A Good House (19 page)

Mrs. Wilson pointed them to separate bedrooms and brought towels and dry clothes, a sundress for Daphne and a pair of Mr. Wilson’s best shorts for Murray, telling them in a pleasant, straightforward way what fools they were. “Here,” she said, tossing them their towels, “get yourselves dried off, for God’s sake.” She gave them a few minutes and then knocked on the doors holding a plastic basket for their wet clothes. Daphne told Mrs. Wilson if she could please just have a garbage bag, that would be great, and then she went to the bathroom to fix her hair in the candlelight, to search her face for giveaway signs of joy. Murray went out to talk to Mr. Wilson, who was standing in the kitchen pouring the rye with his flashlight tucked under his arm.

The four of them carried their drinks to the fire in the living room, which was furnished much more formally than Dunworkin,
the sofa and chairs obviously just one generation off new, likely brought out from the house in London when a better suite there displaced them. The floor was carpeted and there was a new open kitchen with a breakfast bar. Several oil lamps had been lit and placed on stable-looking tables.

Earlier that afternoon, before they’d arrived at Dunworkin, Mary and Patrick had come to tell Mary’s parents about their honeymoon, about all the historical sights in Boston and the drive back through New York State, and after the Wilsons got Daphne and Murray settled into comfortable chairs with their drinks and a sincere assurance that they had both enjoyed the groom’s dinner just so much, travel was what they wanted to talk about now. They wanted to know had Murray had the chance to broaden his experience with travel? Had Daphne? They themselves had travelled a lot and hoped to do more of it now that Mr. Wilson could take some time away from work. They had been to Florida many times of course and twice to Europe, once to California, to Jamaica, to Banff, to Washington.

Murray was relieved beyond measure that there was nothing to do between the cracks of thunder but drink rye and listen, or appear to listen. He had thought about it so many, many times and now here it was. In all his imagining he had never once imagined it unexpected or clumsy or rushed, or on the rough cement floor of some anonymous cement-block shed in a banging storm. The metal roof above them had been so roaring loud he couldn’t hear or understand most of what she’d said to him, and because he was afraid to raise his voice in case someone heard and came to rescue them, he’d had to try to speak with his hands, had to let his hands say what he might have said if it had happened some place else, some place safe and quiet. Near the end, near the brilliant end of it, he understood that his hands were not moving kindly, they were not soothing her flesh and her bones and her muscles as he had imagined they would, given their chance. He was bruising her with questions, the questions being, Why does this have to come to me now? and, Why do you decide you want me now?

Daphne drank her rye and smiled her misaligned showmanship smile. She was not thinking about the trips she might make. She was
thinking about the sheet lightning that had filled the high shed window. In its intermittent flash she had seen that he was as fine as she’d discovered, just this evening discovered she had imagined him to be. She’d looked down at many men lying naked or nearly naked, bruised and broken and suffering or healing or dead. But this was a man as he was meant to be seen, and a man’s moving body, all bones and angles and shadows, was a lovely thing. She could feel his hands on her face and on her body, all over it and all over it again when they were finished, much harder when they were finished. And her body knew her mind. Her body had known enough to brace itself. Her mouth had gone to his skin, to the rain on his shoulders, to his damp belly, instinctively. She could no more have stopped this than she could in other times have stopped her aching arms from reaching for a sweet bundled infant or her mangled jaw from opening wide in unanticipated laughter.

When it had become clear that he should not be asked to wait any longer she had wrapped herself around him and he held her exactly as she wished to be held, and when he broke through into her it wasn’t hurt she felt at all. Or it was hurt with a fine new name.

And even so, even with all of this ringing absolutely true through her comforted, thankful body as she sat there watching the Wilsons’ fire and drinking their warming rye, when they’d finally got themselves hidden from the storm, safe under the eaves, when Murray asked her, “Did that happen?” she could only try to look at him squarely and say, “I might be the last person to ask.”

