Strange –
she went on –
how puffy his face became in old age, reverting to the youthful roundness we see in his early movies. Fred Astaire stayed bony, but Gene Kelly and Cary Grant widened, and not with fat. More like girdles giving way. I learned the business about Cary’s favourite lunch from one of the trashy biographies I read secretly, shamefacedly, when I was old enough to know better. At the time I was writing a letter to you, since your affection for Cary Grant gave my own free rein. I said to myself, if smart, pixie-faced Pauline Kael can call him “The Man from Dream City,” then so can I. I wanted to put my mind at rest about his sexuality – a silly quest, a small-town girl’s quest. As if I were going to marry the man. In my letter, which was really a story, I asked you why you didn’t spell things
out. Was he gay or not? Then I reread your essay and saw that for a careful reader all the implications were there. You let the two halves of his personality fall on the table like a pair of gloves, to use someone else’s excellent phrase
.
North of England read aloud his piece about his older brother, a great reader who used to sneak outside during the wartime blackouts in London – only later did they move to Manchester-because he loved the dark, he would do anything to be in the darkness. He even begged his mother to let him bring the clothes in off the line at night. After the war he found the darkness inadequate. But he fixed that. He took his life at thirty-five.
No-neck Vanessa filled the sudden silence. She was sitting beside North of England – an easy intimacy had developed between them – and she said she knew lots of suicides, having grown up in Niagara Falls. The year they stopped the American falls to make repairs, they found all sorts of bodies in among the rocks. It draws people, she said. Well, said North of England, you know it will work, for one thing; why die alone in a motel room when you can step into a river and be swept over the side? And, of course, Harriet added, they want to make a point of their unhappiness.
You
think you’re happy now, you newlyweds, but just you wait.
Jack Frame read his piece next, sticking to his own first sentence. “‘My brother the egghead hated the smell of eggs so much he stayed at the top of the stairs and held his nose during breakfast. Then he married Debbie, whose breasts looked like fried eggs. “No,” he’d say every morning, “Not sunny side up. I can’t face the look of them twice in one day.” His kids called him
Egg-beater. After she was institutionalized, they called their mother Scrambled.’”
“That’s not funny,” said Cheerio-woman.
One summer, Jack Frame and his first wife had a small trailer in the woods north of Montreal, rounded and old, fitted out so neatly that when Harriet entered it she thought, This is what I’ve been looking for. And she didn’t want to leave. But the next time she went, in place of the neatness were buckets to catch the drips, and an all-pervasive mess. Jack always spread himself sloppily wide, even as he went to almost magnificent lengths to be attentive.
In Dinah’s room he sprawled in the chair beside her bed and peeled a grapefruit, one of a box of twenty-four huge, beautiful grapefruits he had brought to her. With thick-fingered dexterity, he divided one of the grapefruits into sections and shared it with Dinah, then Harriet. Dinah asked in her croaky voice if either of them knew who got the grapefruit in the kisser in that movie with James Cagney.
“The Public Enemy,”
said Jack. “Not Joan Blondell, the other one.” He used his upper lip to work some grapefruit from between his teeth. “Mae Clarke,” he said.
Harriet tried to think of some light remark, to lift Dinah’s spirits, but her mind was blank. “What happened to Rod Steiger in Dr.
Zhivago?”
she asked finally.
“Murdered,” said Dinah.
“He was good in that role,” said Jack.
Harriet said, “He was the
only
good thing in the whole movie. I mean, apart from Julie Christie.”
She had been trying to figure out what to tell Jack about his manuscript. In the past she had softened her damning words with some skill, or so she liked to think, focusing on the questions his novels addressed and feeling like a low-level diplomat keeping her nose clean. But this time was different. As they left Dinah’s house he said to her, and his voice was brusque, “If you’re not going to read my manuscript, just say so. I’ll show it to Dinah.”
And in her mind the small, perfectly outlined trailer receded into the distance like a child’s toy. This was the real world, this vast canyon that opened wide between people, no matter what you did.
That night the phone rang. She went into the hallway to answer it, but no one was at the other end.
