A Good House (23 page)

“No, she didn’t tell me,” Patrick said. “And no, I didn’t ask her. No one is asking her. Except Mary, who had to take a large load of abuse for her trouble, which she did not in any way deserve. Not from Daphne or anyone else.” He was not going to go on much longer with this. He was going to pull the discussion up out of this shitheap. Practising law, he was required to keep clients focused, disciplined, well away from the murky, useless, self-indulgent talk
that could waste hours of his time and truckloads of their money. He was required to keep them firmly concentrated on what the law allowed and he was extremely good at it.

“She won’t have me,” Murray said. “Not now or any time soon.”

“And if she’s got a kid, nobody’s going to be having her. I don’t think you two realize what you are playing at. This kind of mindlessness has repercussions all the way down the line.”

“And when did you get to be the great moral centre of our lives?” Murray asked. “You must be a busy man…”

“You can’t expect non-reactions all around,” Patrick said. “Dad isn’t exactly jubilant.”

“Margaret will be able to help Bill with it,” Murray said.

“Jesus,” Patrick said. He used his fork to lift the overcooked asparagus and drop it onto his side plate. “Everyone depends on good old Margaret. There’s no escape. Almost for as long as I can remember. Almost that long.” He scraped the sauce from his veal, turned it over to check the other side. “And she’s always right in there, ready and willing to decide what everybody thinks. Christ. As if it’s been agreed she’s got some kind of wisdom. Which she does not have.” He had cut a slice of his veal but it stayed on his fork.

“Margaret’s only solution is to smooth things over,” he said. “Make the phone calls, smooth things over, clean out a cupboard or two, and build a stack of salmon sandwiches. And then assign her little jobs to keep us busy, in case we might want to articulate what’s on our own God damned minds.”

“That sounds a bit like hatred,” Murray said.

Patrick leaned back from his dinner. “I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone and certainly not to you,” he said. “We should have been left alone longer after my mother died,” he said, making his summation. “It should have taken a lot longer.”

“I have always thought Margaret was a bloody saint,” Murray said.

Patrick counselled himself, swallowed the words sitting ready to go at the back of his throat. He offered instead a calmer, “I have always thought her moving into our lives was perhaps not entirely altruistic, not without significant and obvious benefit to Margaret herself. And if my understanding is correct, you don’t get to be
declared a saint unless you’re dead. It’s my mother who is dead,” he said. “Do you remember any small part of how deathly…?”

“Why should you be the only one who remembers?” Murray asked. He hadn’t stopped cutting his veal. He hadn’t stopped eating and he wasn’t about to. “I was there. You haven’t got a lock on it.”

“Do you know what she said to me after Daphne fell?” Patrick asked. “After all the surgery and the wires and the clamps, when it became obvious the price Daphne was going to have to pay and still she refused to even cry a little, to even let on that something serious had happened to her?”

“I know what she said to me,” Murray said.

“She said it had to stop at Daphne’s jaw,” Patrick said. “Right there. She said if I went through life blaming myself, it would only make things that much worse. And that I was to take care of her, that Paul couldn’t do it because he didn’t have the right kind of heart, Paul had her own soft heart. She said I had exactly the kind of heart Daphne would need.”

Hearing this, Murray remembered some of the other things that had been said in that kitchen, in that living room. And he felt a bit cheated. He wished he could find someone right then and there to ask precisely what kind of heart he had. Maybe the waiter would know. But of course there was no one to ask, not any more. The goodness Sylvia had dreamed up and assigned to him at the kitchen table, her generosity in assigning it, would have to do him. And it had done him. It was probably the reason the boy he’d been had gone there, as if he’d known if he just hung around long enough, Sylvia would give him his goodness.

“Listening to you,” he said to Patrick, “I can hear something close to her actual voice. That’s what she understood, you know, when she was dying, that we choose our own words. That we make what we say. We own what we say.”

Patrick was spent. Maybe it was just a combination of the August heat and the Scotch, but he’d had enough. He could feel his body tightening up, and as he concentrated on relaxing the muscles in his back, he wondered if this rummaging around in the muck for something that might be called true, this spilling your guts, your
unsightly guts, was what women did, what girls and then women did, when they huddled together to listen to each other with their rapt, intimidating exclusivity. He wanted it over and done.

But he was cornered. He believed he had very little choice. If he was Murray’s friend, and he was sure of only that, it would not be humane to leave the question unasked. “What did she say to you?” he said.

“She said, ‘You’ll have to take your lead from Daphne,’” Murray said. “She said, ‘You and I are the only two people who know how much you care for her.’ She said she believed things would be all right in the end.”

“So this is your ‘in the end’?” Patrick asked. “Daphne and her illegitimate baby here with us and you off somewhere else living your normal, busy, sophisticated life?”

