A Good House (14 page)

He drove the thirty miles home just before dawn. The wet snow was thicker on the windshield and the traffic had picked up so he was forced to take it slow.

When he walked into the kitchen Daphne and Paul were waiting at the table with a pot of coffee ready for him on the stove. “A girl,” he told them. “And Margaret's all right. She did fine.” He said Margaret was sleeping now, that they'd decided to put her to sleep because it had been extremely fast. “It was very, very fast,” he said. In answer to Daphne's questions, he said he had no idea how much their sister weighed, all he could say was that she was tiny, a real little runt, and he couldn't say either if she looked like anyone or when they might come home. After only a few sips of coffee he stood to go upstairs to get ready for work. “I'll come home at noon,” he called back from the stairs, “and we'll go back in together.”

Daphne called Patrick and Murray in London and got them out of bed. She talked to each of them, said the same things twice. “It's a girl and Margaret came through with flying colours. She's absolutely fine. It's sister Sally.”

Margaret's uterus gradually came out of shock and when she woke up, alone, she ran her hands over her sore, softened stomach and then up over her breasts, which in the last few months had become ridiculously large and which were now aching and hard as melons.

They fed Sally sugar water in the nursery and brought her to Margaret several times a day to try to take the breast, one nurse staying with them always, even after Margaret told her that it might be better if they were on their own. By the second day Sally had caught on and the nurse finally left them in peace. Bill had brought Daphne and Paul in that first day to look at their sister through the nursery window and the boys drove down from London, coming awkwardly into the quiet of Margaret's room in their coats and boots. After four days of it, Margaret told Bill she wanted out, as soon as possible, yesterday.

When Margaret brought Sally home everyone was ready to hold her, she was never down. Bill called her the Christmas present. After the boys got the tree up and decorated, Daphne wrapped Sally's squirming naked body in a red ribbon and carefully tucked her in among the other presents for a picture. Margaret leaned against the living-room arch and watched Daphne do this not because she was even slightly worried about Sally in Daphne's beautiful hands but because before Sally joined them she had not once seen Daphne reach to touch anyone, man or beast.

Murray's parents were on their first Caribbean cruise, so the big brick house beside the United Church was dark and empty. Murray unpacked but he didn't stay even long enough for the heat to come up before he got back in his car. He had every reason to go over to Bill and Margaret's. More reason now. He assumed he would be welcome to join them for Christmas dinner but he offered to buy the turkey anyway and Margaret said sure, that would be fine, although she would appreciate it if he let her go up to Sylvia's father at Clarke's and pick it out herself. Last year Bill had gone up on his own and after a Christmas drink or two out back with everyone he had come home with a twenty-eight pounder and, although she hadn't said so and would not have said so, she believed the meat in a younger, smaller bird was just a lot more tender. If quantity was going to be an issue, better two smaller birds than one monster. That was her policy.

Margaret knew that with all this help around she had it much easier than most new mothers. She rested, aware of her good fortune. When Sylvia's mother asked discreetly if her milk was coming down all right, Margaret put her hands to her astonishing breasts and laughed out loud, said there was enough for Sally and likely quite a few others. Sally thrived.

*   *   *

IN EARLY APRIL
of the following year, at the end of a beautiful first long week of spring, Margaret stood with her hands buried in soapy water at the kitchen sink watching evening overtake the backyard. Sally was in her basket on the floor at her feet, sleeping as she always did with her small fists curled and her arms uplifted in the position of surrender, her soft scent almost visible. Margaret liked to stand at the kitchen window watching the shadows from the trees make their way across the grass. There were patterns she could anticipate now. She didn't know if it was having Sally or just more time alone since she'd given up her job, but she saw things here, lovely things, all the time.

