The box garden

Chapter 5
“She never talks to me anymore,” Judith is saying of her daughter Meredith. “Not the way she used to when she was a little girl.”
Children. Judith and I lie in bed listening to our mother in the kitchen making breakfast and we talk about our children.
“I’m always reading those articles about how parents are supposed to keep the lines of communication open,” Judith says. “And now and then out of duty I make a stab at it.”
“And what happens?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She—Meredith—just smiles. Mona Lisa. At least sometimes she smiles. Other times she cringes. As though the thought that we might have something in common was unspeakable. Everyone’s always telling me how charming she is, and it’s true she’s got this non-McNinn effervescence. And a kind of wild originality too, but to me she doesn’t say one word.”
“You don’t sound as though you mind all that much,” I say.
“Mind? Oh, I suppose I should. After all, I’m her mother, she’s my only daughter, why shouldn’t she be able to pour out her heart now and then. But the truth is, Charleen, I couldn’t bear it if she did. All that anguish.”
“You must be curious though.”
“In a way. I’m always wondering what she’s thinking about. Or what she does when she’s not home. After all, she’s eighteen. But eighteen is such a ... well ... such a suffering age. Remember? Sometimes I feel I’ve only just recovered from it myself. To listen to her ups and downs would kill me, and I think she knows it too. She senses it. She’s got a kind of rare psychic radar—she always had but now and then she looks so bedeviled that I’m afraid she’s going to break down and take me into her confidence. She’s come close a couple of times. But then she stops herself. I can almost see her mumbling her vows of silence. And, strangely enough, I’m rather proud of her for it, for going it alone. I admire her for it. And I’m grateful, even though I know I’m failing her somehow, I’m grateful to be left alone.”
“What about Richard?” I ask her.
“Richard,” she shrugs. “He’s always kept things to himself. Of course he’s a boy. They’re always more secretive. I suppose that’s what you call a sexist judgment. Does Seth confide in you?”
I pause for a moment, not really wanting to admit that he doesn’t. “No,” I say slowly, “but I don’t think it means anything.”
It’s true that most of the time these days Seth and I speak to each other in monosyllables—sure, yeah, okay—but these words are our accepted coinage of familiarity, the sort of shorthand which forms unconsciously between people who are naturally in harmony. It has never occurred to me to think that his lack of explicit communication might be an attempt to hide something from me; his nature has always been exceedingly open, and, if anything, it is this openness that worries me, openness with a suggestion of vacuum, a curious, perhaps dangerous acquiescence.
“I used to think it was strange,” Judith is saying, “that we never told Mother anything when we were girls. All my friends used to rush home and tell their mothers everything. But we never did. At least I never did.”
“Neither did I,” I say firmly. “Never once.”
“You know,” Judith says thoughtfully, “looking back, I don’t think it’s all that strange. I think she must have sent out a kind of warning signal, a thought wave, saying ‘Don’t tell me anything because I’ve got enough to cope with as it is.’ ”
“Perhaps,” I nod.
“Anyway,” Judith continues, “I’ve come to the place now where I know she and I will never be able to talk. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
Her certainty surprises me; it seems rather shocking to be so final, and I am forced to admit to myself that I have by no means surrendered. Somehow—it is only a question of finding the point of entry—I will break through our terrible familial silence. I came close, very close, yesterday drying the eggbeater.
Judith springs out of bed and begins to get dressed, but I lie under the blanket a few minutes longer; I am still sleepy, my mind begins to wander, but I am not thinking about Meredith or Judith or about my mother or even about the girl I once was. For some reason I am thinking about Seth. And the small string of worry that plucks away at me.

After breakfast—toast and coffee in the kitchen—we take up yesterday’s small routines. Eugene goes downtown for his conference, and Martin carries his newspaper into the back yard. It is rather cool outside; a wooly sun struggling through massed clouds, the grass still wet from yesterday’s rain. My mother sets up the ironing board in the kitchen (the smell and sight of its scorched cover pierces me with nostalgia) and she presses, through a clean, damp tea towel, the dress she will wear for her wedding. Cocoa-brown crimpeline with raised ribs, a row of dull, wood-looking buttons down the front, long sleeves and no collar.
“It came with a scarf,” she says, frowning narrowly, “as if a scarf made up for no collar.” Her lips turn inward thinly, visible, measurable emblem of her complaint. “But I’m certainly not going to wear it, all those bright colours, cheap, of course it was in the March sales; nothing is well made anymore, imagine not even a collar. But it will have to do, that’s all there is to it.”
I am thinking: the wedding is Friday, tomorrow is Thursday and with luck I’ll be seeing Brother Adam at last. Today is Wednesday; today I am having lunch with Louis. He is coming for me at eleven. When I asked Judith if she enjoyed her lunch yesterday, she smiled somewhat mysteriously. “It was interesting,” she said.
“Did you find out anything about Louis?” I asked.
“A little,” she smiled, “and so will you.”
For a moment I pondered this, and then I asked, “Where did you go?”
“A little place in the country.”
“Where exactly?” I pressed her.
“West of Toronto. Weedham. Just a little spot.”
“Weedham? Weedham, Ontario? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she had answered, puzzled. “Weedham. Spelled WEEDHAM. Being literal-minded, I naturally expected it to be full of weeds but it turned out to be a pretty little place. You’ll like it.”
Weedham. Weedham, Ontario. Watson. I am going to Weedham, Ontario. I am going there today. An arc of anticipation, not unlike sexual desire, brightens inside me. I look at the kitchen clock. Nine-thirty. In an hour and a half I will be sitting in Louis Berceau’s little green Fiat bouncing along the road to Weedham, Ontario.

I am sick, oh, I am sick with shame, I am in hell. I want to die of it, oh God, such pain, such humiliation, to be so humiliated. Stupid, stupid, I am sick with shame, it won’t go away, it’s done, nothing will take it away, dear God.
I am lying on my mother’s bed in the middle of the morning, I am rocking from side to side, my fists in my eyes. I want to moan out loud, I want to weep, but no one must hear me, no one must know, oh, the shame of it.
Martin. Martin knows. Will he tell Judith? I cannot bear the thought of Judith knowing. She would think it was—what?—she would think it was amusing, too amusing for words. It would be awful to hear her laughing over it; I couldn’t stand that.
