The Diviners (21 page)

Mrs. Crawley cooks mainly boiled cabbage and wieners, or boiled turnips and (very small) portions of bacon. With gobs of watery mashed potatoes. It isn’t very different from Christie and Prin’s house. Which is disappointing. Morag considers seeking another room. But how can she, after Mrs. Crawley has confided all that about her sex life, and so on? Also, they need the money. A dilemma. Morag knows she will dislike living here more and more as the winter clenches in, and will be unable to move.

If Mrs. Crawley were tough, hard-spoken and angry, it would be easy. It is her flaccid lack of fight which makes it impossible. As with Eva Winkler, whom in some ways she resembles. Morag gags inwardly at the weak, against whom she has few defences. But she resents and fears them.

All the same, Morag talks more with Mrs. Crawley than with any of the golden-appearing college kids. She knows they are not all golden, not all happy, not all inheritors of some as-yet-unspoiled Garden. She isn’t that stupid. She has seen the worse-off ones walking alone and quietly, or else trying to ingratiate themselves, clownlike, into the brazen multitude.
These walking wounded she avoids like the plague. It might be catching.

One day, walking the narrow cracked sidewalks from the end of the streetcar line to the Crawleys’ house, the bare lean board houses reminding her of Hill Street and the leaves still splendid with the last of the upblazing autumn, she hears the geese.

The Canada geese are flying very high up in their wide V-formation, the few leaders out in front, the flock sounding their far clear cold cry that signals the approaching frost. Going somewhere. Able to go, at will. Last year she saw them and thought
This time next year I’ll be away too.
Now she is away. Away is here. Not far enough away.

Morag watches, angrily grieving and loving, until the geese have passed over.

Winter, and snow of many textures. Hard-packed snow on Portage Avenue and the downtown streets, dirty from the trampling boots. Deep, dry snow, creaking underfoot on the ten-million-mile trek from streetcar to house. And on lawns and little-used roadsides, the drifts are three feet high, crusted and white like royal icing, and when you break through the crust, the snow underneath is light and powdery as icing sugar. Snow everywhere. Black bare tree boughs are transformed overnight into white glittering traceries, candelabra, chandeliers of trees, the sun lighting them as though from within. In the mornings, frost patterns on the bedroom window, painted by windbrushes. Beautiful, but bloody cold. The breath seems to freeze in your throat, and your lungs feel full of ice.

Morag’s room is so cold in the mornings she can hardly bear to snake slowly out of bed. The Crawleys’ furnace is not
efficient and Mr. Crawley does not stoke it sufficiently in the evenings, as Mrs. Crawley fears fire during the night. Morag would rather take the chance, and go out of life, if necessary, in a blazing splendour, gloriously warm. It is, however, not up to her. Taking a bath is a torture. Only those truly devoted to cleanliness would ever venture into the Crawleys’ tepid bath-water and steel-cold tub in midwinter. Morag is one of these (
what if I smell?
). The Crawley kids are not. Twice a week they scream and shriek as their mother exhaustedly forces them into the bath. The window is right beside the tub, and the storm-window does not fit properly. December seeps in.

Morag studies in bed, the dirty wine satin eiderdown drawn around her. Feels ill. Writes home (home?) to Christie, saying she has flu and will not be back in Manawaka for Christmas. Flu or cowardice?

Christie sends her a money order for five dollars. She cries, under the wine eiderdown, bitterly repentant. But does not change her mind. Reads
Paradise Lost
, sneezing.

Memorybank Movie: Ella

Morag is daring the world of the elect, those who run the college newspaper and who in the literary section print mainly selections from their own prose and poetry. Her story is concealed inside the first volume of Taine’s
History of English Literature
which she holds nonchalantly under her arm. In the
Veritas
office, she finds herself standing awkwardly beside a short rather stocky girl with auburn hair. The girl, who is Ella Gerson, is in Morag’s year but they have not spoken before. Ella is holding a copy of
Das Kapital
nonchalantly under her arm.

“I’ll bet,” Morag says, grinning, “you’ve got a poem or something stashed away inside
that
.”

Ella looks, at first, amazed. Then strikes a hand across
her forehead in what later comes to be known as the Sarah Bernhardt gesture.

