A Good House (38 page)

Margaret hadn't moved. “Are you sitting there thinking about all of it?” she asked. She didn't approach him, didn't put the tray down. “Perhaps you shouldn't,” she said. “I don't.”

He looked up at her. “Who knew?” he said.

“Who could have known?” Margaret answered. “None of us.” She steadied the tray against the long moon curve of her stomach. “It's all right, Patrick,” she said. “You are a kind man. I am a kind woman. There are lots of us around.”

He covered his face with his beautiful tired hands as if to hold something back, as if something behind his face was asking to be held back. “Do you ever pray?” he asked.

“I don't waste my time asking for anything,” she said. “Although once in a while, perhaps two or three times a year when some small thing happens or maybe doesn't happen, I catch myself feeling thankful.”

“Thankful,” he said.

“Or maybe lucky,” she said, leaving him there, calling back to him from the kitchen. “Your towels are on the dresser. Have your shower now or in the morning, it doesn't matter to us one way or the other.”

Patrick got up to put the Scotch away and then he climbed the stairs. Margaret rinsed the cups and saucers in the sink and followed him. There was no further talk. They slept quickly and soundly, all three of them, their separate exhaustions quietly absorbed by the house, by its safety, its comfort, its simple, blessed walls.

*   *   *

AFTER A BREAKFAST
of bacon and French toast with whipped butter and a pitcher of this spring's maple syrup, the kind of luxury breakfast Margaret allowed only once or twice a year now, Patrick and Bill unhitched the trailer from the Lincoln and drove out to the nursery on the highway for seed. Bill had the list in his hands, held it up close to his face.

“Geraniums,” he said. “I don't remember that we decided on geraniums.” He reached toward the radio and Patrick, anticipating his wish, turned it down for him. “Tell me if this is right,” he said. “Corn. Geraniums. Peppers. Potatoes. Broccoli. Asparagus. Peas.”

“Sounds about right to me,” Patrick said.

Bill reached out again. “Who is this guy?” he said. “What the hell is he talking about?”

When Patrick told him it was the CBC, it was Arthur Black, and that he talked very quickly, that was his style, Bill said, “I don't like broccoli.” He was studying the radio, trailing his good left fingers over the buttons. When he finally found the right one, he punched it off. “They don't necessarily pick up on it, what you don't like.”

“So tell her,” Patrick said, glancing over. “It shouldn't have to be any big deal.”

Bill shifted in his seat to look directly at this son of his. “Whatever difficulty Margaret and I might have,” he said, “would never under any circumstances become a concern of yours.” He turned away, muttered, “You worry about your own God damned life.” When they pulled into the parking lot, to close it off for good, he said, “I don't intend to be eating very much broccoli.”

The nursery was having a busy morning. They had recently expanded, there was a bigger, better sign over the doors and a bigger, paved parking lot. Bill claimed to know a dozen cars. “Everybody's here this morning,” he said, throwing off his seat belt, checking his tie, opening his door wide before the Lincoln had come to a full stop.

They were nearly two hours finding what they'd come for. Bill said he wanted to see where things were now, what was new. He said they had no reason to rush. Patrick let him lead them around the old greenhouse and then outside and into another and then into another. In the courtyard behind the main building, looking over several neat rows of small “accent” trees, most of them stunted, grafted at a modest height for small properties, the grafts gnarled like a big man's hard fist, Bill laughed out loud and slapped Patrick on the back as if they were compatriots, as if such obvious stupidity must have been staged for their enjoyment. “Whatever these are,” he said, “they sure as Christ aren't trees. Imagine,” he said, “passing these things off as trees. And people falling for it.”

As they wandered around and around again, he made several of the other gardeners stop and shake hands with Patrick. Some of them remembered Patrick, of course, some of them did not. Bill told everyone that he had decided to replant Margaret's garden and that he'd asked Patrick to come up and give him a hand. He told them they would have to come over to see his new space-age garden tools, said they were beyond belief. He walked up and down the same soggy aisles a dozen times, reached out to touch the barely blooming plants on either side as if he loved them. He had words for everyone he passed, smiled grandly, bent to kiss all the women who would be kissed.

