A Good House (25 page)

“Why have you never connected with someone else?” he asked. “Made a family for her that way? There must have been guys…”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked. “How could you think that such a thing would be possible for me?” She was looking out her window at the distant muddy Thames. “It’s you.”

“It’s me what?” he said.

“All right,” she said. “Okay.”

She had never said it. He believed she would never say it.

“We’ve got an hour before she gets home,” she said.

He stood and pulled her up out of her chair. “Maybe I should just figure out a way to make you very lonely,” he said. “Maybe I should make you sit and wait for what you think you want. Waiting can unsettle a person, you know. It can make a person ready to agree to anything. In desperation. Pathetic desperation. You should give it a try.”

“I don’t think either one of us is going to be lonely,” she said. “I think we’re going to be lucky. Same as always.”

“Lucky?” he said. He had not once associated this word with this woman. He reached to lay his fingers on the skin of her exposed throat, which was always warmer than he expected it to be. Then he quickly had her naked and she began to work on him, uncovering his narrow, fuzzy chest, unbuckling his belt to expose the sand dunes of his belly, which she would recognize blind.

“Lucky,” she said. “Think about it.”

He was watching her hands. “Are you saying this should happen now?”

“Probably,” she said. “It’s that time, or close. I feel quite fertile and you certainly appear to be.”

“What about your job?” he asked. “You just got back.”

“I wasn’t planning this,” she said. “I didn’t see how I would get the nerve to put it to you. I wouldn’t have asked if you hadn’t decided you were finished with Charlotte or, I guess more accurately, if Charlotte had not decided she has had enough of you. But now it seems, well, not unreasonable.”

“Only if you can tell me why it has to be me,” he said.

She looked out at the muddy Thames. “You can likely manipulate
me enough to make me say what you want to hear,” she said, lifting her head, lifting her hand to touch his mouth. “I think I can feel the words just on the tip of my tongue.”

She turned to lead him to the quiet of her bed. They had from the beginning got into the habit of quiet, perhaps because twice it had been required, perhaps for other, better reasons. On the way to the bed she was deciding that this time she would tell him what he wanted to hear. It was an easy word, she knew that now, having Maggie and wanting another, and it looked to be true.

“You are one crude woman,” he said, following her close enough to touch her again, to run a lonely finger down the deep furrow of her back, which made her go weak every time he did it, made her quiver, as if she had never before in her life been touched there, not like that.

T
HERE
were conversations about Daphne’s second pregnancy, full-blown conversations whose fitful purpose, whose work, was to find an acceptably humane context for unexpected or unacceptable behaviour. Bill and Margaret talked, Paul and Andy talked. The first time almost everyone had thought, well, anyone can make a mistake. And they had been more than willing, almost immediately eager, to fall in behind Daphne, to help her make it as right as it could be made for Maggie.

Maggie was beloved, there was no other word for it, and she had emerged a confident child. She was not particularly precocious, she did not constantly nag at the outskirts of adult life as beloved children sometimes do. She was just a relaxed little girl, easy inside her own skin.

Patrick knew again of course. He simply deepened his resolve, disciplined himself to speak carefully. Mary, almost ready to accept that she wouldn’t ever learn what was going on with Daphne, tried to undergo a change of heart.

Paul and Andy, who were wanting to rebuild some kind of social life now that they no longer needed a sitter, now that Meg had moved into the group home, had come in to London for an evening of drinks in the screened porch. After Patrick and Paul had each asked about the other’s work and exhausted their ball talk, recent
catches and hits and errors, questionable trades and undeserved salaries, Mary started to tell Andy about the strawberries she’d got her hands on, how small they were, how sweet, and at nine-thirty the women decided out of the blue to make up some freezer jam.

Patrick had been refusing to discuss Daphne’s situation, so Mary hadn’t had a chance to speak her thoughts out loud, and she needed to. But standing next to Andy at the kitchen counter, hulling berries while Andy mashed, listening to Andy quietly sing, as she always did when she was happy, she was coming up empty. Her thoughts wouldn’t get themselves organized and they didn’t even seem to be actual thoughts but just clumps of words banging around in her head, bouncing off the side walls, having themselves a bit of fun. She heard her own rational voice start several sentences and leave them hanging, unfinished, and she saw Andy quietly waiting as she sang, knowing better than to push it. Oh, Andy was smart. Finally, tired to the bone of the sound of her own banging, bouncing thoughts, of her own noisy half-finished sentences, she dropped her paring knife down on the edge of the sink and said, “Oh, hell. At the end of the day, what’s it matter.”