“Good God!” she cries, although not so loudly that anyone else can hear. “My guilty secret has been discovered. How’d you know?”

Morag holds up Taine.

“Short story.”

“Oh. Well, hell, and I thought I was being so original.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of
Marx
,” Morag says admiringly.

“If you’d been me, with
my
mother, you would’ve,” Ella says.

They wait some more. Hoping to catch the eye or polite enquiry of one of the in-group. No dice. Cacophony surrounds them. Slender blonde girls with breasts bouncing under Shetland wool sweaters dash past bearing copy. There are cries of
Who’s gonna make up Page Five?
and other technical terms, which fail to impress Morag, as she understands their meaning. Should she offer her services? They’d laugh, probably, to hear about the
Manawaka Banner
. She thinks of Lachlan with a fondness she never felt for him when she was there. The
Veritas
editor, Mark Trilling, strolls past, pipe clenched in teeth, frowning in leonine fashion, as befits one in this high calling.

“Ah, the heck with it,” Ella says, snapping her fingers. “I’m gonna mail it in.”

“Yeh, me too, I guess,” Morag says. “I don’t trust the mail, though.”

They go to the coffee shop and brood over cups which neither inebriate nor cheer.

“You gotta begin somewhere,” Ella says.

“That’s just it.”

“Even if it’s only that crumby excuse for a paper.”

“Exactly. Well, they don’t know what they’ve just passed up.”

They both despise
Veritas
now, and will continue to do so until something of theirs is printed therein.

They show each other their work. Ella’s is a poem, part of a long narrative poem about the Jews in Europe during the war. Auschwitz. Buchenwald. It is written with such an openness of love and bitterness that Morag for a while can’t make it jibe with Ella’s flippancy in speech, which, she now sees, is as determined a cover as her own.

“Did you have relatives–”

“Yes,” Ella says. “But it would’ve been the same if I hadn’t.”

Ella does not live very far from Morag’s place, as it turns out. “Want to come over sometime, Morag? Your boardinghouse sounds like a whole load of shit.”

“I’d really love to come over. But my place–it isn’t so terrible. Mrs. Crawley’s okay, but just kind of defeated, you know.”

“Yeh. I know all right. Lumpen proletariat.”

When explained, the term seems unfair, in Morag’s view. She says so.

“Whatever gave you the idea I was fair, for God’s sake?” Ella shouts.

Then they both laugh. Morag tells–can she? she does, though–about Christie and Prin, and about the town. Some, anyway. It is a world which to Ella seems about as warm and inviting as living six feet deep in a snowdrift.

“How could you
take
it?” Ella asks.

“Tell me how I could do anything else.”

This is a point of view which Ella instantly recognizes.

“Yeh. That’s so. Let me read your story, now?”

Morag hands it over. As it is longer than a poem, the waiting period is prolonged. Morag smokes five cigarettes. In comparison with the reach of Ella’s poem, the story is pure unadulterated crap. She longs to snatch it back. But longs even more to know what Ella thinks of it. It concerns a young farmer during the drought, who nearly gives way to despair, but who finally determines to stay alive and to stay with the land.

“I think it’s good,” Ella says.

“No kidding?” Morag says hungrily. Then reality sets in once more. “The trouble is, I can see that the ending is kind of implausible, the way I’ve set it up, but I don’t know what to do about it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Implausible, nuts,” Ella says. “Lots of people did stay, didn’t they?”

“Oh sure, but–”

“The barns weren’t overcrowded with hanged farmers, were they?”

“Well, no, but–”

“It would have been more implausible,” Ella declares, “if you’d had him going through with the rope on the rafter bit.”

A friend for life, Ella. Even though Morag knows the story is badly flawed and suspects that Ella knows, too.

“You really think so?”

“Sure. Did you–I mean, did you ever know anyone like that, Morag?”

“No. It’s not based on anyone real.”

And yet, in a way, it is. She sees the distortion and sees why the story had to end this way. The child, in some way, although without realizing it, saving the father’s life. The father
going on living. Could it have ended any other way, the story? No. Anyway, the child isn’t her. She realizes almost with surprise that this is true. The child
isn’t
her. Can the story child really exist separately? Can it be both her and not her?

Ella is looking at her oddly.

“What’s the matter, Morag?”

“I–don’t know. Sometimes I get–well, scared. I don’t feel all that normal.”