“I trust her to know what she’s doing,” Murray said. “Do you remember when she used to call herself ‘dee-formed’?”

“Without even trying,” Patrick said. “I hated it. Her jaw is wrong but it’s not that wrong.”

Murray laid his knife and fork across his empty plate. “She needs more time because things like this go slower for her. She knows that. We know that. But she seems to be ready to take the time. And she wants my kid with her while she’s doing it.” He pulled his cheque-book from the pocket of his leather jacket. “I’ll leave you with a good chunk of money,” he said. “I can’t be writing cheques to her. I don’t want you to tell me how much she should have, she can have whatever she wants, but if you would administer the payments…?”

“Fine,” Patrick said.

Murray was leaning forward on the edge of his chair now, writing his cheque. His joy was apparent in his still very serious face, in the shoulders hunched confidently across the table. He folded the cheque and handed it over. “Maybe you could just be happy for us?” he asked.

Patrick looked at Murray’s long-fingered hands, which were open, palm-up, in the middle of the table. He was trying to think, Maybe there is nothing to lose here. He was trying to look at Murray fairly, as a man in a great heaving mess, as a troublesome,
irksome, loyal man. “Be very careful with Charlotte,” he said. “It can be pretty rough on women. Even when it’s what they want.”

“Could you bring yourself to say something good about this?” Murray asked.

“We will make sure they’re all right,” Patrick said.

Murray closed his hands, tightened his fists, and then opened them one more time. “Say, happy,” he said. “You don’t have to make a sentence. Just try the one word.”

Patrick drained his glass and put it down carefully on the tablecloth. He took one of Margaret’s deep breaths. “Happy,” he said. He searched the room and lifted his arm to get the waiter’s attention. “Ecstatic.”

C
HARLOTTE
had had enough long before she decided on Mike. She didn’t care that Murray was away much of the time because she had always known this would be the reality. She’d believed from the start that he would do well and that doing well would mean travel and moving from assignment to assignment, sometimes on very short notice.

She did care that when he did get the chance to be around for a while he was always and obviously preoccupied, preoccupied being just another word for absent, another way to be gone. There was a song, she couldn’t remember what kind of song or who sang it but she did remember the one phrase: “solid gone.” Somebody was solid gone.

He didn’t even seem to need sex much any more, not from her anyway, although she’d had some occasional evidence that her body could still, as it were, hold his attention. She supposed she instigated this intermittent sleepwalk coupling out of pride, for the opportunity to remind him that he was absenting himself from something that even he thought was exceptionally fine. There was no sadness in it. By this time she wasn’t a believer and neither was Murray.

What she had learned from Murray, and after learning it realized she had learned it late, was that a man’s physical attention, occasional or otherwise, should not be taken as hard evidence of anything. That wondrous, breakneck need that appeared to speak for something too complex for words, something beyond ordinary articulation and astonishing and touching in even the most mundane of men, spoke for nothing but itself. It was a need gratifying nothing but a need. This was the way it had been quietly and modestly explained to her when she was a disbelieving girl who had wanted with all her pumping heart for it to be otherwise, who had wanted the men she would
love to be exceptions to this shitty rule, to be absolutely her own. And it was the truth.

With Mike, she had adopted an entirely new attitude. She had decided it was safer to go in knowing. Knowing didn’t necessarily cancel the possibility of happiness because there was still a satisfying and surprising range of affection and fun and respect. Working with men, working seriously and productively with men, she had early on got wise to their deceptively relaxed drive for power, she had learned by watching just how they got what they wanted and came out clean. But all of that was nothing compared to understanding, at long last, how men loved.

Sometimes she wondered if she had stalled around with Murray, putting up with it, because she was terrified of the absolute vacancy she might feel living on her own. Something awful being better than something empty. But it didn’t matter now. It would be all right now because Mike was there, ready and willing and wonderfully able. Murray, of course, had never been in danger of feeling empty.

She had long since stopped being intimidated by the cast of characters that accompanied Murray into their marriage, or tried to. She’d started to refuse to go up there ages ago. When? After that failed Hallmark Christmas, in 1962? No, it was a bit later, out at the cottage, Dunworkin, it was the summer before the motorcade in Dallas, before Jackie Kennedy showed the world that sometimes a woman just wants to crawl out of the damned car. Anyway, it was soon after it became crystal clear that they expected her to make a gargantuan effort to get to know them, to warm up to them, to bend to them. That they expected her to stand at the sink and wash the fucking dishes. She was working a fifty-hour week in those days, for God’s sake.