In all the time Andy had known her, this was the first and only thing Mary had ever said that impressed her. “That’s pretty much what I think too,” she said. Pushing down hard on the berries, adding the cups of sugar, Andy told herself that from this night of jam making she and Mary might finally be able to rely on each other for a bit of womanly comfort, for an occasional bout of womanly fun. Friend, she thought, maybe.

Mary had never been a quiet talker. Sitting in the porch drinking their beer, the men had heard her change of heart. Looking back through the dining room into the kitchen, watching these women make up the jam he would eat all winter, Paul said his problem was that while he wished things with Daphne could be otherwise, they apparently couldn’t. So there it was. He said if there was going to be hell to pay, he’d pay his share. He smiled, saying this.

Patrick would have described his brother’s smile as one part strength to two parts oblivion. But he said nothing. Sometimes, like now, he caught himself believing that Paul was not much more than
a belligerent innocent, that he simply preferred the luxury of being in the dark and would fight very hard to stay there. Once in a while people like Paul paid an extremely high price but more often, more usually, they were spared, excused from the full cost of realizing what was actually going on in the world.

Paul was watching Patrick watch a squirrel balance on the crest of the garage roof. He recognized the concentrated attention, the temporary silence, the threat you couldn’t quite hear. He knew his brother’s anger as well as he knew his own. “Jesus,” he said. “You could lighten up a bit.”

Almost immediately after Patrick said, “Could I? Is that your considered opinion?” Mary was beside him with a spoonful of strawberry jam.

“Taste this,” she said. “Tell me if it needs more sugar.”

And then Andy came to lean against the garden doors that opened to the porch. She, too, had heard the edge in Patrick’s voice. “Whatever’s going on here,” she said, “it has to be fixed. Now.” She moved to sit at the foot of Patrick’s chaise, facing Paul. “I will not allow another drop of trouble in my life. Not another God damned drop.” She turned to look at Patrick. “Can I make myself any clearer?” she asked. “Because I’m ready to try.”

Patrick had nothing to say to the severity in Andy’s eyes. He nodded once and then he took the spoon of jam into his mouth to declare it sweet enough for him. Paul got up and followed Mary to the buffet to get the cards out for a rubber of bridge.

Sally found it very tough sledding this second time. At twenty-one and having just about completed her first biology degree, she was more than sometimes fiercely judgemental about even the smallest transgressions, so her attitude about Daphne was not a surprise to anyone. But the word she slung around this time was
humiliation,
which did seem a bit strong, even for her. On a Sunday evening over one of Margaret’s roast chickens, in Daphne’s and Maggie’s absence, she tried to share her theories with the others. She said it was clear to her that Daphne’s pregnancy was either an act of aggression or an indication of a lack of caring on both sides, theirs and Daphne’s too. She said she could not understand why this
couldn’t be faced head-on. “It’s our business,” she said. “It’s obviously our business.” Patrick was the only one who watched her as she lectured them. The others looked at Margaret’s new plaid wallpaper, or out the window above the sink.

When she tried to provoke them into joining her discussion, asking, “What kind of family are we?” they did begin to look around the table at each other. But no one could come up with a satisfactory or useful answer.

“Can’t tell you,” Paul said. “Not on the spot like that.” His face was deadly serious with concentration, as if this were a quantum physics problem that might be solved had any of them been anything other than mere idiots. The rest of them laughed but Sally didn’t. She judged their refusal to join her, to engage, to be evidence of a shared shame that had left them understandably inarticulate, and forced them to retreat, as usual, to the false comfort of a limp joke.

That night, tucked into Bill in their bed, Margaret said, “I suspect there was quite of bit of ridicule when Daphne was a girl, when she was out of Sylvia’s sight, away from her protection. Kids do god-awful things to each other,” she said. “It isn’t any myth.” She pulled away a bit to look at his craggy face, which had too quickly aged there on that pillow, year by year, as had her own beside it. “Ridicule has a way of sticking to the ribs.” She reached up to rub his shoulder. “Maybe Daphne just lost her chance to believe in her own worth.”

Bill shifted his shoulder slightly, like a tamed animal moving its body under an affectionate, trustworthy hand. “Sylvia and I both watched for that kind of thing,” he said. “It seemed to us that she regained her confidence not too long after she fell. She appeared to be more or less her same old self. From what we could tell anyway.”

