A Good House (24 page)

When Murray walked into the restaurant he was empty-handed, no briefcase, nothing. Maybe he had an accountant. Maybe he was going to refer Patrick to his Toronto accountant.

As Murray sat down, he glanced at the open file laid out on the table. “Nice suit,” he said. “New?”

“Hardy Amies,” Patrick said. “Not all that new.”

The very attentive waiter had watched Murray settle into his chair and was soon right there with his “What will it be for you, sir?” They ordered their drinks and after the waiter left them Murray said, “What the hell's happened to us that middle-aged men are required to call us sir? If this is achievement, I don't think I like it. We're not nearly smart enough to make people feel servile,” he said. “Are we?”

“No, we're not,” Patrick said. “How are things?”

“Good,” Murray said. “Extremely good. I just found out that I'm going to Saigon in September, which almost, but not quite, makes up for the fact that I didn't get there last year.”

The waiter was back with the drinks and two oversized menus. He recommended the veal and they both said veal would be fine, although they'd pass on the salads. When he left again, Patrick asked, “Should we get at this or do you want to wait until after we've eaten?”

Murray reached across the table to close the file.

Patrick set it down beside the legs of his chair. “Fine by me,” he said. “I won't start the meter until we actually begin our discussion.”

“I'm going to pay you for the work you've done so far,” Murray said. “Just send me the bill. But I've decided to hold off on anything legal.”

Patrick found his horizon, the restaurant's name painted in heavy black capitals across the plate-glass window. He held his drink steady in his hand, an inch above the pink tablecloth. “You might as well keep talking,” he said.

“She won't marry me,” Murray said. “There is less than nothing I can do about it, so don't you go weird on me. Don't lay all of this at my door.”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” Patrick said, meaning that he hadn't yet found the words for his contempt.

“So I'm not going to put anything to Charlotte immediately,” Murray said. “Things have not been exactly spectacular for her lately. At work. With her parents.”

“This would be the same woman you couldn't stand the thought of carrying on with three short months ago? The one with the legs and the breasts and the extreme, what was your word, vanity?”

“Charlotte and I are nearly but not quite played out,” Murray said. “Nearly but not quite dead. And I think it will be better all around if I stay until we are absolutely finished, until it is obvious to both of us. And thus unavoidable. Why should I get to miss the worst of it?”

“Some people might call that commendable,” Patrick said. “But the reason you should get to miss the worst of it is, of course, because you are soon to be a father. I had assumed you would not want it to be born a bastard. That is what many people have agreed to call kids who arrive mysteriously without fathers. You've likely heard the word.”

“Of course it has a father,” Murray said. “I am the father.” The waiter was there again, silently placing their plates of veal in front of them. Murray thanked him and he padded away. “Did she tell you I'm the father?” he asked. “Did you ask her?”

“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.”

1977

CHARLOTTE 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.