeking of it; I don’t dare turn my head sideways when I go downtown. Toronto isn’t the same; not the way it used to be, not the way it was way back.”
We eat lunch in the kitchen. Martin is quiet. So am I. Our forks clicking on the plates chill me into a further silence.
“Hmm, delicious,” Martin says politely.
“Yes.” I agree, forcing my voice into short plumes of enthusiasm, “Really good. So tender.”
Afterwards she washes the dishes and I dry. Always take a clean tea towel for each meal. It may be a little bit extra in the wash but when you think of the filthy tea towels some people use ....
I yearn desperately to talk to her; to say that, despite my foreboding, I have been rather taken with Louis Berceau, that I am immeasurably pleased that he and she have found each other and she will no longer have to endure the loneliness of the ticking clock, the sound of the furnace switching on and off, the daily paper thudding against the door, the calendar weeks wasting, the reminders of time slipping by which must be unbearable for those who are alone. But the words dry in my throat; if only I knew how to begin, if only I could speak to her without shyness, without fear of hurting her. Instead I poke with my tea towel into the spokes of the egg beater.
“Don’t bother drying that,” she turns to me, taking it out of my hands. “Here,” she says, “I always put it in the oven for a little, the pilot light dries it out; the gears are so old, I’ve had it since just after the war, it was hard to get egg beaters then. Cousin Hugo got it for me from the store. I don’t want the gears to rust, they would if I didn’t get it good and dry. I’ve had it so long and it will have to last me until—”
Until what? Until death? Until the end? That is what she means; the words she couldn’t say but which she must have recognized or why did she stop so suddenly? I have never thought of the way in which my mother thinks of her own death. No doubt, though, she has a plan; she will do it more neatly, more thoroughly than her sister Liddy, better than the neighbours, more gen teely than Cousin Hugo, more timely than our father; no one will laugh at her, no one will look down on her.
Still, it may be that she is a little uncertain: the way she plunges into vigorous silence beside the scoured sink hints at uneasiness, an acknowledgement at least of life’s thinned reversal, of the finite nature of husbands and egg beaters and even of one’s self.
After lunch Martin carries a kitchen chair out into the backyard (my mother has never owned. a piece of lawn furniture) and there in the sunshine he reads a book of critical essays, a recent paperback edition which he opens with a sigh. He is, I suspect, a somewhat reluctant academic, preferring perhaps to while away his time with the small change of newspapers and magazines. Nevertheless he enjoys the warmth and the serious Sis ley sky, finely marbled, gilt-veined, surprisingly large even when viewed from the postage stamp of our tiny, fenced yard.
One-thirty. My mother goes about the house closing the curtains, first the living room and then the three bedrooms. (Much of her life has gone into a struggle against the fading of furniture and curtains and rugs.) Then she goes into the spare bedroom where she slept last night and closes the door. She is going to lie down, she is going to have her rest. She has always, since Judith and I were babies, had a “rest” after lunch. Never a nap, never a sleep, never, oh never, a doze, but a rest. She will remove her laced shoes and her dress, she will button a loosely knit grey and blue cardigan over her slip and she will turn back the bedspread into a neat fan; then she will get into bed, and there she will remain for between an hour and an hour and a half. Sometimes she falls asleep, sometimes she just “rests.” “A rest is as good as a sleep,” she has said at least a hundred times. A thousand times?
Quietly I carry the Metropolitan Toronto and Vicinity telephone book from the hall into the kitchen and settle myself down at the table. I turn to the P‘s, running my finger down a column, looking for The Priory, Priory, the. For some reason my heart is beating wildly. But there is nothing listed. I look under the The’s where I find quite a few listings: The Boutique, The Factory, The Place, The Shop, The Wiggery. But not The Priory. I even look under the B’s for Brother Adam. There is no Brother Adam, (nor any other Brothers) then I try Adam, Brother. Nothing.
Perhaps the Priory is listed under Religious Houses or under Churches, but my mother has no Yellow Pages. I decide to phone Information.
It is necessary to whisper into the phone because my mother is resting a few yards away behind a closed door; she may even be sleeping. The operator is enraged by my muffled voice and my lack of specificity—“Did you say it was a church?”
“No.”
“Well, is it or isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure. I think it is but I’m not—”
“Is Adam the first name or last name?”
“His first. I think.”
“I have to have a last name.”
“I’ve got the address. It’s on Beachview.”
“Sorry. I need the last name.”
“But I don’t have it.”