Yet, isn’t it her fault, isn’t she the cause of it’s happening ? If I hadn’t been thinking about her and her peculiar baffling indifference to Martin, it would never have happened.
She had been so busily occupied after breakfast. She had settled down at the dining room table with her portable typewriter and her reference books and her lovely calf-hide attaché case which she snapped open on her lap; inside were bundles of five-by-seven cards, each bundle bound with a rubber band; I thought of the way Mafia men carry their wads of money. Her notes, she explained, and with an air of enormous concentration she had selected one bundle, had whipped off the rubber band with a clean snap, and, one by one, she arranged the cards around her in a large semi-circle, a zombie playing at solitaire. I watched admiringly, such concentration, such independence. Judith explained that she had set herself a deadline for her next book. “It’s odd,” she said to me, “I seem to be getting compulsive in my old age. Writing used to be just a kind of hobby. Now if a single day goes by without working, I feel as though the day’s been lost.”
Martin, on his way in from the back yard to get his book, had paused and regarded her affectionately. Judith gave him a level look over her circle of cards; she looked at him, but I could tell she didn’t really see him; what she gave him was a wide spatial stare, an empty optic greeting as though he were a smallish portion of the wallpaper; then she broke her gaze abruptly, scratched her head with vigour and, slowly, thoughtfully, inserted a sheet of paper into her typewriter.
Martin picked up his book and went outside, and out of a kind of pity—I think that’s what it was—I followed him.
For a few minutes we sat together on the back steps, letting the frail, glassy sunlight fall on our backs. The little lawn looked exceptionally fine. Louis had put some fertilizer on it, my mother had explained with her mixture of shyness and sarcasm, and two pounds of grass seed. Martin seemed rather lonely, rather bored, a little restless, he seemed glad enough of my company. I even dared to tease him a little about how he’d worried about Judith’s outing with Louis; he had laughed at himself in an altogether pleasant way, and then we talked for a few minutes about modern criticism. Yes, we were starting to be friends. We were comfortable sitting there together; the sun was growing stronger; it might be a nice day after all, and I was just about to say so when Martin leaned over and whispered into my ear.
“Look, Charleen, just between us, what do you think of the archaic sleeping arrangements here?”
“Pardon?” I said. Our mother had always taught us to say pardon.
“The sleeping arrangements,” he repeated. “You know, the boys’ dorm and the girls’ dorm.”
“Well—” I started to say.
He leaned closer, he put his arm around my shoulder, he whispered in my ear, “How about switching around tonight?”
“Martin!” I breathed, completely shaken.
“We could switch back later,” he leered. “No one would ever know.”
“Martin,” I said again in a dazed whisper, “I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly.”
There was a short chilly silence. A dead hole of a silence.
Then Martin asked, “Why not?”
I stood up abruptly, choking back rage, “Because Judith happens to be my sister. My own sister. What kind of person do you think I am?”
“My good Christ, Charleen; don’t go all moral on me.”
“And what makes you think I would want to sleep with you anyway?”
Then, then Martin’s expression underwent a profound shocking, nightmarish change. Then suddenly he began to laugh, very softly so that my mother, still ironing in the kitchen, wouldn’t hear. Manic tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes, he rocked back and forth on the step hugging himself, “Oh, Charleen, oh, my God, I can’t stand it, it’s so funny. I didn’t mean you and me. Oh, God.” He broke into another obscene spasm of laughter.
I stared. What was he laughing about? Had he gone crazy?
Then quite suddenly I understood. Then I knew.
“I meant you and Eugene,” Martin gasped. “And Judith and me. After all,” he continued, making an effort at control, “we are joined in holy wedlock and all that.”
I hardly heard him. I dashed away, up the steps and through the back door. I ran past my mother and here I am in the bedroom, rocking and moaning in a suffering parody of Martin rocking and moaning on the back steps. How he laughed. I could die, I could die, I wish I could die.

Louis will be here any minute. I roll over in bed and look at the clock. I must get changed. I must try to look cheerful and eager and grateful to be taken on an outing.
I put on my stockings and slip into my new orange dress. Then I brush my hair, trying to turn it under smoothly the way Mr. Mario had done. It doesn’t look too bad. And the dress looks surprisingly becoming. I even hum to myself a jerky little comforting tune while I clean my shoes with a Kleenex. They’re still a little damp from yesterday.
Too bad about Martin, I say to myself in mock dismissal, peering into the mirror. Just when we were starting to be friends. If only I’d laughed I might have carried it off. Ah well, with my typical faulty reflex I blow it every time, a fatal quarter-step behind the rest of the world. Martin, without a doubt, will have been repelled by my embarrassment; not only that, but I with my gross misinterpretation have left myself vulnerable to a host of other questions: exactly what kind of a woman was I anyway? Just answer that.
Then I hear the little car pulling up in front, I hear Louis and Martin in the back yard talking about lawn care. One last reassuring grimace in the mirror and I emerge.
Louis does not embrace me, but he gives me a smile and a cherishing handshake over the kitchen table. My mother, sighing as she puts away the ironing board, says sharply, “Don’t be too late. I’m making my tunafish bake for supper.”
We walk to the car; Louis is cheerful and nimble and I shorten my steps to match his. The sun is blazing merrily overhead, and Martin and Judith walk with us to the street; Judith’s writing is going well this morning and she seems immoderately happy. “Have a good afternoon,” she sings.
I don’t dare look at Martin. But after Louis has turned the ignition and we start to slide away from the curb, I turn back and find my eyes looking directly into his. His eyes look funny as though he is squinting into the sun. No, he isn‘t, no he isn’t. He is—yes—he is winking at me.
Without thinking, without reflecting, I wink back, and then we move down the street, Louis and I, slowly, almost elegantly.

Louis’s car is a Fiat 600, a 1968 model, recently repainted, the interior worn but exceedingly clean. This is the car that takes my mother back and forth to the cancer clinic, this is the car that carries her out for Sunday drives, this is the car which in two days will become their car, used for their minor errands, for their weekly trips to the Dominion Store, for their little jaunts into the country.
Louis, as I had predicted, is a cautious driver. He sits tightly in the driver’s seat, moving the steering wheel and gearshift with intense little jerks, with careful, choppy, concentrated deliberation. The car moves down the suburban streets, delicately shuddering, and Louis, leaning forward, appears rather gnomelike with his wreaths of wrinkles, his puckered, colourless mouth, his contained and benign ugliness. Taking the 401 he heads west across the city.