Coming back to Toronto in the car with Murray after the last time she’d made one of her efforts, and she would have called her efforts gallant, anyone would, she had finally let her thoughts be known. She’d told Murray that while she could see they were nice people, they were just not particularly interesting to her. None of them. She had asked him to please explain to her why on earth he believed they were exceptional. Could he name anything at all? When they weren’t
breeding, the women worked, sure, but at only the expected jobs. The jobs you’d guess. And the men. Right, the men. They risked nothing. The biggest risk in all their lives was setting a place at the table for the minefield that was Meg, waiting to see what outrage she’d put them through, or Paul and Andy planting the damned corn, watching the futures market to see if in the fall they’d be simply rich or stinking rich. And the worst of it, the inescapable worst of it, was their perpetual, mind-boggling awareness of each other, their constant gatherings, their relentless, tedious assumption that they could rescue each other. That rescue was possible.

She had truly expected Murray to put up some defence. She assumed she’d hurt him. But he just shrugged his sloping shoulders, which she had loved then, oh, she had loved pretty much every inch of his bony body then, and kept driving.

His parents weren’t that bad. Mr. McFarlane was a kind of slow-moving, old-school gentleman and his mother, stuck in little old Stonebrook with no hope of release, had made a valiant effort to create a quiet, civilized life for herself. And Patrick wasn’t bad. She had been fond of Patrick. But there was no way to get near him without tripping over the rest of them. They were a mob, a tight little pack of yelping, nondescript, self-satisfied, what? Yokels? That was likely a bit cruel. Anyway. Anyway. All of it was ancient history and having Mike would soon make it dead history.

She had known Mike at work. He was a writer on her news team and they had been working almost side by side, slamming stories together, for nearly twelve years, had looked at each other perhaps a million times before that one-more-night-among-many when they’d all gone down to unwind in the bar. They were discussing Peter Finch’s performance in
Network
when they looked at each other differently. Mike was very, very bright and fun, tons of fun. He was a terrific gossip, had delicious, nasty stuff on lots of people and he loved to get down and dirty. But his primary attribute was that he did not automatically assume that beautiful women were dim and from her perspective this was a substantial attribute. He wasn’t any better looking than Murray but he was blond with a grey-blond beard and great clothes, great style. And he was
absolutely comfortable with himself, which made bed just so much better.

All the best people she had ever known, even or maybe especially the people who were not particularly good looking, had style and none of it was accidental. Contrary to most assumptions, style didn’t require a lot of time or even a lot of money. You didn’t have to look like Warren Beatty or Diane Keaton. You just had to decide to look like bloody someone, to behave like someone who counted in a world that counted.

When she’d poured Murray his drink and told him that she had been sleeping with Mike for a year, give or take, he’d had nothing to say except, “I’ve met him. He’s the one with the good teeth.” He had no accusations to heave. There was no yelling, no hard breathing that might dissolve into gloomy sobs and, thank heaven, no massive melodramatic pain rising up between them on the sofa, which was a very good thing because she really, really hated melodrama. Despised it. She could have got quite worked up if Murray had taken the thing in that direction, tried to make a production out of it. But he just set his drink on the table and stood up and left the townhouse. Like a man, she’d thought. He believes he’s walking out like a man. All she could think to say to his back was “Thanks, Murray.”

She supposed he would get himself to Patrick right smartly to begin his defence of the great McFarlane fortune. He would soon discover that she’d already been to a lawyer herself. He would soon be learning how to divide by two. Mike had almost nothing left because he’d had to split what she’d guessed was a substantially smaller amount of money when he left his wife, and since then, of course, every year, month after month after month, he was required to hand over child support. For most of the years of his marriage his wife had not worked “outside the home.” She had chosen the domestic life, home with the kids, home with the cookies. She had chosen to spend his money as if it were her own and seven years later she was still at it. “The bottomless pit” Mike called them when he was pissed off, when he once again found himself wanting something he couldn’t afford.

But that first wife had taken care of Mike’s paternal needs, so
there wouldn’t be any difficulty there, there wouldn’t be any unexpected hope there. Anyway, she was almost past it. In two quick months she would be forty years old and people would soon stop asking the dreaded, dreadful question. People would soon stop looking at her like some apparently vigorous houseplant in a pretty pot that refused to flower.

Mike’s children, whose nicely framed photographs sat on every flat surface in his apartment, lived year round with their mother and her new husband, really a fine guy, Mike said, usually, out in Victoria. The children would continue to come to visit of course. She had already met them several times. Not bad little people, quiet, polite, perhaps a bit terrified of her. But this was natural given the circumstances. The last time they’d seen them, in March when she and Mike had flown out to Whistler on a quick, impulsive ski trip, both girls were in desperate need of a good haircut but one of the boys seemed quite bright, which could be interesting.

D
APHNE
wasn’t surprised to get the phone call, although she had never once indicated any interest in the particulars and the few times Murray had seemed eager to talk about Charlotte, about his ridiculous marriage, she had stopped him cold. She expected him to stay married.