On the way home with the seeds and the geraniums, Bill checked the time and then told Patrick to turn at Albert Street, to swing by Turnball's barn down at the creek. He said the Old Babes' Committee was dedicating the new park today and why didn't they stop off for a few minutes to watch the proceedings.

“Who are they dedicating it to?” Patrick asked.

“Oh, themselves, I expect,” Bill said.

Turnball's barn was gone but there were a dozen cars parked where it had once stood and about thirty people standing around down near the creek. The park wasn't big. It was only a cleaned-up section of Stonebrook Creek with a wide footbridge over the water to an open expanse of cleaned-up land on the other side. Whoever was behind the park had got enough money together for an elaborate wooden swing set and a slide and a complicated climbing gym on the far side of the water and the grass had been roped off and reseeded, although it was still pretty patchy. Several small red maples and a clump-birch had been staked for strength against the hazard of wind and there were three large picnic tables placed in the shade of the willows at the water.

And it was obvious even sitting in the car that they had tampered with the creek bed, that rocks and stones had been either hauled in or substantially, carefully rearranged. Someone with a forklift or a front-end loader had tried to make themselves a little work of art, tried to complicate the course, the appearance and sound, of the current. As if the random placement, the natural state of things, was not worth watching. And all of this effort, this expense, all of it for the benefit of someone who might want to stand for a while on a footbridge.

Bill didn't get out of the car this time. “Too blazing hot,” he said. “It's going to be one of those days when walking is more like swimming. Our first this year.” He was leaning forward studying the controls on the dash. “We'll just sit here with the air on if you don't mind.”

Patrick adjusted the air-conditioning. “What a fine park,” he said.

“Maybe,” Bill said. “We'll hope so.” Sitting there, he began to play at the stubs of his missing fingers, a habit he had begun only recently. Soon after the war, the scarred skin had healed and faded back to an almost fleshy pink but now it had been rubbed raw, it was once again a wound. “They came knocking,” he said. “I gave them fifty bucks and Margaret gave them her own fifty. You should give some thought to doing the same.”

Patrick did not respond to the admonition. After Mr. McFarlane's note was paid off, years before, he had found his own private way to move that generosity on down the line. Now, with student loans, no kid was as trapped as he would have been, and he believed this was a good thing, removing the chance for success from the realm of sheer, dumb luck. And it certainly had been sheer, dumb luck, Mr. McFarlane being there to decide that he was worthy of risk. Anyway, if he remembered correctly, such things were not to be bandied about.

Bill was searching around for the control that would make his seat go back. “Your mother would have been pleased as punch to be part of this,” he said, nodding toward the crowd. “It's just her kind of thing. Improving the filthy creek.” He'd found the right knob to push and he stretched out his legs and crossed his arms. “And she has always supported Margaret. Don't ever doubt that. All these years not a word against Margaret.” He pointed his left index finger, directing Patrick's attention to the activity at the creek.

Patrick looked from face to face and finally recognized Charles Taylor, who was dressed as he'd always been dressed in pressed pants and a shirt and tie, maybe the same tie. Except for the snow-white hair, Charles hadn't changed much. From this distance, at least, he still had the body of the young man who'd spent one of his summers watching a bunch of kids get ready for a circus performance. Patrick tried to calculate just how elderly the rarely seen Mrs. Taylor might be by now and then he recognized the woman standing beside Charles. It was Margaret's friend Angela Johnston, who was old and small and bent over a stainless-steel walker that reflected the sunlight. Perhaps Angela was the mother now.

A middle-aged man who was probably the mayor spoke briefly and then a woman Patrick was sure he had never known stepped forward to bend down and pull a bright red cloth off a plaque. The plaque was affixed to a rough chunk of black granite that sat low to the ground like a modest grave marker and as soon as the words of dedication were exposed everyone standing down at the creek began to applaud. When some of them lifted their clapping hands high in the air to signify a particular pleasure, Bill joined them with his own hands, shouting, “Hurray for the Old Babes.”