On the way to Weedham Louis talks about the wedding. And I think how strange that it is so easy for people to talk in cars. It must have something to do with the enforced temporary proximity or with the proportion of space or perhaps the sealed, cushioned interior silence which must resemble, in some way, the insulated room where Greta Savage meets each week with her encounter group. It is as though the automobile were a specially designed glass talking-machine engineered for human intimacy. Furthermore, in a car the need to watch the road diverts and relieves the passengers, giving to their conversation an unexpected flowing disinterestedness.
Louis clears his throat and explains that both he and my mother were anxious to avoid fuss and expense; that was why they decided to be married in my mother’s living room in the middle of the afternoon. Afterwards there would be tea in the dining room. And a small cake which Louis has ordered from a bakery; a United Church minister, a local man, has been asked to perform the ceremony.
This last piece of information surprises me. The McNinns have always been vaguely Protestant; at least Protestant is the word Judith and I supplied when we were asked our religious denomination. But we had never been a church-going family. The reason: I am not entirely sure, but it stemmed, I think, from my mother’s belief that people only go to church in order to show off their hats and fur coats and to sneer at those less elegantly dressed. Certainly it had nothing to do with those larger issues such as the existence of God or the requirement of worship.
“Is anyone else going to be at the wedding?” I ask Louis. No, he answers, only the family. He himself has no family, none at all anymore.
The neighbours. I wonder if the neighbours have any inkling that my mother is to be remarried on Friday. Has she told anyone or has she kept her secret? The leitmotif of her anxiety, for as long as I can remember, has been her fear of being judged by the neighbours; what would the neighbours think? When twenty years ago I ran away with Watson to Vancouver, she had been struck almost incoherent with shame: what would the neighbours think? All the other girls in the neighbourhood were going on to secretarial school or studying to be hairdressers, but her daughter—the shame of it—had eloped with a student, had left a note on her pillow and ridden off to Vancouver on the back of a motorcycle.
Later I learned from Judith exactly how shattered she had been, how for months she’d hardly left the house, how for years she’d been unable to look the neighbours in the face. The fact that I had not been pregnant as she had supposed, the fact that Watson and I had been quite legally if rather sloppily married before we set off for the west, and the fact that Watson, three years later, received his Ph.D. (with honours)—none of these things seemed to ease the terrible shame of my extraordinary departure And then the divorce, the embarrassing blow of the divorce which for years I tried to conceal from her. No one else in the neighbourhood had a daughter who was divorced. The neighbours had daughters who were buying property in Don Mills and producing families of children who came visiting on Sundays. Our mother alone had been cursed by strange daughters: Judith with her boisterous disturbing honesty, bookish and careless, and I with my now fatherless child, my unprecedented divorce, my books of poetry. The neighbours’ children hadn’t dismayed and defeated and failed their mothers.
And now my mother is getting married and she doesn‘t, it seems, worry at all about what the neighbours will think. She doesn’t care a fig; she doesn’t care a straw. For after all these years she has, in a sense, triumphed over the neighbours. Or, more accurately, the neighbours no longer exist. Both Mr. and Mrs. Maddison with their wailing cats and shredded curtains have died. The MacArthurs—lazy Mrs. MacArthur, always hanging out the clothes in her dressing gown, and Mr. MacArthur with his gravel truck sitting by the side of the house—have moved to a duplex in Riverdale to be near their married daughter. The Whiteheads—he drank, she used filthy language—have gone to California. Mrs. Lilly and her crippled sister, so sinfully proud of their dahlias, have disappeared without a trace, and the Jacksons, whom my mother believed to be very common, have become rich and live in south Rosedale. All the houses in our neighbourhood are filled with Jamaicans now, with Pakistanis, with multi- generation, unidentifiable southern Europeans who grow cabbages and kohlrabi in their backyards and rent out their basements. My mother is not in the least afraid of their judgment on her. She has, after all, lived for forty years in her little house, she has lived on the block longer than anyone else, she is widowed old Mrs. McNinn, the woman who keeps a clean house, the woman who minds her own business; she is respectable old Mrs. McNinn.

“We’re almost there,” Louis says, steering carefully. “Another mile or so.”
“What a pretty little town,” I exclaim. For Weedham, Ontario, in the blond, spring sunlight has a tidy green rural face. A sign announces its population: 2,500. Another sign welcomes visiting Rotarians. Still another, a billboard of restrained proportions, urges visitors to stop at the Wayfarers’ Inn.
“That’s where we’re going,” Louis says.
The Wayfarers’ Inn at the edge of town is relatively new, built in the last thirty years or so, but in the style of more ancient inns it has a stone courtyard, a raftered ceiling, here and there curls of wrought iron, and rows of polished wooden tables ranged round the walls. Light filters glowingly through stained glass windows which, Louis explains, are the real thing; they were taken from an old house in the area which was being demolished.
“It’s charming,” I say politely.
Shyly he tells me, “I brought your mother here for lunch. When I asked her to marry me.”
I am taken by surprise. In fact, I am dumbfounded, for I cannot imagine my mother submitting to the luxury of lunch at the Wayfarers’ Inn. And it is even more difficult to imagine her absorbing—in this room at one of these little tables peopled with local businessmen and white-gloved club women—a declaration of love.
“Was it ... sudden?” I dare to ask.
His face crinkles over his r hroom soup, engulfed in pleasant nostalgia. “Yes,” he nods, choking a little. “Only three months after we’d met at the clinic.”
His openness touches me, but at the same time I am unbelievably embarrassed. Much as I would like to pursue it, to ask him, “and do you really love each other?” I cannot; Judith might have, in fact she probably did. I am certain he told her too, just as I am certain he would tell me if I asked; why else has he brought me out for lunch if not to make me feel easy about him. But I draw back, I can’t ask, not now at least. To pursue the subject beyond Louis’s first eager revelation might diminish it, might bury it. Why shouldn’t he love my mother? If there is such a thing as justice, then surely even the unloving deserve love. She’s like everyone else, I suddenly see; inside her head are the same turning, gathering spindles of necessity; why shouldn’t he love her?