Actually, I reflect hanging up, it was absurd of me to think that a contemplative man like Brother Adam would have a telephone. Hadn’t he implied in his many letters his ascetic obsession, his distrust of cramped, urban industrial society? A man like Brother Adam would never put himself in bondage to Bell Telephone; a man like Brother Adam would no sooner have a telephone than he would own a car. (He does, however, have a typewriter—all his letters were typewritten—but it is undoubtedly a manual model.)
I carry the phone book back to its place. I am not going to be able to phone Brother Adam after all. And it’s too late now to drop him a note. I should have written from Vancouver as I had planned. What’s the matter with me that I can’t even make the simplest of social arrangements? I’ll have to go to The Priory, there’s no other solution. If I want to see him at all I will have to turn up at his door unannounced.
But I can’t go today; my mother wouldn’t like it if I disappeared on an unexplained errand, and besides Eugene is going to phone me from downtown at three o‘clock. And tomorrow? Wednesday? Tomorrow is my day to have lunch with Louis Berceau. Friday?—the wedding is on Friday, and Friday night we’re flying back to Vancouver.
Thursday—if I go at all I’ll have to go on Thursday. Yes, I will definitely go to see Brother Adam on Thursday. He is in the city, he is within a few miles of me, looking out of his window perhaps, sitting in the sun on his fire escape perhaps, and who knows, maybe he is writing a letter, perhaps even a letter to me, a letter beginning Dear Charleen, the sky is benignly blue today, the sun falls like a blessing across this page ...

Martin is restless. He has brought his chair inside; the sky has clouded over with alarming suddenness, and a few drops of heavy rain have already fallen onto the pages of his book. He is brooding mysteriously by the living room window.
I can never quite believe in the otherness of people’s lives. That is, I cannot conceive of their functioning out of my sight. A psychologist friend once told me this attitude was symptomatic of a raging ego, but perhaps it is only a perceptual failure. My mother: every day she lives in this house; it is not all magically whisked away when I leave; the walls and furniture persist and so do the hours which she somehow fills. When Seth was five and started school I came home the first day after taking him and grieved, not out of nostalgia for his infancy or anxiety for his future, but for the newly revealed fact that he had entered into that otherness, that unseeable space which he must occupy forever and where not even my imagination could follow. It is the same with Martin who, year after unseen year, pursues objectives, lives through unaccountable weeks and months. Martin by the window, shut up in his thoughts, might be standing on the tip of the moon.
When my mother wakes up she goes into the kitchen and begins browning a small pot roast on the back of the stove. “Nothing fancy,” she explains. “I’m not going to fuss even for company, not at today’s prices, not that there’s anything wrong with a good honest pot roast and they don’t give those away nowadays. Maybe it takes a few hours, you have to brown it really well, each side and the ends too, most people don’t want to bother, they’d just as soon take a steak out of the freezer, never mind the cost, and call that a meal.”
Because I make my mother nervous in the kitchen I go into the living room and stand beside Martin. He glances at his watch and says, “They should be home soon.”
Is it a question or a statement? “You mean Judith?” I ask.
He nods.
“It’s quite a distance,” I remind him. “Remember? Out in the country somewhere.”
“He’s over seventy,” Martin says grimly.
“Seventy-two,” I nod.
“These old coots really shouldn’t be on the road,” Martin says with surprising ferocity.
The word “coots” shocks me; it seems a remarkably uncivilized word for Martin to use. What is the matter with him?
I spring to Louis’s defence. “He seems alert enough for a man of his age. I’m sure he wouldn’t drive if he felt he wasn’t capable.”
Martin looks again at his watch, and I can see by the involuntary snap of his wrist that he’s seriously worried.
“I’m sure he’s a careful driver,” I insist again.
“But how do you know?”
I shrug. “He certainly didn’t strike me as the reckless type.”
“Didn’t strike you,” he says sourly, mockingly. But then he asks seriously, “How did he strike you, Charleen?”
“Why are you so worried, Martin?”
“Because,” Martin says, “have you considered that we don’t know a damn thing about this man? Absolutely nothing.”
“He used to be a Catholic,” I say, as though that fact were exceptionally revealing, “and he used to teach carpentry or something like that. In a junior high. In the east end I think.”
“Yes, yes,” Martin says wearily, “but what do we really know about him?”
“His health, you mean?”
He sighs, faintly exasperated. “No, not his health. What I mean is, we don’t know anything. Christ, maybe he’s queer. Or maybe he molests children. Or sets fire to buildings or passes bum cheques. How would we know?”
I feel my mouth pulling into the shape of protest.