*   *   *

MARGARET HAD TAKEN
a plate of cold baked beans out to the garden bench and she continued to wait with the back door open and her ear half-cocked to the phone. She could catch the phone in four rings, she had counted many times before. She knew their delay could be either very bad or very good, she realized there might be consequences for which she was unprepared, but she was enjoying herself nonetheless.

Looking over the newly enriched, perfected soil, she decided it was a shame to bother with the vegetables. Why shouldn't the earth just stay as it was? Undisturbed. Dark and rich and tender. The May sun was directly overhead. She could feel its heat on her thinning hair and on her scalp and on the back of her large freckled hands, the skin there like all of her skin now, no longer tight to her body but loose and thin. The slats of the bench, exposed since sunrise, warmed her backside, a backside which Bill, having just read a borrowed, beat-up copy of
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
had once affectionately called a great sloping arse, and which was more and more often now, unaccountably, chilled.

She stood up slowly from the bench and stretched her long muscles, arched her long back. She dropped her head alternately to each shoulder, then let it fall heavily back so that her face was flat to the warming sun, to the drifting clouds, eased it slowly forward until her chin touched her chest. She bent at the waist to try to touch her toes, extended her long arms skyward as she straightened, splayed her fingers. She did this three times. Then she swung her arms, made five windmill circles with each arm in turn. She inhaled deeply, pulling new air down into her body, knowing it would do her good.

Although she had never been a particularly fit person, neither had she been slovenly or slow to rise to an occasion, and she credited her relatively good health, her usual feeling of well-being, to her day-to-day living, and to the quiet, lifelong, persistent energy that day-to-day living demanded of a person. If her eighty-one-year-old body already carried within it the seeds of its own demise, a murky possibility she allowed herself to entertain only on the worst of days, Well, she thought, tell me something I don't know.

Warmed up, she stepped into the plot. With wide-open, calculating eyes she imposed a mental grid, marked off the earth square foot by square foot in her mind. She had to be careful to plant her steps firmly because the earth could easily be soft where it looked hard and hard where it looked soft but she believed there was a very good chance that Patrick had unearthed something more with the deep cuts of the Rototiller. She believed, too, that such a search might require a promise. I will never tell, she thought. Whatever I find, I will never tell. I will hide it on my person, take it back into the earth with me when I go.

She was looking, she supposed, for an artifact unique to another century, something rarely seen any more, some small thing meant to be solid against rot. She assumed the treasure would be shiny, expected the sun to throw the necessary light.

1997

MAGGIE DREAMED THE
night before her wedding day that Kevin Costner, or someone like him, who was with her at a run-down rainy cottage on some river, had a very short, perky penis that he proudly called a smart penis and that someone else, some dark Robert Mitchum film-noir type, standing half dressed and hunched in a shadowy alley doorway smoking a cigarette, had one that was a foot long and thin as a pencil and apparently exhausted, worn right down to almost nothing. As she came to consciousness, these disparate images, these quite separate men crowded together in one lusty dream frame, tried hard to cling to the rafters of her brain. But they were fading fast, they were being booted out the back door, asked to leave with the sleep that made them. Well, she thought, not quite ready to open her eyes, that wasn't very bridelike.

When she did open her eyes to the light from the window, the men were gone, completely and immediately gone. It was almost as if they had not been real at all. Throwing off the duvet, getting up to walk to the bathroom, she thought, I am only anticipating fidelity, I am only putting foolish things behind me. And then, levelling a steady gaze at her face in the dappled mirror above the cracked pedestal sink, she thought, Hollywood. Nothing happens without Hollywood. Not even the dreams of a bride. She turned on the tap and laid some Colgate along the bristles of her toothbrush.

When Maggie and Jill were teenagers Daphne had often asked about their dreams, perhaps as a kind of quick, maternal, psychic check-up. As with nearly everything else in those days, sometimes they played it straight and sometimes they did not. Only once in a while, when they were at some loss or in some muddle, when they really needed her to be tuned in to them, did they actually tell Daphne a version of the truth. Otherwise they thought and said that she was being invasive, that she was just trying to shove herself into their lives.