Louis smiles at me with almost boyish gaiety, his teeth, dark ivory with flashes of gold at the sides, his wrinkles breaking like waves around the hub of his happiness—a happiness so accidental, so improbable and so finely suspended—hadn’t Brother Adam written that happiness arrives when least expected and that it tends to dissolve under scrutiny. Better to change the subject.
I glance around the room, taking in the polished wood and coloured glass; a square of ruby-red light falls on Louis’s soft old hair. “How did you find this place?” I ask him. “Had you been here before ... before the day ... you brought her out here?”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” he is pleased with my question. “When I was teaching school—I used to be the woodwork teacher, your mother must have told you. Always was good with my hands.” He spreads them for my inspection.
“Simple carpentry, nothing complicated, knife racks and wall shelves mostly. At the end of the school year, round about the middle of June, I’d say, we used to come out here, all the teachers, and have lunch.” He coughs, a sudden attacking hack of a cough. “Sort of, you know, a celebration.”
“Which school was it?” I ask politely.
“St. Vincent.” He chokes again. “Not so far from where you went to school.”
“St. Vincent,” I say, remembering. “That’s a Catholic school, isn’t it?”
He nods, watching me closely.
“Some of the kids in our neighbourhood used to go there,” I tell Louis. “The MacArthurs. Billy MacArthur? Red hair, fat, always in trouble?”
“I don’t think I remember him,” Louis says regretfully.
“Judith and I always kind of envied the Catholic kids. It seemed—I don’t know—sort of exotic going to a school like that. Like a pageant. First communion and all those white dresses. And veils even. And catechism. And always calling their teachers Sister this and Father that.”
Louis nods and smiles.
“But,” I say thoughtfully, “I always thought that the teachers in those days had to be nuns and priests.”
Louis nods again.
“But you ...”
“Yes,” Louis says.
Silence. “A priest?” I whisper.
“Yes,” he says in a level voice, “a priest.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“I wanted you to know.”
“Does Judith ...”
“I told her yesterday.”
“And my mother. Of course she ...”
“Of course.”
“But—” I try to gather in my words, I struggle for the right words but there don’t seem to be any for this moment, “but weren’t you ... I thought ... weren’t you married before?”
“Only to the Church,” he says with a faint, modest rhetorical edge.
“But now ...”
“I made the decision to leave,” he says, “three years ago.”
My mother is marrying a sick, seventy-two-year-old ex-priest, I can hardly breath, I cannot believe this.
“But Louis,” I stumble on, “why did you ... I mean, it’s none of my business ... but why did you leave?”
He is ready to tell me; he has, I can see, brought me here to make me understand. “It was when I first started to ... get sick. I know it seems strange. You’d think sickness would make me cling to my vocation. But it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like then?”
“I started to feel afraid.”
“Of death?”
“I could never be frightened of death. I’m still a Catholic.”
“What were you afraid of then?” I ask, but already I know. Oh, Louis, I know what it is to be afraid.
“I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure now. But I think I was afraid I’d missed half my life.”
For a sickening half-instant I think he is referring to celibacy, surely he doesn’t mean that.
“I’d never lived alone,” Louis explains carefully. “I’d never had the strength. But then, when I got sick, it seemed possible. Anything seemed possible. It doesn’t make sense, I know.”
But to me it does make sense, for why had I married Watson? Because his sudden arrival into my life had said one thing: anything was possible. Possibility rimmed those first days like a purplish light; love was possible; flight was possible; my whole life was going to be possible.
“So you decided to leave?” I say to Louis.
He nods. His face has become alarmingly flushed. How difficult this must be for him. I want to reach out and pat his arm, but I’m too awestruck to move.
“I’ve been quite happy,” he says, “surprisingly so. Of course, being alone has its problems too.”
I know. I know.
“Then I met your mother.”
I smile uncertainly.
He makes a little laced basket of his hands and says, “I hope you don’t think ... you don’t think we’re just old and foolish.”
“Of course not,” I gasp truthfully.
“Because we don’t have ...” he pauses, “surely you realize ... we don’t have all that ... much time.” He says this lightly, he even gives a faint, ghoulish, baffling sort of chuckle which I find both shocking and admirable.
Now I do reach out and pat his hand, his chamois-coloured, brown-spotted, hairless little hand. We sit in the red and yellow and blue pooled light without saying a word. A young waitress takes our plates away and brings us ice cream in tiny imitation pewter bowls.
Louis sighs at last and says thickly, “It would have been nice ... nice ... to have a priest at the wedding, that’s all. It doesn’t matter though. Not really.”
“You mean to perform the ceremony?” I ask him.
“Oh no. That would be a little ... uncomfortable for your mother, I think. But it would have been nice to have a priest, just to, you know, be there.”
“Couldn’t you invite one?” I ask him earnestly.
“It’s awkward,” he says. “I’m a little ... out of touch.”
I tease the bitter chocolate ice cream with the tip of my spoon. I can’t stop myself: I say, “Look, Louis, I know a priest. As a matter of fact I’m going to see him tomorrow. Why don’t I ask him to come? I don’t have to tell him anything about your being a priest. I could just invite him—you know—to my mother’s wedding.”
He tips his head to one side and smiles a startled amber-toothed asymmetrical smile; pleasure drains into his grouted eyes and, nodding his head, he surprises me by saying, “Why, that would be very kind of you.”

Louis’s confession has refreshed him; he looks rather tired but he orders coffee with the happy air of a man who has discharged his purpose.
For me the revelation is not so speedily digested; it hangs overhead like a bank of fresh steam, and my imagination struggles to picture Louis of the clerical collar; Louis of the ivory Sunday vestments, wafer in mouth, cup upraised; Louis as devout young novice; Louis as frightened lonely child—somewhere under the old, soft, yellowed skin that boy must still exist. It is too much for me—the idea of Louis as priest resists belief, but it must, it will be, assimilated.
And what, I ask myself, is so strange about my mother meeting a defrocked priest—an ex-priest, I should say, it is somehow kinder to think of him that way—certainly a lot of them are floating around these days. And how did I imagine they would look if not like Louis? Did I expect them to be exhausted and spiritual, hollow-eyed, pitted with recognizable piety, baroque in manner, fatherly and frightened with damaged holiness sewn into their fingertips? They were men, only men, assorted, various and unmarked. Was Eugene with his moist normalcy and gentle hands identifiable as an orthodontist? And Martin: to see him turning over the pages of the Globe and Mail in my mother’s back yard, who would suspect the Miltonic peaks and canyons that furnished his intelligence: the very idea was ridiculous.