W
hen Harriet told Kenny and Jane about the tumour in Dinah’s lung, she explained that Dinah’s mother was living with her now, and Jack Frame visited all the time, with flowers. It was dinnertime. They were at the table and Kenny and Jane stopped eating.
“How is she feeling?” asked Jane.
“Tired. Very tired. But they’ll treat her. They’ll do more tests and she’ll probably have an operation and then radiation and chemotherapy.”
“That’s terrible,” Jane said.
Harriet began to say more about her fatigue, the size of the tumour, her doctors, but Kenny interrupted. “Can’t we talk about something else?” And he stood up abruptly and left the table.
But they couldn’t talk about anything else. Next it was Fiona, who felt an uncomfortable pain in her chest, and later in the evening fainted. It turned out to be pneumonia. Harriet went to see her in the hospital and Fiona put her wonderful, tiny hands around her face.
Their beautiful snowy backyard didn’t have a single child’s footprint. Children weren’t drawn outside to that beautiful surface, and parents didn’t force them. It was 1997, and all the children were inside all winter long. Other changes: no one shook a mop outside, winter clothes came in riotous colours, cars started with ease.
Christmas was coming. Old Martin would leave Sarnia at midnight and pull in to Harriet and Lew’s at six in the morning, a man who loved to go from A to B and to wake you up. Gladys would go to their youngest, Owen, who was no longer speaking to Harriet. It touched her to see how hard her parents were trying. They would not disown their children, neither would they favour one over the other, and that included Owen. The little shit.
Lew was talking to himself more and more. She heard him two rooms away castigating himself for forgetting the antibiotics he was supposed to take prior to a dental appointment to protect his heart. It unnerved her, the agitated way he spoke to himself.
It was so different from the unfailingly calm way he spoke to everyone else.
Then one night, early in the second week of December, she woke up to the sound of Kenny’s bare feet on the floor – toilet seat raised – lowered – his return to bed. And then his laughter. He was laughing hysterically, laughing with enormous uncontained glee. She lay still for a moment, having only just managed to fall asleep, or so it felt. Then, when the laughter continued, she got up and went to his room.
He was under the covers, curled up on his side. She bent over him and kissed his head, which smelled like it needed a good wash. Boy smell. Everything’s all right, she murmured, and he rolled on his back and laughed in her face, although she knew he was sound asleep. Too much excitement, she thought. Too many worries. He was eleven years old now, and overtired, overexcited, worried by what had happened at school – the sudden good luck turning to sudden misfortune. He kept laughing and he laughed so hard that once or twice she thought he was sobbing. But no, it was more laughter. She pulled up his covers, discovered the sheet twisted around his knees, straightened it, and tugged everything up. Left him in stitches.
In bed Lew asked, “Is he laughing or crying?”
“Laughing.”
“Is he in bed?”
“He’s in bed. Sound asleep.”
But carrying on like Grace Poole, she thought. And she imagined him going off his head in the trenches.
He had come home from school and immediately she’d known that something was wrong. He let his knapsack fall to the
floor and his
hi
in answer to hers was flat and dejected. He said, “Do you want to hear the tragic thing that happened to me?”
“You went to the Aviation Museum. I’m sorry. I forgot to send money along.”
But he borrowed from a friend. Three dollars. The chips in the vending machine cost $1.10. He put in a toonie and got two loonies. Put in a loonie and got not nickels and dimes but four loonies.
“Congratulations.”
“Wait,” he said.
Everybody gathered around him and tried to do the same thing, but they lost their money in the machine. In the meantime, with his new-found wealth, he gave James one dollar, bought a Coke for two dollars, bought chips for one dollar, and lost a dollar. Then the boys who had lost their money in the machine returned with the teacher, who told him he had to pay the boys for their missing money.
And so Harriet had sat down beside him and figured out the transactions on a piece of paper, saying, first, “The thing to never forget is that vending machines fuck you up. First parents, then teachers, then vending machines.” She discovered when it was all written down that if he paid Robert the one dollar he lost, and another boy the two dollars he lost, he would come out even. It was all right.