Martin continues, “He’s an odd enough looking bird, you can see that. For your mother’s sake we should have looked into him a bit more. And now here he goes off with Judith to God only knows where. We never even asked exactly where they were headed. And now a storm’s coming up.” He sighs again. “I don’t know.”
How odd Martin is becoming. I point out to him the obvious facts: that it is not even quite three o‘clock yet, that it was after eleven when Judith and Louis left the house; that Louis distinctly said it was an hour’s drive. True, we know next to nothing about him, but we couldn’t very well call in a detective three days before the wedding; we would have to go by instinct, and my instinct—but would Martin believe it?—my instinct is to trust him. An odd-looking man, yes, and a strange marriage, perhaps—I nod in the direction of the kitchen— but I feel certain, a certainty which I can in no way justify, that there is nothing to be afraid of.
Martin shakes his head, not entirely convinced but obviously wishing to be. He regards the empty street and the pulsing sky; the rain is holding back, squeezing laboured tears out of the scrambled grey clouds. Clearly Martin will not be happy until Judith is safely home; his devotion touches me, especially when I think of Judith’s careless departure, how she went off without a thought about how Martin would pass the day, making a swift grab for her bag, yanking a cardigan over her shoulders; she took Louis’s arm with huge, loping cheerfulness and sailed past the lilac tree; she drove away in his little Fiat without so much as a good-bye wave. And what else? Oh, yes, she hadn’t told me about Martin’s promotion; she hadn‘t, in fact, mentioned Martin at all; it is rather as though he were no more than a distant acquaintance.
I want to reassure Martin about Louis’s reliability. “I don’t know how to explain it,” I tell him, “but I know Louis’s okay. And I’m usually right about things like this.” (Am I?)
He smiles a twisted, academic smile. “Intuition, I suppose.”
I smile back. We will be friends. “Look,” I say, “it’s a rather odd marriage, but they may surprise us by being happy.”
“Happy?” He looks amused at the idea.
“Well, a kind of happiness.”
Happiness. Such a word, such a crude balloon of a word, such a flapping, stretched, unsightly female bladder of a word, how worn, how slack, how almost empty.
“Happiness,” Martin repeats dully.
And before I can say anything more, the telephone rings. It’s Eugene.
“Charleen.”
“Yes. Eugene? How’s it going? The conference?”
“Not bad. A bit draggy.” (I rejoice at his detachment. If he had greeted me with ecstasy my heart would have sickened; I am queasy about misplaced enthusiasm.)
“What time are you coming?” I ask him.
“That’s why I’m phoning. What I’d really like is if you could come downtown.”
“Tonight?”
“We could have dinner.” His voice slants with pleading. “Just the two of us.”
“I don’t know, Eugene. My mother. She’s already making dinner. I don’t know what she’d say.”
“Couldn’t you say I had to stay downtown later than I’d thought? Because of the conference?”
“I don’t know, Eugene,” I say doubtfully, thinking, poor Eugene, this morning must have been too much for him, and last night too, stuck in the back bedroom. Then I think of the pot roast my mother is cooking, reflecting that it is really rather small to feed all of us; wouldn’t it, in fact, be a kindness to go out for dinner?
“Okay, Eugene. What time?”
“Any time. We’re through for the day.”
“I don’t think I can make it before five,” I tell him.
“Five then. Get a taxi and I’ll wait for you at Bloor and Avenue Road.”
“I’ll come by subway. No need to take a taxi all the way from here.”
“Charleen. Please.”
“Eugene. I can‘t,” I hiss into the phone. “My mother.”
“It’ll take you hours.”
“No, it won’t. Remember, I used to live here. I know the subway.”
“You’re crazy, you know. I’ll be waiting. Bloor and Avenue Road, all right? By the museum.”
“Okay,” I promise. I think of my mother fretfully turning her pot roast in the kitchen, of Martin sighing by the window; suddenly I can’t wait to get out of this house. “See you soon,” I tell Eugene.
Of course my mother minds. Or, perhaps more accurately, she goes through the motions of minding; the pot roast has shrunk alarmingly.
“You might have said something about it this morning,” she says with a short, injured sniff. “I could have done chops if I’d known there would be only three of us. I’m surprised your Dr. Redding, him a doctor and all, didn’t have the courtesy to tell me this morning. It isn’t like this was a hotel, whatever you may think. But go ahead, go ahead if you’ve made up your mind. All I say is it’s a waste of money eating in fancy restaurants and you never know what you’re getting, food poisoning, germs and I don’t know what. I’d just as soon have a good honest pot roast if you asked me, not all that foreign food. You don’t know what it is. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of a pot roast if I thought you were going to take it into your head to go eat in a restaurant. I suppose you won’t be too late?”