Meeting Watson Forrest when I was eighteen—there he was drinking orange soda in a run-down, soon-to-be-bankrupt drugstore—a short, frowsy boy of twenty-two with wrinkled corduroy pants, acne scars and tufted crown of reddish hair—I had not believed him at first when he told me he had graduated in botany from the University of Toronto, that he had already written his Master’s thesis (what was a Master’s thesis? I had asked) on rare Ontario orchids. Later, made restless by the romance of the North, Watson had turned to Arctic lichens; later still, drawn into the back-to-nature movement, he had focussed on the common pigweed and had theorized, often tiresomely, on the pigweed’s ability to draw nutrients to the surface of the earth. Orchids to pigweed: Watson had continually evolved toward the more popular, more democratic, more ubiquitous forms of a plant life. Specialty was for those who were content to stand still. Watson had resisted, more than most, the stamp of profession.
And as for me, Charleen Forrest, who, seeing me buying oranges in the Safeway or mailing letters on rainy Vancouver corners, who would guess that I am a poet? My bone structure is wrong; all those elongations; all those undisciplined edges, the ridged thighs, the wire-brush hair, the corns on my feet, the impurities in my heart—how could I possibly be a poet, how could I, as some might say, sing in a finer key?
The truth is, I am a sort of phony poet; poetry was grafted artificially onto my lazy unconnectedness, and it was Watson—yes, Watson—who did the grafting. Watson made me a poet—at least he pushed me in that direction—by his frenzied, almost hysterical efforts to educate me. What a shock it must have been, when he recovered from the first sexual ecstasies, to find himself married to an eighteen-year-old girl of crushing ignorance. Our first apartment in Vancouver was crammed with the books he brought me from the library, books I read doggedly, despairingly, in an attempt to conceal from him the shallowness of my learning. I seemed always to be working against time; the bright lights of possibility he had lighted in my head were already flickering out one by one.
I took a short typing course in Vancouver and for three years I supported both of us by typing term papers for graduate students in the cluttered, dusty nest of our one-room apartment. And in between, in order to forestall Watson’s ultimate disenchantment, I sweated through books of history, biography, science; in fact, whatever Watson selected for me. How he had loved the role of tutor, one of his many incarnations: he became a kind of magician and I the raw material to be transformed. His devotion to my education was, to be sure, less than altruistic : his first appointment was in sight; another incarnation, another role—that of brilliant young lecturer—awaited him, and he became, not without reason, worried about the handicap of a stupid wife.
Somewhere along the line my self-education ceased to be a wifely duty. Watson began edging into student politics and laying the groundwork for the Journal, and for me, sitting alone in the apartment, literature became a friend and ally. Surrounded by frayed basket chairs, brick-and-board book shelves, a card table desk, studio couch and bamboo blinds—the furniture, in fact, of the newly married—literature became the real world. And poetry, modern poetry, unlocked in me not so much a talent, but a strange narrow aptitude, a knack, at first, and nothing more.
My first poems were experiments; I built them on borrowed rhythms; I was a dedicated tinkerer, putting together the shapes and ideas which I shoplifted. And images. Like people who excel at crossword puzzles, I found that I could, with a little jiggling, produce images of quite startling vividness. My first poems (pomes) were lit with a whistling blue clarity (emptiness) and they were accepted by the first magazine I sent them to. Only I knew what paste-up jobs they were, only I silently acknowledged my debt to a good thesaurus, a stimulating dictionary and a daily injection, administered like Vitamin B, of early Eliot. I, who manufactured the giddy dark-edged metaphors, knew the facile secret of their creation. Like piecework I rolled them off. Never, never, never did I soar on the wings of inspiration; the lines I wrote, hunched over the card table in that grubby, poorly ventilated apartment, were painstakingly assembled, an artificial montage of poetic parts. I was a literary con-man, a quack, and the size of my early success was amazing, thrilling and frightening.
But after Watson left us, after he walked out on Seth and me, poetry became the means by which I saved my life. I stopped assembling; I discovered that I could bury in my writing the greater part of my pain and humiliation. The usefulness of poetry was revealed to me; all those poets had been telling the truth after all; anguish could be scooped up and dealt with. My loneliness could, by my secret gift of alchemy, be shaped into a less frightening form. I was going to survive—I soon saw that—and my survival was hooked into my quirky, accidental ability to put words into agreeable arrangements. I could even remake my childhood, that great void in which nothing had happened but years and years of shrivelling dependence. I wrote constantly and I wrote, as one critic said, “from the floor of a bitter heart.”
And the irony, the treachery really, was that those who wrote critical articles on my books of poetry never-not one of them-distinguished between those poems I had written earlier and those that came later. (What grist for the Philistines who scoff at literary criticism.) To these critics my work was one arresting—“the arresting Charleen Forrest”—seamless whole. Which goes to show ....

Louis Berceau takes an enormous amount of sugar in his coffee. Four heaped teaspoons. I watch him—his hands are remarkably steady for a man of his age—dipping into the sugarbowl. The smiling girl of a waitress refills our cups several times, and Louis almost succeeds in emptying the bowl of sugar.
The mind is easily persuaded, a fact which Brother Adam mentioned in a recent letter, and Louis suddenly appears to me to be an altogether holy man sitting here stirring his sticky coffee. A monk. He inspires, in fact, a torrent of confession. In half an hour I have told him rather a lot about my marriage with Watson. He is an excellent listener, something I noticed yesterday in my mother’s kitchen; he simply nods from time to time and fixes me with his opaque gaze. And out it all spills.
Watson, I tell him, was a man without a centre; he took on the colour of whichever landscape he happened to stumble across. Watson was a man who went to a Cary Grant movie and for a week after spoke in a light, slight, cocky English accent. He also did a weary, sneery Richard Widmark and—his favourite—a lean, mean, sinewy Dane Clark. Watson was a bit like a snake—the comparison is not really a good one for it suggests malice—but he was like a snake in his ability to continually shed his skin. Louis nods, and I hesitate, remembering that Louis too is a man who has shed his skin.