The rolling April sky was threatening to do something before nightfall and three yard squirrels were quarrelling stupidly over the hickory nuts they'd hidden in the fall, chasing each other across the garage roof and halfway up the trees, around and around the lawn chairs, which were still overturned from the winter. Bill had been talking about having the back hickories cut down, using the space they took for a shed to store the odds and ends that accumulated, of their own volition, he said, in the garage. He said he could disguise the shed with a trellis or an arbour, maybe add a garden bench. He said with some of the shade gone Margaret could plant some vegetables out there if she liked.

Patrick had come home for Easter to work a week at the feed mill because one of the full-time guys had some heart trouble, and as Margaret rinsed the glasses under the hottest possible water she heard him coming quietly down the stairs. Sylvia had been correct about her oldest son. Lately he had been spending a lot of his free time in his room with his stereo, listening to records, and he always moved quietly now, you never quite knew where he was. He was too well mannered, too thoroughly trained for much outright anger, for outbursts, and she would not have thought to use the word
depressed
because that word was saved for people who were in serious difficulty, but she did come up with the word
cranky.
She assumed that a good part of his crankiness was directed at her, although she did not dream that Patrick would tell her what was on his mind. From what she had seen so far, they were not in the habit of levelling with each other in this house, certainly not the way she was used to anyway, with screaming matches and foul, ugly words that had to be mopped up the next day, with mindless accusations that still rang clear miles and years away. And she wasn't about to teach them how.

Patrick walked into the kitchen wearing a new ball glove, his Christmas gift from Murray. He was working it with his fist, pounding it, giving it shape, and when he pushed the screen door open to leave she stopped him with a question. “When you consider the fact that men generally have longer legs,” she said, “do you believe the greater distance between the bases really does make baseball a harder game than softball?”

His face showed mild surprise but he thought for a minute and gave her a serious answer. “Well, I think that's the idea,” he said.

“I wonder,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if I couldn't have played baseball, given my legs.” She turned to look at him. “Your mother and I played softball together,” she said. “She was a top-flight first baseman and I myself was a half-decent shortstop. You likely don't remember,” she said, “but sometimes your grandparents brought you guys to the park to watch in your pyjamas.” And then to give him some context, to give him a way to imagine it, she told him, “This was when the men were overseas.”

He was halfway out the door, leaning against the screen, waiting.

She picked up the pile of plates from the counter and lowered them carefully down through the water. “Although no one ever put it in so many words,” she said, “your mother and I were pretty much the backbone of that team. We were good,” she said, nodding once and firmly as someone would after any fair judgement. When she said, “One year we came this close to the provincial championship,” she lifted her hand from the suds to show him the smallest possible space between her thumb and forefinger.

Patrick looked at her soapy hand and for just a split second, but surely, his face softened. There it is, Margaret thought, and, Now maybe that's done. Then he gave her his own clumsy nod and turned his face to the sound of Murray's car on the gravel in the driveway.

Margaret raised her head to smile at Murray through the window. She knew he would be watching to see if she did, they all kept an eye on her to see what she might do. And she knew he would be able to see the smile because she had been walking Sally up and down the streets in her high, proud buggy in the evenings and now she understood better than some that what looked from the inside like a square of shadowy darkness was really in the dusk a square of framing light. Murray would see the smile and not as a freakish reflection as she saw it, but clearly, unmistakably. Seeing it, he might put one more tick in his Margaret's All Right column. She realized that Murray, too, had needed time to get used to things. She had watched him grieve, maybe not as obviously as the others, but not less.

“Sally and I might come to some of your games this summer,” she offered, and although Patrick had nothing to say to this, he did take the time before he jumped the steps to use his elbow against the closing of the screen door so Sally wouldn't be frightened awake by a bang.

The last part of what Margaret had told Patrick had been a lie, had been what her notoriously blunt, profane, and long-deceased father would have called a bare-assed lie. She had hardly known Sylvia. They had never played on the same ball team and neither of them had ever got close to any championship.