He cheered up. They’d gone over to see Dinah and he told her the whole story. He sat at the foot of her bed and rattled on, full of gestures, his hands as long and beautiful as Gary Cooper’s when he held the reins in
High Noon
, his thin, young back curved, the muscles in his neck strained. Then, as suddenly, he ran out of steam.
Ida came to the rescue. She took him downstairs and served him apple pie. A Mrs. Smith’s, a tad burnt, and curdled milk in the small pitcher, but Kenny drank Pepsi so it didn’t matter. He ate three pieces of pie he was so eager to please, and almost passed out. Then he demolished most of a bowl of green grapes, except for the few he fed to Buddy. Then lost himself in
People
magazine.
Upstairs, Dinah said sadly, “He’s changing.”
“Changing?”
“Haven’t you noticed? He doesn’t talk like he used to.”
“He talks a lot.”
“Not like he used to.”
Harriet thought he had done so well, and felt hurt on his behalf. Dinah expected too much. Too much from a boy who was shocked by the change in her: her colour, fatigue, decline. “He’s growing up,” she said, and shrugged and let it go. But she thought he was the same boy, of limited but intense interests, who could read the same book repeatedly, watch the same movie repeatedly, stay close to home indefinitely – clear in his attachments, and open about them: as demonstrative as ever.
Dinah felt her take it the wrong way and was too tired to set her straight. But she could see it, even if his mother couldn’t: the beginning of Kenny’s drift into shy adolescence.
On the sidewalk Kenny said to his mom, “Do you believe there’s life after death? I don’t mean angels. I don’t believe in that. But being able to read?”
That night his stomach ached, but it was different from nervousness; it was a real ache. His mom told him to go to the bathroom. Then, when he came back still clutching his stomach, to lie on his back, to rub his tummy with his hand, this way; to
think about Christmas. Too much pie, she said. Then added, “Remember, we put all your worries in the hallway. Everything is going to be all right.”
Even though it was dark, she saw him relax. His body eased a little as he lay there. That much she could make out. But what does it mean, she wondered,
everything is going to be all right?
And why does it have so soothing an effect? It must mean that deep within us we have reservoirs of calmness we can draw upon, since everything, as we know, is never all right.
“Put your worries into my hands,” she said.
But this was less satisfactory. First, her joined hands couldn’t hold much. The worries were bound to spill through her fingers, or over her wrists. Second, it was coy: stupidly literal, yet not literal enough. If she managed to hold all of his worries without spilling them, and took them into the hallway, they would still be in the hallway. Lurking outside his door. Pressing to get back in.
No, she would have to take them into herself. So this time she’d given him her left arm to electrocute.
F
iona was recovering at home. Bill Bender looked after her, and a nurse came every day, a very fine nurse, she said, who made her a laxative of fruit and senna. She recognized the bitter
childhood taste of the senna through the nurse’s mixture of apricot and prunes. ‘In childhood’ the mixture had been prunes, figs, raisins, and senna. A spoonful each morning.
She looked older and even more pushed over, in a sweater and pleated grey skirt, her hair more windblown and white, her old translucent skin unpowdered. She used a mixture of Vaseline and baby oil on her skin, rubbing it on and wiping it off with a cloth; something she learned on a visit to France, she said. I’ll tell Dinah, said Harriet.
On the table beside Fiona, in a stack, were a Russian grammar and dictionary, and copies of Chekhov and Akhmatova in Russian and English. Old Buster lay asleep at her feet. Harriet always found it restful here, away from her own study, which was so chaotic with papers and the wrong light. It revived her, seeing the arrangements Fiona made of her person, her furniture, her walls and plants and windows. The house was warm, the air biscuity-smelling; every armchair had a footstool and every side table had a lamp. Bill Bender served tea on a tray, then read aloud one of Akhmatova’s poems. It was the one about letting “the terrible stranger” into your house. When he finished, Harriet said, “A terrible visitor is coming to us in January.”
Fiona said, “In this case, the terrible stranger was death.”
“Yes,” said Harriet.
Bill poured more tea and Fiona returned to the subject of her dedicated nurse. “Dedication not romance,” she said, “is what drives the nurse in
The English Patient.”