A Bird in the House (22 page)

“Just like old times,” I remarked one evening. “Remember how he was with Aunt Edna?”

“Now, now, dear,” my mother said, torn between a desire to sympathise with me and a feeling that family skeletons were never to be paraded in front of outsiders. “Well, if you must know, I do remember – who could ever forget it? But we mustn’t forget that he’s an old man.”

“Heck, he was never any different that I can recall,” I said.

“Well, just try,” my mother said, and I was reminded, as I often was with her, of Grandmother Connor, who could not bear scenes either.

That evening was different from other evenings which Michael had spent in the Brick House. Roddie was in bed, my mother was writing letters at the mahogany desk in the dining room, and Michael and I were sitting on the huge shell-shaped chesterfield in the living room. My grandfather emerged from the basement, winding his watch with obvious intent.

“Aren’t you folks ever going to sleep?” he demanded. “You plan on sitting up all night, Vanessa?”

“It’s only eleven,” I countered. “That’s not late.”

“Not late, eh?” Grandfather Connor said. “You’re still going to school, you know. You need your rest. These late hours won’t do you no good. No good at all.”

He glared at Michael, who edged a little away from me.

“If Mother doesn’t mind, I don’t see why you should,” I said.

“Your mother’s got no sense,” Grandfather Connor declared.

I had argued away at my mother over every possible facet of our existence, but I did not recall any of this now.

“She’s got plenty of sense,” I cried furiously. “She’s got a darned sight more than you’ve ever had!”

My grandfather looked at me with dangerous eyes, and all at once, I was afraid of what he might say.

“You ought to know better than run around with a fellow like this,” he said, his voice even and distinct and full of cold rage. “I’ll bet a nickel to a doughnut hole he’s married. That’s the sort of fellow you’ve picked up, Vanessa.”

I jumped to my feet and faced him. Our anger met and clashed silently. Then I shouted at him, as though if I sounded all my trumpets loudly enough, his walls would quake and crumble.

“That’s a lie! Don’t you dare say anything like that ever again! I won’t hear it! I won’t!”

I ran upstairs to my room and locked the door. My mother went into the living room and quieted my grandfather somehow. I could hear her apologising to Michael, and I felt the enormity of the task she was having to try to deal with. Then Grandfather Connor came stamping upstairs to his bedroom, and I went down again.

“It’s okay, Nessa,” Michael said, putting an arm around me. “Don’t worry. It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”

Nevertheless, the next time he had a weekend leave, he did not come to the Brick House. He did not write or phone that week, either.

“It’s just the same as it used to be with Aunt Edna,” I stormed to my mother. “Remember the men
he
drove away from her? Until Wes, nobody kept coming around for long.”

“It wasn’t really that way,” my mother said. “A man isn’t driven away that easily, Vanessa. Don’t worry. Maybe Michael’s got flu or something.”

It was December by this time, and flu was rampant. I told myself this was the reason I hadn’t heard from him. Then I got flu myself. I got it at the worst possible time, for there was a dance at the South Wachakwa camp, and two buses were taking girls from Manawaka, suitably chaperoned. Mavis
would be going, and all the others, but not me. I coughed and felt nauseated and wept with self-pity.

The next day Mavis came to see me after school.

“Don’t go too close, dear,” I could hear my mother saying in the front hall. “She may still be infectious.”

“Oh, it’s okay, Mrs. MacLeod,” Mavis said. “I’m not very susceptible.”

She came up to my room and sat down on the chair beside my dressing-table. She did not look like herself. She looked anxious and – what?

“Mavis – what’s the matter? How was the dance? Did you see Michael?”

“Yeh,” she said. “I saw him, Nessa.”

Then she told me.

Michael had been with a fairly pretty brunette with a fancy hair-do. When Mavis said
Hi
to him, the girl asked to be introduced, and then she introduced herself. She was Michael’s wife. She had come from Vancouver to visit him, a surprise visit. Michael’s parents had paid her train fare. She couldn’t stay at the camp, so she was staying at the Queen Victoria Hotel in Manawaka for a week. Michael was getting over as often as he could, which wasn’t half often enough, she had said, laughing. He seemed to have to sneak in and out of Manawaka like a criminal, she had said, and wasn’t the Air Force crazy? Mavis had replied yes, very crazy, and had walked away.