P
ATRICK
and Mary bought their house in 1964, the first spring after they were married. Mary had roamed north London with a real estate agent for two months before she decided on tree-lined Piccadilly Street and then it was just a matter of waiting and watching for one of the big old square-jawed houses to come on the market.

Most of their friends and certainly all of the men at Patrick’s law firm were buying out in the suburbs, big brick splits with two-car garages and bay windows, shake roofs and two fireplaces and lower levels to be finished soon with shag carpet and wet bars, but Mary had grown up in a once-modern fifties ranch over behind the university, every solid inch of which, the walls, the baseboards, the doors, the ceilings, had been painted a creamy off-white, and now for her own life she wanted some character. She wanted natural wood and high baseboards and thick plaster walls you could sink a nail into and deep windowsills and the muted, unobtrusive yellow brick that had been the preferred brick when the old part of the city was built. Although she would never have said so, the first time she saw Bill and Margaret’s white frame house, the house Patrick had grown up in, which was so much smaller, so much the lesser house, she decided that she liked it better than her own family’s. From the look of things, Margaret had neither the inclination nor the time for the pristine demands a woman could make on a house. She had moved in with Bill and his kids and more or less maintained what Patrick’s mother had begun. This was the kind of house Mary wanted for her own kids.

Because Patrick still had the last half of Alex McFarlane’s note to take care of, Mary’s father had loaned them the five-thousand-dollar down payment, telling them to go ahead and buy big, buy what they’d need down the line, because waiting was not nearly as wise
as it was assumed to be. Moving up was an extremely costly undertaking. He further advised that it would be worth their while to forgo holidays and a new car for a while in order to put every loose dollar they had against their mortgage. Somehow he knew what was coming, knew that the housing market was just on the brink of the kind of growth not seen since the years after the war. He was obviously disappointed to see his money sunk into such an old house but Mary told him she was convinced it would outlast the new houses being thrown up so fast on the outskirts of the city, and besides, the trees alone and the park just a few blocks away and the settled, closed-in feel of the street, these were the things she and Patrick valued. And Patrick’s office was so close he could walk and that would save them the expense of a second car, forever.

Mary was just pregnant with Stephen, didn’t even quite realize she was pregnant, when she got almost exactly the house she wanted and they asked one of Patrick’s colleagues to draw up the papers.

Bill and Margaret said nothing one way or the other about the choice of a house but when Bill saw that the kids were serious about the place on Piccadilly he did bring Archie Stutt in to look over the hot-water furnace and the wiring and the plumbing. Archie’s diagnosis was that the wiring was a bit suspect and should likely be tackled some time in the next five years, the plumbing, being copper throughout, was that much better than new and the old boiler could probably fire the
Queen Mary
across the Atlantic, if in fact the
Queen Mary
still existed.

After they signed on the dotted line, but before Paul came in with his half-ton to help bring over what little they owned from the apartment on Oxford, most of it cheap, leftover university stuff, Margaret and Mary stripped all the downstairs hardwood with a rented sander. Then they waxed and polished, both of them on their knees for long hours, their stiff joints screaming because Mary wouldn’t have urethane, which she said looked phoney. They went down to Kingsmills to pick out material for drapes, decided together on good understated linen that was neither in fashion nor out. Margaret didn’t offer to sew these herself, although she did find someone at home who was an experienced seamstress, to run them up.

A year later, after the drapes were hung and the floors buffed to a soft glow by the socks and slippers that moved across them, Margaret drove into the city more than she normally would have to watch Stephen while Mary took herself off to estate auctions to try to find the furniture she imagined filling all her rooms. Stephen was a good, pudgy baby, happiest when put on the kitchen floor with the pots and pans and a couple of big spoons. Sometimes Margaret brought Sally in with her for company, to dispel the hollow sound of the rooms that was caused, she knew, not just by the absence of furniture but by the extremely high ceilings that Mary liked so much. At nine, Sally appeared to have lost every ounce of her earlier maternal inclination, although she would agree to hold Stephen while Margaret spooned him his pablum. Usually Sally just wanted Mary to hurry up and get home and said so.