“What I mean is,” Margaret said, rubbing him harder, “maybe she lost her chance at truly believing. There is perhaps a significant difference.”

“She’s made her bed,” Bill said.

“I don’t suppose it’s ever a good idea to make assumptions,” she said, lifting her hand from his shoulder. “I’m going to have something to say to Sally about this, and if Patrick doesn’t climb down soon, I’m going to have something fairly straightforward to say to
him as well.” She flipped her pillow, to get the cool side up. “He might be surprised to find out that I can win an argument, but we know I can, don’t we?”

“She has made her bed,” Bill said, turning away from her, to sleep.

If any of them could have asked her, Daphne might have tried to say that it wasn’t the deformity of her jaw. It was hardly her jaw at all. There certainly had been some cruelty, sometimes more than she’d thought she would be able to withstand, but in her experience kids with a physical oddness were not mocked so much if they’d had an accident, as she had. And she’d had herself a famous accident. From what she’d seen, from what she knew, you had to be born with something wrong to get the worst of it.

She might have tried to tell them that she didn’t even remember much about what happened in the time after she landed on the mattress: the bleeding, the pain, the painkillers, the trips into Toronto to have her jaw reconstructed, the wires, the clamps, the months she was not allowed to chew, or able to speak clearly, to make herself understood. And it wasn’t the actual fall she remembered either.

It was the time between, between the hard-swinging, show-off happiness under the Christmas lights and the dropping straight down through the cold air. It was that everlasting split second when there was nothing she could do to save herself.

P
AUL
and Andy had been married for twenty-six years. Sometimes Paul found this hard to believe. When they started out together at nineteen they’d had lots of energy, lots of momentum, and then, running the farm and their lives, they’d slowed themselves down. They’d got into the habit of talking things over, planning things out, and they were conservative with money, deliberate. No one had told them that they should live this way, in sync and carefully. It was a kind of gut instinct that came naturally to them, from their careful natures, from their natural affection for each other.

Besides the farm, for almost fifteen years they had been operating the feed mill in town, hiring extra help when it was needed to keep things moving. Now Neil was almost old enough to take over. He appeared to be a mature twenty-five and it looked like he might be able to handle it.

Right after Murray’s parents died he had come out to offer them the mill for a lot less than he should have got for it and the steady income from that had paid off both the loan and most of the mortgage on Andy’s parents’ farm, which was now their farm because Andy’s mother had sold it to them and moved into a bungalow in town out near the golf course. Over the last ten years there had been enough extra money to modernize the old farmhouse, to put on a new roof and insulate the draughty walls, to replace the furnace, and then to build a fourteen-by-thirty-foot addition with an efficient, sunny kitchen that Andy had designed herself and a breakfast nook and a downstairs bathroom with a shower. And recently there had been enough money for the seventeen-foot Bowrider that Paul docked at Grand Bend.

With a dedication that was a surprise even to himself, after the crop was off and between Oldtimers’ hockey games, Paul had
begun to look into his ancestry. It wasn’t a deadly serious hobby but he was interested enough to make a couple of trips to the county library, to talk to the people there and let them help him with his searches. He had got his start from Grandma Ferguson, who was not just old now but elderly, frail, although she was still getting along all right in her own place. Near the end of one of what she called Paul’s too rare visits, she had opened a closet door on three cardboard boxes of very old pictures, most of them formal in the extreme, all of them black and white. And, while not inheriting any land, wheeler-dealer Grandpa Chambers had been left in recompense a very old, dried-out journal called
Our New Life in Lambton County,
which he handed over to Paul casually, as if he himself had no use for it. The formal faded script described in full the back-breaking demands of daily life without the ease of technology, the awkward, slow-moving courtships, the sicknesses and some of the early deaths, the marriages, the many births, the stillbirths, the visitors, the families that moved on, often to the West, to the promise of sections of very good land. It described the years of stubborn work, the need to clear farmland properly, the threshing crews, the accidents, the food poisoning, the quilting bees, the prized horses and the barns that burned in the night, the roar of the fire and the frenzy of the prized, dying horses that could be heard for miles around. The journal had been written by a woman who would have been Paul’s distant, many-times-removed aunt, and the assumptions she made, the attention she paid, could not have been mistaken for anything but a woman’s, although she had tried, she had taken some trouble to describe the life completely, as a whole.