No, not like a snake, I correct myself, but like an actor who plays a number of roles one after the other, roles which he takes up energetically but later, with a kind of willful amnesia, shakes off and denies. Louis looks puzzled, and I try to explain. Watson’s first incarnation I can only theorize about: he must have been a sort of child prodigy hatched into an otherwise undistinguished Scarborough family, bringing home to his bus-driver father and seamstress mother miraculous report cards and brimming with a kind of juicy, pedantic, junior-sized zeal. But by the time I met him, he had left that scrubbed good-son image behind and transformed himself into a studied, lazy dreamer of a student, tenderly anarchic, determinedly bumbling and odd. Oh, very, very odd. A structured oddity, though, which both thrilled and terrified him; he needed someone, me, to bring reality to the role. Later, as a married graduate student in Vancouver he had stunned me with a whole new set of mannerisms and attitudes; he literally fought his way into all-roundedness—he boxed, he ran for elec tions, he wrote articles on alfalfa, he signed petitions, he played softball, he even forced himself to attend chamber music recitals and read up on the history of ballet. And I had adored his earnestness, his determination, his rabid certainty which completed, it had seemed to me, some need of my own. I had not quite loved his Young Professor Self, his two year retreat—it seemed longer—into piped and bearded tolerant middle-class academe, his almost British equanimity, the completely unforeseen manner in which he began to utter whole networks of archaisms, words like vouchsafe and gainsay, words strung together with a troubling catgut of hitherto‘s, wheretofor’s and whilst’s; once, completely unabashed, he began a sentence with a burbling I dare-say. It had been during that period that we actually bought a house with a garden. And actually conceived, with brooding deliberation, a child. House, wife, child, all he needed was the ivy. But already he was on his way to his next creation: rebellious young intellectual. For a while he did a balancing act between the two roles: one Sunday afternoon, sulky and depressed, the three of us had taken a walk around the neighbourhood. Seth, who must have been two years old at the time, walked between us, holding on to our hands. He was a little slow and unsteady, and Watson yanked him now and then angrily. But then we happened to pass by a house where an elderly couple were taking the afternoon sun. Seeing them, Watson had smiled gaily; he had swung Seth merrily to his shoulders in gruff fatherly fashion, crooning nonsense into his startled ears; this extraordinary display of affection had lasted until we were out of sight of the couple. Watching him, I had been sickened; that was when I knew he was a man without a centre.
As he careened toward thirty, he seemed to dissolve and reform with greater frequency, and each reincarnation introduced a new, more difficult strain of madness. Watson seemed unable, psychologically unable, physiologically unable, to resist any new current of thought. He was the consummate bandwagon man. Yet, I had loved him through most of his phases. Riding off to Vancouver on the back of his motorcycle, my face pressed for thousands of jolting miles into the icy smooth leather of his shoulders, hadn’t I thought that I would be safe forever? And for most of the eight years we were together I tried to be tolerant, sometimes even enthusiastic. But what I could never accept was the way in which he coldly shut the door on his past lives. The fact that he so seldom wrote to his parents was a troubling warning; I could sympathize, but still it seemed heartless not to acknowledge the birthday gifts of knitted gloves and homemade fruitcake. Friends, abandoned along the way, wrote imploring letters—what is the matter with Watson, why doesn’t he write or phone? The Journal which he founded in a burst of professional ardour became another dead end. He and Doug Savage quarrelled irrevocably over the definition and degree of scientific responsibility. And he refused to have anything to do with the Freehorns after they once teased him about his intermittent vegetarianism. Seth he regarded as a kind of recrimination, a remnant of a former, now shameful, life which he wanted to forget. Of course I saw that eventually I too would have to go.
“So it wasn’t such a shock,” Louis says, “when he ... when you separated.”
“It was still a shock,” I tell him. “I knew it was coming, but I couldn’t believe it when it actually happened.”
When I look at snapshots of myself taken during that period I am amazed that I am not deformed by unhappiness, that I am not visibly disfigured, bent over and shredded with grief. In fact, except for my bitter, lime-section mouth, I look astonishingly healthy. In the first months I was so weighted with sorrow and relief that I slept twelve hours every night. I was so emptied out that I ate greedily and constantly, buying for myself baskets of fruit as though I were an invalid. My eyes in those photographs gleam like radium; perhaps I was crazed by the cessation of love, still disbelieving, always certain that Watson would return in another guise.
And in an entirely hopeless way I know I am still half-expecting him to turn up, remorseful, shriven, redeemed. Why else am I keeping Eugene waiting if not for my poor bone of expectation? Waiting has become my daily religion. Tomorrow I must remember to ask Brother Adam why, after all these years, I am still wearing my four-dollar wedding band.
When Louis speaks again, he asks with phlegm-plugged caution the perfect question. “Where is your Watson Forrest living now?”
One lives for moments like this. “Here,” I pronounce solemnly, feeling my tongue cooling in delicious irony. “Watson lives right here. Isn’t that amazing, Louis? Can you believe it? He lives here in this very town.”
Louis shows perhaps a lesser degree of astonishment than I would like, but nevertheless he shakes his head in slow, grinning wonder.
And both of us, sitting in silence over our coffee cups are stewing in the rarified, blood-racing excitement of knowing exactly what will happen next.

The Whole World Retreat is two and a half miles south-east of Weedham, reached by a neglected section of secondary road. The young-brown-eyed waitress at the Wayfarers’ Inn is pleased to give us directions. “We buy all our lettuce and onions from them,” she dimples, “and I don’t care what anyone says about them, they make the best whole-wheat bread you ever tasted. Sort of nutty like, you know what I mean. Crunchy. All our customers ask where we get it.”
We take the road slowly, swerving here and there to avoid potholes still glittering with yesterday’s downpour. The countryside is green and rolling like calendar country; and the farms, though small, seem prosperous with good straight fences, herds of healthy cows and cheerful country mail boxes: The Mertins, Russell K. Anderson and Son, Bill and Hazel Rodman, Dwayne Harshberger, and, at last, a mail box that announces in blocky, green letters, The Whole World Retreat. Louis pulls the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road.