“Nessa – I’m sorry,” Mavis said. “I mean it.”

I believed her. We had known each other all our lives, she and I, and from grade one onwards we had often quarrelled and been rivals in every way. But we cared about one another. She really was sorry. If there had been anything she could have done to help, she would have done it. But there was nothing.

I did not tell my mother what had happened. From my general demeanor and from the disappearance of Michael she gathered enough.

“Vanessa,” she said hesitantly one day, “I know you won’t believe me, honey, but after a while it won’t hurt so much. And yet in a way I guess it always will, to some extent. There doesn’t seem to be anything anybody can do about that.”

As it happened, she was right on all counts. I did not at the time believe her. But after a while it did not hurt so much. And yet twenty years later it was still with me to some extent, part of the accumulation of happenings which can never entirely be thrown away.

In those months that followed, I hated my grandfather as I had never hated him before. What I could not forgive was that he had been right, unwittingly right, for I did not believe for one moment that he had really thought Michael was married.

I was frantic to get away from Manawaka and from the Brick House, but I did not see how it was going to be possible. To take a business course would not have been too expensive, but I thought I would make a rotten secretary. When I applied to the women’s Air Force, they told me they had enough recruits and advised me to continue my education. How? On what money? When I had finished high school, however, my mother told me that I would be able to go to university after all.

“Now don’t fuss about it, Nessa,” she said, “and for mercy’s sake let us not have any false pride. I’ve gone to Patrick Irwin at the jewellery store and he says the MacLeod silver and Limoges will fetch about three hundred dollars.”

“I won’t,” I said. “It’s not right. I can’t.”

“Oh yes you can,” my mother said blithely, “and you will. For my sake, if nothing else: Do you think I want you to stay here for ever? Please don’t be stubborn, honey. Also,
Wes and Aunt Edna can contribute something, and so can your Aunt Florence and Uncle Terence.”

“What have you done?” I cried. “Canvassed the entire family?”

“More or less,” my mother said calmly, as though the tigress beneath her exterior was nothing to be surprised about. “Father is also selling some bonds which he’s been hanging onto all these years.”

“Him! How did you do that? But I’m not taking a nickel of his money.”

My mother put a hand on my shoulder.

“When I was your age,” she said, “I got the highest marks in the province in my last year of high school. I guess I never told you that. I wanted to go to college. Your grandfather didn’t believe in education for women, then.”

So I went. The day I left for Winnipeg, Wes and Aunt Edna drove me to the bus station. My mother did not come along. She said she would rather say goodbye to me at home. She and my brother stood on the front steps and waved as Wes started the car. I waved back. Now I was really going. And yet in some way which I could not define or understand, I did not feel nearly as free as I had expected to feel.

Two years later, when I was beginning my third year at university, I got an abrupt phone call from Manawaka.

“Vanessa?” my mother’s voice, distant and close, came over the crackling wires. “Listen, honey, can you come home? It’s Father. He’s had a stroke.”

I got the first bus back to Manawaka. By the time I arrived, he was dead. He had lived nearly ninety-four years.

My grandfather’s funeral was the first I had ever attended. When Grandmother Connor died and when my
father died, I had been too young. This time I had to go. I was twenty. I could no longer expect to be protected from the bizarre cruelty of such rituals.

Before the funeral, I kept thinking oddly of the time when my Great-Uncle Dan died. I hadn’t attended that funeral, either, but it was one I wouldn’t have minded going to. Dan had never ceased being a no-good, a natural-born stage Irishman, who continued even when he was senile to sing rebel songs. For years Grandfather Connor had virtually supported him. His funeral must have been quiet and impoverished, but in my head I had always imagined the funeral he ought to have had. His coffin should have been borne by a hayrack festooned with green ribbons and drawn by six snorting black stallions, and all the cornets and drums of the town band should have broken loose with “Glory O, Glory O, to the Bold Fenian Men.”

What funeral could my grandfather have been given except the one he got? The sombre hymns were sung, and he was sent to his Maker by the United Church minister, who spoke, as expected, of the fact that Timothy Connor had been one of Manawaka’s pioneers. He had come from Ontario to Manitoba by Red River steamer, and he had walked from Winnipeg to Manawaka, earning his way by shoeing horses. After some years as a blacksmith, he had enough money to go into the hardware business. Then he had built his house. It had been the first brick house in Manawaka. Suddenly the minister’s recounting of these familiar facts struck me as though I had never heard any of it before.