She did have a memory of the Chambers kids on the bleachers those summers when the men were away. They would already be bathed and ready for bed, Paul and Daphne wrapped in blankets in their grandparents' arms, Patrick running loose with the other boys. Banks of park lights had been installed to illuminate the diamond for night games, sometimes there were two a night, and she did remember warming up behind the bleachers, glancing over once in a while to see how the other game was going and seeing Sylvia on first base slamming a fist into her glove, yelling ball talk with the other women, jumping funny little jumps on the bag to keep herself revved up.

And what's a lie, she thought, against everything else? Against Sylvia's bone-thin dying? Or Bill's having to learn to love a second woman a second way? Against her own stale life above the Hydro office, the small rooms holding like swamp gas the uncut smell of her own body, her own habits, her own little difficulties. Against her living-room view of the cenotaph, where a name she had once said softly and often was etched two inches high in the granite column, her view of that column fouled by filthy windows she could neither open nor get anyone to wash. Against the secret, muffled, after-the-war footsteps of a man not her husband mounting the stairs late in those long evenings above the Hydro office, the pleasure of his company, his praise, and then the hush of broken, wondrous promises. What, pray tell, is a lie?

She was ninety per cent certain Patrick would never mention the championship to anyone, he wasn't that type, and even if it did get mentioned one day, she could rear up and say, Sure we did, of course we did. She could talk about those years long enough to make them all believe they misremembered. And they would defer to her, just as surely as they watched her. Truth be told, she thought they should be ready to offer a few lies on her behalf.

Alone now, she turned from the window and looked down at the basket at her feet. And then she snapped her sudsy wrist hard in the air above the basket, releasing a cluster of rainbow bubbles that fell in slow time down to her perfectly formed Sally who, sleeping, could neither reach to touch them nor watch with an innocent's bewilderment their bursting.

1963

THEY RENTED DUNWORKIN
for the entire month of July. Other years Bill had taken his holidays when they were at the lake, but because it was only a fifteen-minute drive from town and because he couldn't see sitting around on his duff for four whole weeks, he decided not to that summer. The plan was that he would go back and forth to work every day and Margaret and Sally would stay put. The rest could come and go as it suited them.

Dunworkin was one of the oldest and biggest cottages on the beach. It was painted a muted light green, and it sat in the dunes, was tucked into the grassy dunes for protection from the winds off the water. As part of the deal, a fourteen-foot cedar-strip outboard with an easily managed twenty-five-horse motor sat beached on the sand in front of the cottage, and after an evening spin out on Lake Huron, when it was time to make the turn to come in for a drink, Bill sometimes made a game of testing the strength of his middle-aged eyesight against the block letters painted on a board above the screen-porch door. Like most of the other cottages up and down the beach, Dunworkin had always had its name, was probably named soon after it was built in the twenties, or maybe before, when it was still just someone's good idea.

It was a magnificent cottage. Across the front, a deep, screened-in, slightly sloping porch with hinged board shutters that in good weather were left hooked up to the ceiling held a picnic table for card games and Margaret's jigsaw puzzle, several Muskoka chairs painted either a deep cherry red or black, an old canvas hammock at one end and at the other a swinging couch suspended from the ceiling on rusty chains.

Inside the cottage proper there was a large main room with two old maroon sofas and several low-slung upholstered chairs, none of which matched each other or anything else, and beside these a few rickety little tables, each with an ashtray, one with a stack of
Reader's Digests
and
National Geographics
for rainy days. The ceiling was a grid of rough-weathered beams and painted plywood. The walls had been finished with good pine panelling and the floor was covered with broad pine planks. Visible footpaths had been worn into the planks' grain from the front door back into the kitchen and from the kitchen past the big oak dining table to the open staircase.

The fieldstones in the fireplace on the end wall had been darkened with years of smoke curling out before the fire got going properly and above them a heavy, broad mantel held a spread-out collection of necessities and treasures: pink shells from some ocean, four arrowheads, a red flyswatter, a flashlight, a transistor radio, a small, decorative Japanese fan, and a large box of Eddy matches. Beside the fireplace the owner had left a well-stacked supply of dry wood and a beat-up wicker laundry basket filled with newspaper and kindling.