I listen; I bear with it; in a few minutes, I tell myself, she will have exhausted herself and I will be free to go. No, I tell her, we won’t be too late. I speak calmly, lightly, remembering to be kind, reminding myself that her nerves are poor, that her health is shaky, that she has never, no never, eaten in a downtown restaurant, that she has been little rewarded in her life for her efforts: her scrambled eggs and careful housekeeping have not won her the regard she might have liked. I remind myself, above all, that she is weak.
And from her weakness flows not gentleness but a tidal wave of judgment. No wonder she has no friends. Over the years those few people who have approached her in friendship have been swept aside as prying and nosey, their gestures of help construed as malicious arrogance. Underpinning all her beliefs is the idea that people “should keep to themselves.” They should stand on their own feet, they should mind their own business, they should look after their own, they should steer their own ship, they should tend their own gardens. Judgment colours her every encounter: “Mrs. Mallory said she admired my new slipcovers. Imagine that, she admired them. She couldn’t just say she liked them, no, she admired them. I don’t know what gives her the right to be so high and mighty. I’ve seen her slipcovers.”
The world which she has constructed for herself is fiercely, cruelly, minutely competitive, a world in which each minimal victory requires careful registration. “Well,” she would say, “I had my washing out first again today; first in the neighbourhood.” Or, “At least we don’t eat our dinner at five o‘clock like the Hannas, only country people eat at five o’clock. I told Mrs. Hanna how we always sat down at six o‘clock when my husband got home from the office, from the office I said, and that ended that.”
My poor, self-tormented mother with her meaningless rage, her hollow vindictiveness, her shrinking fear—how had it happened? Heredity suggested a partial answer. My mother’s mother, Elsie Gordon, had been one of two sisters born in a village in the Scottish lowlands; she had married a farmer named Angus Dunn, and the two of them had immigrated to Ontario where they rented and finally bought a thirty-acre farm and produced two daughters, Liddy (poor witless Aunt Liddy) and, three years later, Florence, our mother. And Florence, as though responding to a cry for symmetry, had also produced two daughters, Judith and me. So here we are, three generations of paired sisters; had we been shaped by a tradition of kindness and had our sensibility been monitored by learning, we might even have resembled Jane Austen’s loving, clinging, nuance-addicted chains of sisters with their epistles and their fainting spells and their nervous agitation and their endless, garrulous, wonderful concern for one another. As it was, we were stamped out of rougher materials: dullness and drudgery, ignorance and self-preservation. Our father too had been a man without ancestors: to go back three generations was to find nothing but darkness; as the “Pome People” might say, our family tree was no more than a blackened stump. I don’t even know the name of the Scottish village my grandparents came from. There have been no pilgrimages, there are no family legends, no family Bible with records of births and deaths, no brown-edged letters, no pressed flowers, few photographs and even those few stiffly obligatory; there are no family heirlooms and, of course, no family pride. Each generation has, it seems, effectively sealed itself off from its lowly forebears. My mother had not wanted to remember the muddy thirty acres where she grew up, the roofless barn, the doorless outhouse, the greasy kitchen table where the family took meals, the chickens which wandered in and out the back door, the thick-ankled mother who could neither read nor write and who had little capacity for affection or cleanliness. Hadn’t my mother, in spite of all this, finished grade nine and hadn’t she gone to Toronto to work in a hat factory? (Ah, but that was another sealed-off area.) Hadn’t she married a city boy, someone who worked in an office, and hadn’t they, after a few years, bought a house of their own, paid for it too, a real house in Scarborough with a back yard and plumbing, hadn’t she kept it spotless and proved to everyone that she was just as good as the next person, hadn’t she shown them? Yes.
Yes, yes, I understand it; why can’t I put that understanding into motion? Why am I running down the sidewalk like this? The rain is pouring in sheets off the sides of my borrowed umbrella. My feet in my only good shoes are soaked already.
I’m on my way downtown, running to the subway station. How unfair to blame my mother for the fact that I am taking the subway—I clutch my scratched vinyl purse and admit the truth—I am the one who lacks the largesse to phone a taxi. Meagreness. I am Florence McNinn’s daughter, the genes are there, nothing I’ve done has scratched them out.
My ankles are wet and rimmed with mud. Oh, God, one more block and at least I’ll be out of the rain.