I could not cry. I wanted to, but I could not. When it became compulsory to view the body, after the accepted custom, I had to force myself to my feet. I had never looked upon a dead face before.

He looked exactly the same as he had in life. The same handsome eagle-like features. His eyes were closed. It was only when I noticed the closed eyes that I knew that the blue ice of his stare would never blaze again. I was not sorry that he was dead. I was only surprised. Perhaps I had really imagined that he was immortal. Perhaps he even was immortal, in ways which it would take me half a lifetime to comprehend.

Afterwards, we went back to the Brick House. Wes did not drink, but he had provided himself with a mickey of rye.

“C’mon,” he said. “This’ll do all of you good.”

“I’m not saying no,” Aunt Edna replied. “How about you, Beth?”

“I guess so,” my mother said. “I feel as though I’ve been put through a wringer.”

“You know something, Beth?” Aunt Edna went on. “I can’t believe he’s dead. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

“I know what you mean,” my mother said. “Edna – were we always unfair to him?”

My aunt swallowed a mouthful of rye and ginger ale.

“Yes, we were,” she said. “And he was to us, as well.”

I finished my drink and then I went outside. The old stable-garage had not been entered by anyone in a long time. Probably the key to the padlock on the door had been lost years ago. I got in through the loose boards in the loft, as I had done when I was a child. It was not so simple now, for I was neither as skinny nor as agile as I had been when twelve.

The MacLaughlin-Buick had altered. Its dark brown paintwork had lost its lustre. The beige and brown striped plush of the seats had stiffened and faded. Rust grew on it like patches of lichen on a gravestone.

I wondered what the car might have meant to him, to the boy who walked the hundred miles from Winnipeg to
Manawaka with hardly a cent in his pockets. The memory of a memory returned to me now. I remembered myself remembering driving in it with him, in the ancient days when he seemed as large and admirable as God.

Twenty years later, I went back to Manawaka again. I had not been back in all that time, and I sensed that this would be my last sight of it, for there was nothing to take me there any more. Everything had changed in the family which had been my childhood one, but now I had another family and my own elder child was already fourteen. After my grandfather died, my mother had sold the Brick House and moved to Vancouver. My brother had grown up and married and moved once again. Wes Grigg had been transferred to Nova Scotia, and Aunt Edna’s letters were full of the old indomitability.

My mother had died. She was buried in the Manawaka cemetery under the black granite stone of the MacLeods, beside Ewen, her husband and my father, who had died so long before her. Of all the deaths in the family, hers remained unhealed in my mind longest.

I drove out to the town one day, when I was visiting in Winnipeg. I went alone. It would have no meaning for anyone else. I was not even sure it would have any meaning for me. But I went. I went to the cemetery and looked at the granite and the names. I realised from the dates on the stone that my father had died when he was the same age as I was now. I remembered saying things to my children that my mother had said to me, the clichés of affection, perhaps inherited from her mother.
It’s a poor family can’t afford one lady. Many hands make light work. Let not the Sun go down upon your wrath
.

I did not go to look at Grandfather Connor’s grave. There was no need. It was not his monument.

I parked the car beside the Brick House. The caragana hedge was unruly. No one had trimmed it properly that summer. The house had been lived in by strangers for a long time. I had not thought it would hurt me to see it in other hands, but it did. I wanted to tell them to trim their hedges, to repaint the windowframes, to pay heed to repairs. I had feared and fought the old man, yet he proclaimed himself in my veins. But it was their house now, whoever they were, not ours, not mine.

I looked at it only for a moment, and then I drove away.

A
Bird in the House
is a portrait of the artist as a young girl, the child in the process of becoming a writer. With this “fictional autobiography” Margaret Laurence offers a moving and enlightening account of her own emotional and intellectual development and describes with stunning accuracy the ways in which the creative temperament evolves. We are indebted to authors like Laurence who can tell us about
how
a child chooses to become a writer and the ways in which time and place influence that choice; we need this information in order to understand the creative process. And here, in these eight beautifully crafted stories, Laurence ensures that we share their insights.