Back at the restaurant we agreed that we would simply drive past the place. It would be fun—I had emphasized the word fun, while despising the sound of it—it would be fun, out of curiosity, to drive by and see what the place looked like. I had proposed this to Louis in my lightest, most floating accents, as though this were no more than a crazy whim, a mad impulse, as though I were one of those programmed eccentrics who love to do mad, mad, mad things on the spur of the moment. Like Greta Savage who spends her life crouched on the contrived lip of unreason with her: who else does crazy things like eat sardines for breakfast, who else is mad enough to take a holiday in Repulse Bay, who else is demented enough to tune in everyday to the Archers. I have long suspected that her insanity is partly an affectation ; now I adopt her shrill cry—“I know it sounds silly, Louis, but let‘s, just for the fun of it, drive by.”
An act of adolescence, for don’t high school girls in love with their math teachers furtively seek out their houses so they can cycle by, half-drowning in the illicit thrill of proximity. I hate Louis to see this undeveloped, irrational side of my personality which hungers for cheap drama, but not enough to pass up the opportunity of seeing the Whole World Retreat. And besides, hasn’t something more than chance brought me this close? Isn’t there at least a suggestion of predestination in this afternoon’s events, and hasn’t Louis with his surprise revelation introduced a note of compelling, almost mystical significance? This day clearly has not been designed for rationality. Even though it is almost four o‘clock, it does not seem right to turn back toward Scarborough where the tunafish casserole awaits, no doubt about it, already browning in my mother’s oven, and where my mother herself waits with her contained, wordless questioning. Something entirely unforeseen has been set into action; I can feel the piping tattoo of my pulse in my throat, and, looking sideways at Louis’s suddenly brightened eyes, I can see that he shares at least a measure of my excitement.
Beside the mail box a sign in heavy lettering announces : Green onions, Rhubarb, Homemade Bread, Fresh Eggs, Nursery Plants. And at the bottom in larger letters: Absolutely No Chemical Fertilizers. Louis and I sit, thoughtful for a moment, reading the sign and thinking our thoughts.
The house itself is set well back from the road. It is a top-heavy house, late Victorian in old-girlish brick, and its porch skirt of turned, white spindles gives it a blithe knees-up-Mother-Brown gaiety. Red and yellow tulips, not quite open, stand cheerful in a curved bed. The sloping front lawn is exceptionally beautiful with its twilled, gabardine richness and its fine finish of new growth.
There is no one in sight.
“They sell nursery plants,” I remark to Louis.
“Yes,” he says, “they do.”
“I wonder what kind of things they have at this time of year.”
“Hmmm.”
“Actually,” I take a deep breath, “actually I’d thought of buying some nursery plants.”
No response from Louis.
I try again. “For you, Louis, the two of you. Something for the backyard. I thought it might make a good wedding gift.”
More silence, and then Louis says cheerfully, “The perfect thing.”
“We could just see what they have in stock.”
“Are you ... that is ... are you sure?”
I pause. Then lunge. “Yes. I’m sure.”
We leave the car—Louis checks both doors to make sure they are locked—and walks up the loose-gravelled drive toward the house. He stumbles slightly, then catches himself, but I don’t even turn my head. I can feel excitement leaking in through my skin and for an instant I feel I might faint.
Up close the house looks slightly less picturesque. There is an old wringer washing machine on the porch, a pair of men’s work gloves hanging on a nail (Watson’s gloves?), two rain-sodden cartons of empty pop bottles. The screen door, rather rusty, has been inexpertly patched.
I knock.
“Hang on a minute,” a woman’s low voice calls from the shadows behind the screen, “I’m coming.”
From inside the house we hear a young baby wailing. Baby! It takes my brain an instant to decode the message: a baby, oh God. Then plunging grief—Watson’s baby. And in another instant I will be seeing Watson. He will come striding through that screen door and see me standing here with my old, grotesque vulnerability hanging around me like a hand-me-down raincoat. What am I doing here?
A young woman, plumply tranquil, wearing granny glasses, pushes open the door. She wears a dirty, pink shirt over her jeans and on her hip rides a screaming, naked baby of about fifteen months. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she says in a flat but friendly southern Ontario voice. “I had the baby on the pot.”
“That’s all right,” Louis says wheezing.
“What a lovely baby,” I half moan. “Is it—” I peer closely, “Oh, it’s a little girl.”
“Faith,” the woman says.
“Pardon?”
“Faith. That’s her name.”
Louis receives this information silently. He is searching his pockets for a handkerchief. Automatically, never missing a beat, my kindness act uncoils itself. “What an interesting name.”
“My husband calls her Mustard Seed.”
“Oh!” The word husband pierces me. “Oh?”
“Just a joke. Faith of a mustard seed. From the Bible.”
“Oh, yes,” my head bobs.
“Well,” she says smiling and shifting the still wailing baby to her other hip, “is there anything I can help you with?”
“We saw your sign,” Louis says indistinctly. His asthma is threatening; he is alarmingly tired. I should never have dragged him here; we should never have come.
“Nursery plants,” I say, clearing my throat. “We were interested in nursery plants.”
“Terrific,” the young mother beams. (Young! she can’t be older than twenty-five. I am shaken by a shower of dizzy shame for Watson, this is too much.)
“I wanted to buy something for a wedding gift,” I say. “A shrub, I thought, something like that.”
“Just a sec,” the woman says. She peers over her shoulder into the kitchen. “My husband can show you what we’ve got. Of course, it’s early, there’s not much, but he can at least show you what we’ve got.”
“Look,” I say, taking a step backwards, “we’ll come back another time. When you’ve got more in.”
She won’t stop smiling at me; her yeasty good cheer glints off her glasses, making creamy Orphan Annie coins of her eyes. “You might as well have a look,” she says. “He’s right here. He’ll be glad to show you what we’ve got.”
Footsteps across the kitchen floor, a man’s footsteps, a man’s muffled pleasant voice saying, “I’m coming.” Watson.
But the face which appears in the doorway isn’t Watson ; it is younger, leaner; it has blue eyes. And this man is taller. Not only that but he has straight, straw-coloured hair hanging to his shoulders and a muscular chest moving under his T-shirt. “How do you do,” he says, stepping onto the porch.
“How do you do,” Louis and I chorus. Louis gives me a quick, quizzing look, and I manage to flash him the smallest of smiles.
“Hey,” the young man says, squinting at me, “hey, aren’t you Charleen Forrest?”