As I run splashing along, a sort of song thrums in my crazy head: Seth, Seth, where are you? Oh, Watson, why did you leave me? Brother Adam, why can’t you save me? Eugene, Eugene, Eugene.

Actually I love the subway. Not its denatured surfaces, not its weatherless tunnels, but its mad, anonymous, hyperactive, scrambling and sorting: the doors sliding open in the station, the rush of people, their faces declaring serious and purposeful journeys they are undertaking. Then another stop—they push their way out and are instantly replaced with equally serious, equally intent others. Their namelessness pleases me, their contained and dignified singularity comforts me. And it amazes me to think of the intricate, possibly secret connections between them, perhaps even connections of love. I like to think that at the end of each of these rushed, wordless, singular journeys, there is someone waiting, someone who is loved. How extraordinary—of course there are all sorts of chemical explanations—but still, how extraordinary is the chancy cement of love; a special dispensation which no one ever really deserves but which almost everyone gets a little of. Even my unloving mother has found someone finally to love. Even Louis Berceau with his scraped-out lungs and his screwed-up, druid face has found someone to love.
Joy seizes me fiercely, sweetly. I am one of the lucky ones after all with my hard-as-a-kernel nut of indestruc tibility. My hereditary disease, the McNinn syndrome, has riddled me with cowardice, no question about it, but happiness will always return from time to time—as on this train blindly tunnelling beneath Bay and Bloor.
At the end of the trip, above ground, Eugene is waiting, his gull-grey raincoat flapping in the wind and his face fixed with its own peculiar flat uncertainty. I am ridiculously happy to see him.
Eugene steers me into a taxi and down the street toward a big, new hotel; through the chrome-framed doors into a warm, bronze-sheeted lobby, strenuously contemporary with revolving lucite chandeliers and motorized waterfalls. The elevator is a cube of perfect creature comfort: softly lit and carpeted, ventilated, soundless and swift.
In a darkened cocktail lounge high over the city, Eugene and I sit on strangely shaped, grotesquely padded chairs and sip long, cold drinks and nibble on tiny smoked, salty, crackling things. And we talk in the strange, curiously-shy fashion of reunited lovers. I tell Eugene about Louis Berceau, and he tells me about an old dental school friend he ran into today who asked him how “his charming wife was.” When Eugene told him he was now divorced, the friend backed off and, in a blind flurry of honesty, said, “Actually I never could stand Jeri.” Or was it honesty, Eugene wonders now, drumming his fingers on the table. Maybe the friend was, belatedly and pointlessly, scrambling for sides. Maybe he was trying in an unfocussed way to comfort Eugene or to congratulate him for having rid himself of an unpleasant wife. “Strange,” Eugene murmurs, looking into his gin and tonic. “Strange how people react to divorce. Not knowing whether sympathy is in order or not.”
I agree with him. Death is so much simpler; the rituals are firmer, shapelier; social custom will never be able to alter or diminish the effect of death; one need never be confused about the proper response.
Later, in the restaurant, we eat marvellous little things from a wagon of hors d‘oeuvres. Tiny fishes, oily and frilled with lemon; sculptured vegetables lapped with mayonnaise, glazed and healthy under parsley coverlets, sharp little sausages and miniature onions, gherkins and lovely, lovely olives, black, green, some of them an astonishing pink. After that we have tornedos in cream (the speciality of the house, the beaming, gleaming waiter tells us.) I eat less guiltily knowing Eugene will be able to write off almost every penny this meal is costing; at the same time I feel our feast is meanly diminished by that very fact. A paradox. Eugene says he feels the same way. Why?
He says it is a question of puritan ethic: you can only enjoy what you have laboriously worked for. Pleasure must be paid for by sacrifice, at least for those like us. It must not come too easily or too soon. He shakes his head sadly over the fact, but accepts it, admitting that most middle class rewards will no doubt continue to elude him.