This wasn’t decency or anything close to it. It was because she was a grown-up, because she guessed, albeit without the benefit of direct experience, that the long-term investment of time and energy and of what she had always assumed to be good sex, although Murray was careful to deny it, would be very hard to cash in. Hard for both parties. Even in a ridiculous marriage.

She had heard lots of married people use the phrase
work it out,
and other, workmanlike phrases too:
wait it out, ride it through. It
being the thing that was never quite touched on. She’d been at enough weddings, although now that she was thirty-seven the regularity of these was diminishing, to be familiar with the childlike, skipping rhyme rhythms of the vows: in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse.

At least they had no kids. People used that phrase a lot too.

At least she did. Have a kid.

She was back to work full-time at the hospital now that Maggie had started grade one and she was glad to be weaning herself from Murray’s help a bit, finally. Although she had been pleased to cash the cheques when she needed the money. A woman with a child gets it both ways in several respects, more expenses and less income, more demands and less energy, more sorrow and more joy. More heart-wrenching sorrow and more inexplicable joy. Sorrow always when Maggie was hurt, not physically, that was pretty straightforward, a scraped knee, stitches here and there, but hurt in her trusting eyes, in her small trusting heart. And inexplicable, absolutely indescribable joy in her resolute accomplishments: walking, going to the bathroom alone for the first time, saying as she careened down the hall that it was private, setting the breakfast table for two, accumulating secret, treasured, junky things around her in her bedroom, drawing detailed pictures of three-storey houses and horses running wild on cloud farms, telling jokes to Grandpa Bill, saving them up to make him laugh and slap his knee.

Once when Maggie was small, just beginning to talk, to make herself understood, she had climbed up onto Margaret’s lap for a restful cuddle, and settling herself in, she’d turned and used her capable little hands to lift and fluff Margaret’s breast, like a pillow. Sally was there, she’d been about fifteen, and standing close behind them she had blushed with embarrassment for her mother. But Margaret allowed it, easily. She’d only laughed and said, “This kid’s going to do all right for herself.”

Still, even with all this, there had been days, many, when Daphne was what her own Grandma Ferguson would have called wearied, when a kind of lonely, godforsaken fatigue left her slumped in a chair, drinking cold tea, stunned. When she had to ask herself what she’d done. And why.

When Maggie first started talking, first started giving people names, without any prompting and maybe because she had been told that “uncle” was the word for the other men who sat for a long time and comfortably at Grandma’s table, she’d pointed to Murray
and named him uncle. As soon as she had it out, Daphne spoke to stop her. “Just Murray,” she told her.

“Because I’m not your uncle, honey,” Murray said. “Because I’m way better than an uncle.”

Patrick had kicked in immediately, claimed there was nothing in the universe better than an uncle. This made everyone and then Maggie laugh, which had been his determined intention. He was still the only one who knew. He had never told even Mary, who assumed the father was some married guy who had lied his way into Daphne’s affections or some other nondescript, irresponsible, shift-less jerk, same difference. Patrick didn’t argue with Mary and keeping it to himself eventually became like any other discipline. Once firmly decided, you just kept on.

He had made up his mind that if Maggie ever started to resemble Murray, as she some day might, he would go along with whatever Daphne said she wanted. If she decided then that the others could be told, fine. If not, equally fine. You didn’t invest your time bothering Daphne with rational argument or an appeal to common sense, not productively.

M
URRAY
was just back from Jordan. He was very brown and thin or at least more wiry, more angular than usual. And tired. But forty wasn’t old, how could it be? He had continued to aggressively speak up for overseas postings, particularly to the countries that were just beginning to be called Third World and which were crawling with creatures like himself, men excited and sometimes even amazed by climate and topography and architecture and the massive stench, the stupefying force of poverty and disease released by war. Men who were close to impotence, struck dumb by the relentless confusions of barbaric sensibilities, impaired by a limited tongue and stranded in their useless, indulgent assumptions. Once, hungry himself and filthy dirty and slightly wounded by a grapefruit-sized chunk of concrete that had glanced off his shoulder when he was running with a television cameraman from Spain out into the safety of an empty, bombed-out street, he caught himself believing for one quick second that war was the least of it. Why would these people
tolerate war, he wondered, these of all people? Of course such a question marked a man to be about as naive as a man could get. The people in these countries didn’t vote for what they had any more than they watched their children thrive in comfort or drank good water or sought proper medical attention for their own undeserved wounds. And what they endured in country after country was nothing more complicated than a few ruthless animals at the top who were not the pasty-white desk generals you’d get in a declared war but hard, fit, middle-aged men who were so silky smooth you’d think they’d been to charm school. Men who had found a dependable, foreign source of arms and who worked their charm, their magic, prompting the chaotic, anxious rage of thousands of younger men. And no resource anywhere was as renewable or as ready to be tapped as the rage of young men.