Run, I cry, bolt. Now. Make for the road. Leap in the car, run. “Yes,” I say, “I am.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake,” the smiling girl says, showing a place in her lower jaw where a tooth is missing.
“Can you beat that,” her husband mutters with awe-some gentleness. The baby stops whimpering and holds herself suddenly rigid. Then she wets herself; a surprisingly wide stream of pale baby pee creams off her mother’s hip and splashes to the porch floor.
“Oh hell,” the girl says with equanimity, stepping sideways out of the puddle.
“Charleen Forrest,” her husband murmurs again. He sends me a warm, slow smile.
“How do you know who I am?” I ask, thinking: Watson, he must keep a picture of me, imagine that, who would have thought it of Watson?
“I’ve got all your books,” he says. “And your picture’s on the back. I would have recognized you anywhere.”
“Oh,” I say, disappointed.
“And then, of course, knowing Watson—” he shrugs and smiles, “not that that matters. We really dig your stuff. Cheryl and I.”
“That’s for sure,” Cheryl says.
“Thank you,” I say absurdly. Sweetly?
“Don’t suppose you’ve seen Watson lately?” he asks me.
I stare.
“We sure miss him,” Cheryl says in tones soft with regret. “It’s just not the same here without Watson. Is it, Rob?”
“He was a beautiful guy,” Rob says mournfully. “One real beautiful guy, that’s all I can say.”
“But look,” I say to the two of them in a sharply raised voice, “he still lives here? Doesn’t he?”
“Gosh, no,” the gap-toothed Cheryl says. “Gee, it’s been—what Rob?—two years now?”
“Yeah. More than two years. He split—let’s see—it was round the end of March, wasn’t it, Cheryl? Two years ago March. We haven’t had a postcard from him even.”
“But that’s impossible,” I tell them firmly. “It can’t be true.”
A look of concern passes between them, a look which firmly shuts me out, and I feel a nudge of suspicion. Are they trying to protect Watson, pretending he isn’t here, trying to fool me like this?
“You see,” Rob says, taking the baby from his wife, “Watson sort of, well, I guess you could say he got disenchanted. You know, with the whole scene, the whole group thing, what we were trying to do here.”
“And the others,” Cheryl prompts him.
He nods. “That was part of it too, I guess. There were about eight of us, Cheryl and me and the others. All of them younger than Watson. Mostly kids who’d dropped out of the whole city thing. Younger kids. Watson kept saying they were getting younger and younger all the time. He finally got to thinking, I guess, that it was time to move on to another scene.”
“He was forty,” I tell them abruptly. “Two years ago he had his fortieth birthday. In March.”
“Gee,” Cheryl says, “Forty!”
“But he must be here,” I insist, “because every month he sends me a cheque from here. The child support money. For our son. He sends it every month. Always right on the fifteenth and it comes from here. Weedham. I know because I always check the postmark.”
They laugh softly as if I’d said something outlandishly amusing. “That’s Rob,” Cheryl explains grinning. “Rob’s the one who sends off the cheque.”
“You mail me the cheque?” I ask dazed.
“It was the one thing Watson wanted me to do. He left, Christ, I don’t know how many postdated cheques. Enough ‘til the boy’s eighteen, I think, isn’t it Cheryl?”
“And enough money in the bank to cover them. That’s what’s important, I guess, eh?”
Rob continues, “He wrote a note, left it on the back-door, this door here. All about the cheques, like where to send them and all. And I haven’t forgotten one, not so far anyways.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I say, feeling my mouth freeze with etiquette and sorrow.
“But you know,” Rob rambles on, “I might forget sometime. Memory’s not my strong point, ask Cheryl here. What I should do, since you’re standing right here, is just give you the whole bunch of cheques. Right now. That way you’d have them right with you and you could just cash them as the dates roll round.”
Cheryl nods enthusiastically at this piece of logic, and I feel suddenly flattened by confusion. Something inside me twists, something sour, something sharp, but I manage to smile and say, “Sure. Why not? While I’m here I might as well take them with me.”
Cheryl goes into the house and comes back in a minute with a large brown envelope. “They’re in here. You can count them if you want.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t have to count them. And thank you.”
“No need to thank us,” Rob says. And then he adds wistfully, “We sure miss Watson. It’s not the same.”
Should I ask them? I have to. “Where’s Watson living now?”
“East,” Rob says. “He went east.”
“You mean the Maritimes?”
He laughs again. “No, not geographical east. Philosophical east. He was into the mysticism thing. Hindu mainly.
“Buddha too,” Cheryl offers.
“You don’t know where he went?” I can hear a shameful pleat in my voice. “Geographically, I mean?”
“No. Like I said, we haven’t heard anything from Watson. Not in two years. Just that note stuck on the door. He didn’t say where he was going, just that he was going East. With a capital E. East.”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s all. The others, they kind of drifted off one by one too. After the baby was born. Some of them couldn’t really ride with the baby thing. So now there’s just Cheryl and me. And Mustard Seed here.” He blows a noisy kiss into the baby’s fat neck. “We’re just kind of a family now, you might say. We still do some farming but not like when Watson was here. But our bread baking operation is going along pretty well.”
“And the nursery plants,” Cheryl adds.
“Oh, yeah, the nursery plants. That’s what you folks were looking for, wasn’t it?”
Behind the greenhouse in the spilled, late afternoon sunlight, Louis and I pick out some good healthy shrubs: six mock orange with their roots bound in sacking. And a flat of petunias, white and pink mixed. I pay Rob with a twenty-dollar bill, and he helps Louis put them in the trunk of the car. Then we shake hands all around and head for home.
I sit beside Louis with the brown envelope on my lap and it occurs to me that I will never again receive a message from Watson, Watson my lapsed-bastard, first-love, phantom husband. The last link—a smudged, trea sonous postmark—has just been taken away from me. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. The arrival of Watson’s cheques—the regularity, the suppressed silence—offered me something: not hope, certainly not hope, I am not such a fool as that, but a pencil line of connecting sense in the poor tatter I’d made of my life. A portion of renewal. And a means by which the worth of other things might be tested. Damn you, Watson.
“There, there,” Louis is saying. “There, there now.” The curving kindness of his voice—what a good man he is—makes me conscious of the tears falling out of my eyes.