“It might be better for the kids though,” he says, speaking of his two boys, Sandy and Donny, who live with Jeri and stay with him in his apartment most weekends. He is always impressed with their unalloyed enjoyment of the presents he gives them. “They don’t think they have to do a damn thing in return,” he says. “I mean, God, they’re little primitives. They just open their arms to whatever rains down on them. Damned ungrateful too, but maybe that’s better than being screwed up with the debt-to-the-devil complex.” “Maybe,” I say. And yet I’m glad Eugene is not entirely guilt-free about tax deductions; I’m grateful for his company here on the ethical edge, in the no-man‘s-land between youth and age, between puritan guilt and affluent hedonism; what a pair we are, half-educated, half-old, half-married, half-happy. I should marry him and relieve a little of the guilt he suffers. He would like that: living alone in an apartment is frightening for a man like Eugene; he feels his ordinariness more than ever. Maybe I will marry him. What a nice man he is. I don’t even mind his being an orthodontist. What if his proportions are less than heroic? Isn’t goodwill a kind of prehensile heroism in this century? Does it really matter that Doug Savage thinks he is miserably average, even slightly substandard, and that Greta fears his mediocrity will place a ruinous stain on Seth’s character? I cannot, after all, choose a husband just to please my friends.
Nothing is simple. After dinner we take a taxi back to Scarborough, sitting in the back seat with our arms around each other. The sky has cleared; there’s a rounded, whited, theatrical moon cleanly cruising along behind us. Eugene’s raincoat is still damp and rather cold against my thighs but I like the feel of his lips on my face, unhurried, soft.

Coming into my mother’s dimly lit living room with its flickering television screen and its cleanly shabby furniture, my senses play a perceptual trick on me: I see, it seems, not those who are actually there—my mother with her mending, Judith with her book, and Martin with his newspaper—but the ghostly shadowed presence of those who are missing. My father—shy, secretive, stoic, perpetually embarrassed—reading his paper much as Martin does, with hunched concentration as though he were perched temporarily in a doctor’s waiting room. And Judith’s children, Richard and Meredith: their absence is marked by her weary inattentiveness to the novel she’s reading, the way she jerks the pages over; her real life belongs to another place now. And Seth, the grandson my mother has not even inquired about, the grandson for whom she does not knit mittens or mufflers and whose birthdays she does not remember (he is, after all, the extension of a daughter who has twice disgraced her family, first by running away and then by getting divorced); Seth who is the most important person in my world is suddenly briefly visible, filling this little room with his absence.
“Seth!” I suddenly exclaim.
“What’s the matter?” Judith says, looking up.
“I’ve forgotten to phone Seth.”
“It’s not too late, is it?” Eugene asks, hanging up his raincoat.
“Do you mean long distance?” my mother asks.
“I just want to see if he’s all right.”
“But it’s long distance.”
“It’s after eleven,” Judith says helpfully. “Don’t the rates go down after eleven?”
“After twelve, I think,” Martin says.
“It’s all right,” I tell my mother. “I’ll leave the money for the call.”
“A waste of money,” she shrugs. “And when you’ve been out to a restaurant and everything.”
“I really must see how he is.”
“But you’re going home Friday night. Why would you want to go and run up the phone bill for nothing?”
“But I have to. I really must,” I insist, knowing I sound unreasonable and shrill. “I simply couldn’t sleep a wink tonight unless I know everything is all right.”
“But what could go wrong?” my mother says giving one last dying protest.
“There’s the phone ringing now,” Eugene says. “Maybe it’s Seth calling you.”
But it isn’t Seth. It’s Doug Savage and he’s phoning from Calgary.
“Hiya, Char,” he says as breezily as though he were phoning from next door.
“Doug!” I stumble, a little confused. “Well, hello.”
There is a short pause—perhaps we have a poor connection—and then I hear Doug saying, “Just wanted to tell you not to worry.”
“Worry?”
“Just wanted to let you know everything’s fine.”
“But ... but what are you doing in Calgary?”
“Oh, you know me, just a little trip. Always here, there, or somewhere.”
“And Greta?”
Another pause. “Has Greta phoned you at all?”
“No. Was she going to?”
He hesitates. “Just thought she might give you a buzz.”
“Well, no she hasn‘t, but as a matter of fact I thought I’d phone her tonight. Have a word or two with Seth.”
“Oh, God, Char, save your shekels. As a matter of fact, I don’t think they’re home tonight anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure. Something about the band. A rehearsal, I think.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling suddenly let down and disappointed. “I forgot about that.”
“Well, don’t let it worry you. Everything’s fine. Fine.” His voice trails off.
“Maybe I’ll try tomorrow night.”
“Great idea. You do that. Having a good time?”
“What? Oh, yes, uhuh, a good time.”
“Take care then. Bye for now.”
“Bye, Doug. And Doug ...?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for calling. That was really nice of you to think of phoning. But why ... I mean why exactly did you phone me?”
“Didn’t want you worrying, that’s all. Just thought I’d let you know everything’s fine. Good night then, baby.”
“Good night,” I say. And stupidly, cheerfully, add, “Sleep tight.”