It took Mary three years to find all the big pieces she wanted and she was careful not to rush it, not to be swayed from her master plan, which she never did articulate to anyone.

Now they were almost a houseful. The boys were in the second biggest bedroom, Stephen up in the top bunk and John, who was born the day after Stephen’s third birthday, just recently coaxed into the bottom bunk. The crib had to be freed because at the end of March Mary had discovered she was carrying her last baby. If it was a girl, and Mary and her doctor both claimed to be sure this time that it was, she would be Rebecca. Rebecca Sylvia.

Patrick was working ten-hour days almost all the time and they hadn’t had a holiday since the big family trip to Florida two years earlier, just before John was born. If he’d stopped to think about it, Patrick would have had to say that he was exhausted but he was still only thirty-three and hungry for promotion, for the added income and the status and the responsibility, for the meat a man like him was expected to sink his life into. You didn’t get a promotion in a firm like his if you allowed yourself to appear tired. The walking to work helped. He believed it did. And often in good weather he donned sweats to jog the route he’d laid out for himself, changing it sometimes in response to traffic patterns, finishing off with the seven blocks to his office, cleaning up in the small men’s washroom
and changing into the suit and shirt and dress shoes he’d parked behind his office door. This routine was the source of edgy amusement for some of his colleagues, many of whom paid exorbitant fees to belong to a downtown gym that had a weight room and a sauna and a pool. While his jogging precluded his taking part in most of the jock talk and in the much more significant rounds of boasting about paying so damned much money for fitness, his thirty-minute run down the quiet morning streets, through the large, heavily treed central park, past the tank from the Second World War and the cannon from the Siege of Sebastopol and the larger-than-life soldier high on a concrete pedestal ignoring in perpetuity the larger-than-life woman reaching up to him, became an essential, head-clearing part of his day. Perhaps because it gave him his only privacy.

He did enjoy his noisy rituals with the boys, lifting their tough, squirming, slippery little bodies from the bathtub if he got home early enough, escalating their loud, goofy nonsense with his own at the breakfast table on stretched-out Sunday mornings. And he was content with Mary, who was not remotely like Sandra or any of the others he’d been with after Sandra. They did not very often have sex as he’d imagined a man and his wife might, on automatic, when they were tired at the end of a long day or just coming out of sleep in the privacy of early morning. Mary would do anything, go anywhere, but only when they had the assurance of an empty span of time, only after she’d been held for a long quiet time in his arms. And neither of them liked to talk as they waited for it to come to them, the peaceful energy that Mary in the middle of one long night had called their loving freedom, murmuring her satisfied and slightly smug conviction that, for her money, it was a far, far better thing than free love.

Except for the absence of a decent garage that might actually hold a car, he had come to like the house on Piccadilly and to like what Mary had done with it. The oversized armoires and the odd corner cabinets and the heavy little tables and the several reupholstered chairs you could fall asleep in took comfortable hold in the house and in their lives.

At their first cocktail party, which they gave the third year they were in the house, Patrick’s fifth year at the law firm, he’d overheard
one of the senior partners’ wives say to another senior partner’s wife, casually, that she could not imagine surrounding herself with someone else’s worn-out junk. But Patrick did not look to such women for any kind of guidance. He didn’t look to such women for anything. When they came to him at his office with their husbands, usually to have new wills drawn up or sometimes to sign the papers on a bigger house at a more prestigious address, he pulled their chairs out for them despising their little downtown suits, their immaculate puffed-up hair, their expensive assumptions, their second-hand confidence. When he passed those particularly gruesome women in his own narrow hall with its sconces and its dark oak staircase, which he hoped to be climbing until he was a very old man, they pretended they had not been heard and he almost laughed, but knew better of course. Their husbands were standing just inside the kitchen talking about Expo and the possible implications for international trade. Lifting their almost empty glasses in Patrick’s direction, they too pretended the women had not been heard. As he poured the Scotch for his superiors he wondered whether this little bit of awkwardness would help him at the office or hinder him. From what he’d seen, he guessed it could go either way.