Paul didn’t talk much about his little project and no one pushed him, not even Grandma Ferguson. He guessed they were waiting for some finished product they could hold in their hands, and dispute.

Even after twenty-six years of marriage, Andy was still very small and this pleased Paul because it made her body so available to him. And she was still outgoing, easily friendly with people. She was tired of course. She had been tired since the summer Meg was born. Neil and Krissy had always been good with Meg and still were, but they had a perfect right to get on with their own lives.

With a bit of help from Paul and Andy, Neil and his wife Carol had bought a house in town down near the arena, which Carol called the big old dilapidated monster but lived in quite happily, talking non-stop to her toddlers as she painted all the rooms, comman-deered a crew to jack up the porch and got the yard in shape. Krissy was in Sarnia working as a dental assistant, making pretty good money as far as Paul could tell. Although there were guys around now and then, she hadn’t yet found anyone permanent. Paul believed privately that Krissy might be a bit headstrong, independent, perhaps to her own detriment. Most of her friends were the same. Once he had heard a bunch of them, all of them flashy, long-legged, good-looking girls, sitting around on the front step talking about not getting married until they were at least thirty, not giving up their freedom one split second before they absolutely had to. Privately he hoped that Krissy would settle soon, that she would find someone good enough to make her want to break away from these friends and get a young start, a head start, as he and Andy had. Independent or not, he didn’t like to think about her alone. It made no sense to him.

Usually he left this kind of thing to Andy. She would come up with a way to describe Krissy’s situation, a way to make it sound right, like it was nothing to worry about. Once in a while he wondered if he and Neil and Krissy didn’t just dance to Andy’s tune but then he would pull back from that line of thought. There were worse things than listening to a smart woman.

Meg, their youngest, was twenty-three. She was living at the group home in London now. Like Neil, like Paul himself, she was extremely tall, but where Paul and Neil were lanky, Meg was bulk. She’d got really big when she hit puberty, and although Andy had trimmed her down with more vegetables and less meat, had stopped baking altogether, since she’d left them she had filled out again. She was heavier and stronger by far than her brother or her father.

Given her circumstances, Meg got along well enough. She could talk with people if she felt like it, if she decided she liked them, and when she was home to visit she could work with Paul in the barn. There was no question of her going out into the fields because today
the fields meant massive machinery, the fields were about as close to industrial as you could get.

They had held Meg at home as long as they could, the teachers at the school in town doing their best to keep her occupied with some bit of busywork at the back of the room while the other kids progressed. The parents of her classmates, many of whom Paul and Andy knew or had known one way or the other, were ready to understand Meg’s limitations, her frustration, they were ready to understand almost anything theoretically, but when the fights started, when their sons and sometimes their daughters started to come home with broken glasses and torn clothes and bloodied noses, they’d had to complain. And who could blame them? Certainly not Paul and Andy.

They had got the chance to put Meg in a group home in London when she was thirteen. Their names had been submitted by their family doctor, the fourth young guy from somewhere else who had taken over what everyone still called Cooper’s practice, which meant they were contacted, sent information. They had decided to try the home, at least for a while, and it had worked out. A group of people from London with problems of their own had got the home under way, got their hands on a good chunk of government money to get it up and running. It was in an older, ordinary residential neighbourhood and from the outside it looked like just a really big brick house. It looked like the kind of ridiculously oversized new-money house that was going up regularly in the suburbs.

Meg had liked it there at first, or said she did. They had a young staff to run the place, to teach the kids things, normalization, it was called, how to go shopping for groceries, how to go to the dentist, how to have your parents come for lunch on Saturdays. Their meds were strictly supervised and they were often taken out on excursions in a van donated by the Kinsmen, which was fine except for the big sign on the van advertising exactly who was inside it.

Every morning through the week all ten residents, six young men and four young women, Paul wasn’t supposed to call them kids, were packed into the van and delivered to a sheltered workshop where they sat at long tables with a hundred other similar souls to
do contract piecework for 3M or some small local company. They were paid, the point being that their work was worth something, but not much, a token really. Most of the money from the contracts went back into the place itself because there was a large staff. A lot of individual attention had to be available to each worker.

Paul and Andy were allowed to visit while Meg worked and from the start they had wanted to make these visits. People were stupid and cruel, all the time, people who should know better, adults as often as kids. You got to recognize that, to watch for it, if you had a daughter like Meg.