Ella shrugs.

“So–who wants to be normal, anyhow?”

“I do,” Morag says with passionate conviction. “Oh Ella,
I
do. I want to be able to talk to boys the way they want to be talked to. Only I can’t seem to get the trick of it.”

“Boys like that are schmucks,” Ella says furiously. “But yeh, I know what you mean.”

“You too?”

“Yeh. I went out with this guy a coupla weeks ago, and I thought
Now this is It. Here is your opportunity, oh Ella bella.
So what did Ella the schlemiel do? Did she tell him how masterful and handsome he was? Not she. Oh no. She began talking in her winsome way about Marx’s theory of polarity. Why? Why? I’ll never see
him
again.”

“Well, then, why?” Morag is laughing, but not in mockery.

“I don’t know,” Ella says gloomily. “It just seemed so phoney, somehow, all that whole mutual flattery bit. And why should I pretend to be brainless? I’m not brainless.”

“I know,” Morag says. “And yet I envy girls like Susie Trevor so much that I damn near hate them. I want to be glamorous and adored and get married and have kids. I still try to kid myself that I don’t want that. But I do. I want all that.
As well.
All I want is everything.”

Ella strikes a theatrical wrist to her forehead. “Engrave it on my tombstone.”

Morag goes often to the Gersons’ house after this occasion. A small white-painted house, always full of people. Ella’s father died several years ago, and Mrs. Gerson now keeps on the bakery, working there during shop hours and coming back at nights to make dinner for her three daughters.

Mrs. Gerson is a tall strapping woman whose voice is brisk and bossy but also loving. She does not complain about the large amount of work she has to do. It never occurs to her that it
is
large. Her daughters are her life. She considers herself blessed.

“A nice house like this,” she confides to Morag, “I never thought I would have. You should only have seen the place where me and my husband lived when we first married, in Poland, that was. A hovel. I could tell you things.”

She stomps out, evenings, to left-wing meetings. If she can bring up her daughters to be socialists, she will not have lived in vain.

“Ella, she’s okay in that way,” Mrs. Gerson says, “but Janine and Bernice I sometimes doubt.”

The girls shout with laughter.

“Mumma, you wait until I marry a rich insurance man or like that,” Janine says, “and you won’t turn down a little luxury. A mink coat, maybe?”

“A mink coat, who needs it? I’d die of shame to be seen in such a thing.”

Ella is the middle daughter. Janine is at High School. Bernice is a hairdresser. Both Janine and Bernice, like their mother, have dark hair.

“Ella, can I ask you something?” Morag says.

“Ask. I’m inscrutable, but ask.”

“How come your hair is auburn? Did your father–” Laughter from the Gersons.

“Poppa would love that,” Ella says. “No. Bernice did it. It was supposed to turn out blonde. That was part of the Glamour Campaign, see? This new advanced technologically perfect method.”

“Such nonsense,” Mrs. Gerson sniffs. “I told her, you don’t like the colour God gave you? You think you can improve on it?”

Mrs. Gerson believes in God and Marx simultaneously, and is not dismayed by her daughters’ suggestion of disparity in such a dual faith.

“You don’t
dye
the hair,” Ella goes on. “You sort of bleach it. Only when Bernice got mine down to its basic element, here I was this colour.”

“I thought it was really lucky,” Bernice says. “Blonde would’ve only made you look cheap, anyway.”

“And who says I am so expensive?”

“Brat.”

But Bernice, queenly and twenty-three, is their oracle in the area of beauty. Bernice knows which shade of nail polish to wear with which colour of dress. Bernice knows perfumes and lipsticks and shampoos like she knows her own name. This is great, from Morag’s point of view, but she soon realizes that it has given Ella the feeling of being a hopeless incompetent. As Bernice prattles on about egg-and-lemon shampoos, the new Tropicoral lipstick and nail-polish set, and the best way of removing facial hair, Morag and Ella give each other the Sarah Bernhardt gesture, meaning in this instance, woe. They will not, they feel, ever attain the status of high priestesses at
Beauty’s Altar. They will, indeed, be lucky if they get even one foot inside the temple door.

“You’re crazy, both of you,” Bernice says disgustedly. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You could both be
gorgeous
if only you’d put your minds to it.”