It had been Patrick’s idea to add the screened-in porch at the back of the dining room. They’d replaced the wide window with double garden doors that, except for the hottest, muggiest days of high summer, were almost always wide open, May to September. Bill had found them an old wrought-iron patio set at a cottage auction, four chairs and a chaise that he’d carefully and thoroughly stripped and repainted white, driving up to Goderich with the cushions to have them recovered in the tough yardage used for boat cushions, realizing when he got there that he’d forgotten to ask Mary exactly what colour she wanted, deciding on his own that she would like the hunter green and she quite sincerely did, nearly as much as she liked Bill himself.

The addition of the screened porch required attention to the garden, which was small but nicely proportioned, with good afternoon sun. Patrick and Mary concluded together that the only things worth keeping were the red maple and the crab apple and a few of
the lilacs back near the garage. After Patrick and Paul cut down or hauled everything else out of the ground, the seven or eight too many lilac bushes and the walnut tree, which was dirty, and the old cedars, which had thinned and faded, the first order of business was a new wraparound euonymous hedge, for privacy. They left a good expanse of reseeded grass for the kids and built a sandbox close, but not too close, to the back door, drove out to the lake for a load of fine white play sand. They worked up the flower beds with topsoil and some of Paul’s Cadillac manure from the farm, put in a dozen peonies along the side and three climbing roses against the garage wall. They left the rest to Mary and she took her time with the perennials just as she had with the furniture. The first thing she did was paint the small garage door a dark cherry red to set off the roses, which would be white, which were by the seventh year of their marriage white and robust and almost glowing in the evening light when they sat with their drinks in the screened-in porch with Stephen and John at their feet, the boys revving their trucks in preparation for a big crash, their little mouths working hard, exploding with the sounds of carnage.

B
OTH
of Murray’s parents died in May of 1970. His mother suffered a quick, entirely unanticipated fatal stroke while she was standing over her stove grating cheese into a sauce for the broccoli and two days after her funeral his father was gone. He had been sitting alone on the brocade sofa watching Archie Bunker berate Meathead on “All in the Family” when he had a mild heart attack and soon thereafter a second attack that was called massive and which killed him.

Patrick had done their wills right after he joined his law firm. Mr. McFarlane told his own long-time lawyer at home that he wanted to give the will business to Patrick, just to help get him started, and this was understood as an ordinary gesture from one generation of men to another, a handing down. The McFarlane wills were not complicated. Everything to each other and then everything to Murray. The only exceptions were a bequest to the Anglican Church for new carpet and choir gowns and another larger bequest to the Cancer Society, because both of the McFarlanes assumed that
if they lived long enough, they would become familiar with one kind of cancer or another. Some of their oldest friends had died of it, quite miserably.

The day after his father’s funeral, a Saturday, Murray drove into London to Patrick and Mary’s house on Piccadilly, which he’d never seen, to be told what he expected to hear. His parents had always ensured that he understood clearly the specifics of their wills. They did this even when he was a child, to give him confidence, they said. Although neither of them would have shared it with anyone but the other, they had been, in their old age, slightly disappointed in Murray. This materialized in three ways: his mother’s worried judgement that he was foolishly and dangerously resistant to his God, his father’s proud disappointment that he had deliberately sought a career that took him so very far away from home, and their shared amazement at his choice of a wife. But their disappointment did not in any way interfere with what they had always privately called Murray’s birthright. Money, his mother said, was money.

After Mary had given Murray a brief tour of the house, and he did seem interested in the staircase and particularly in some of the cabinets, Patrick picked up both wills from the dining-room table and handed them over, explaining unnecessarily that because Mr. McFarlane had outlived her, his will negated his wife’s.