For the first few years a former army man had managed the workshop but now a Mrs. Bradley was very much in charge. She was a British woman in very high heels with orangish hair that she puffed up and sprayed way too thoroughly every morning, who was nevertheless polite and forthright in her comments to Paul and Andy. She said Meg was aggressive, yes, but they often saw that in their clientele and she could be distracted, she could be calmed, and when she was calm she was a very good worker. And the others were learning to keep their distance and never to tease Meg. In fact there was one boy, a Down’s syndrome boy, who had taken a shine to her, who followed her around like a puppy, who liked to sit beside her at breaks and when they ate their lunch. Mrs. Bradley told Paul and Andy that Meg was extremely patient with this boy, very understanding. She said Meg had an enormous heart.

Paul and Andy visited the group home too. During their first visit they were led upstairs to see Meg’s room, which she shared with the three other girls. It was large enough and bright enough, but after they’d had a cup of tea downstairs in the oversized, beautifully furnished living room, as soon as they were in the truck on the way home, Andy erupted into a small rage, turning on Paul to ask, Lord, didn’t he notice? She said the room was just horrible, that it needed a good cleaning, a good airing, that it smelled of old food and sweat and stale underwear. She said she would give anything to be let loose for an afternoon in that bedroom.

On their next Saturday visit, sitting on Meg’s bed, trying not to look perturbed, Andy asked Richard, the supervisor who was on
duty that day, why didn’t he either stand over them and make them do it or get someone in to do it for them? She told him she could see no reason for them to live like that. But Richard just looked around the room and shrugged his shoulders. The girls were expected to do their own wash and to keep their room clean. That was the rule. They were pretty slack, sure, but according to Richard the idea was that they themselves would get sick of the mess and the smell, he believed they were capable of getting sick of it, and then they’d clean it up. And anyway, he didn’t think it was particularly bad. “Maybe you should see my bedroom,” he said.

They didn’t go in quite so often after that visit, maybe once a month, once every six weeks. At home, hoping to help Andy get used to things as they were now, Paul told her that Meg was absolutely safe and cared for and at least slightly happy some of the time and that this was likely as good as it was going to get. “You don’t have to think about her so often,” he told her. “She can make a life for herself there. And better there than here with us. There is nothing for her here.” He didn’t know if he believed any of this to be true, but it was important to him that Andy believed it.

Meg came home every Christmas and for a couple a weeks in the summer, and any time Krissy or Neil and Carol and the kids were going to be around for a few days someone drove in to get her. Later on she would fall to them. Everyone knew this.

W
HEN
Meg hitchhiked home the first time, on a Tuesday afternoon in the late fall of 1985, Paul and Andy had just got back from Bill and Margaret’s and were sitting in the breakfast nook having a coffee together, talking about their mutual suspicion that something was up with Patrick and Mary, that they were in trouble, and that as usual Margaret knew more than she was willing to say. Margaret
had
been willing to say that Sarah, who would no longer answer to Sally, had called the night before from Vancouver to tell them that she and Rob had decided to get pregnant.

Sarah and Rob had been out in Vancouver nearly four years. Rob was an English software engineer who had come over from London just before they met to take a big job with one company and then,
six months after they were married, unsatisfied, he’d moved to another company and they had been transferred West. After Margaret had told Paul and Andy her bit of news, that it looked as if she was finally going to be a grandmother in her own right, she confessed that she had been almost ready to accept that there wouldn’t be any babies because Rob didn’t appear to be big on family, his own or anyone else’s. And then she said it was likely just the waiting that had thrown her off, the idea that a woman could bide her time and then decide to do it when she felt ready. “A modern convenience,” she’d called it.

Paul saw Meg first because he was facing the window and then they watched together as she ran up the long laneway toward the house, a large woman running like a child, her strides clumsy, her arms wild, clouds of cold panting breath bursting from her mouth as she ran. Her new jacket was wide open to the wind, her Blue Jays hat pushed firmly down on her head.

She had been dropped off at the end of the lane by a grey Chrysler, they could see the car waiting out there for her safe welcome. She turned back several times to wave at the driver, a lone male, who returned her wave and honked the horn several times.

Andy went to the door and opened it, letting in the cold air, and when Meg saw them she stopped running and began to walk in long strides across the frozen grass. She stopped once to bend over to catch her breath, lifted her head to look up at them, grinned her widest grin. Paul waved at the driver of the grey Chrysler, signalling that it was all right, he could carry on.