A Long Thaw (10 page)

When Mary’s husband, Bud, died, it was her sister Bernadette who drove them all home from the hospital. The ride was silent, apart from Rachel’s sobs in the back seat. In the rear-view mirror, Mary could see Allen sitting as far away from her as he could, as if her grief might be contagious. At red lights, Bernadette would turn to look at Mary sitting mutely beside her, gazing not so much out of the windshield as at the glove box.

Bernie cooked eggs for dinner. The kitchen wasn’t well stocked and she’d never learned to cook for a family. She had been a newlywed when her husband died. He’d survived the war only to succumb to a heart attack at thirty, a heart defect the army had missed, or ignored.

She had been a wreck for months after that, moving back in with her parents and rarely leaving the house, rarely bothering to brush her hair. Eventually she got a job as a secretary for a doctor from church; it was widely assumed, and probably correctly, that the old man had taken pity on her and offered the job as a favour to the family.

The two youngest sisters had both married and started families by then. Bernie cared for her parents until their deaths, less than a year apart. The house was sold and she moved into a modest apartment. That move was a statement of finality: she would not marry again; there would be no children. She seemed content with this. She went on trips to places that were exotic to her older sister Mary, a housewife. Places like Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans. She dated men here and there over the years, no one seriously.

As Bernie tucked Mary into bed that first night of her widowhood, she put her hand against her sister’s cheek, tenderly. ‘You will be all right, dear,’ she said. ‘I have been where you are.’

Mary smiled at her through dry eyes – the tears had yet to come. She thought of her nearly grown children, the mortgage that wouldn’t pay itself, their parents long dead, the men who would not line up for her to reject them. Mary knew that her sister had not been where she was, but she wasn’t sure which of them was better off.

‘How could I not have known?’

‘How could you have known?’ Bernie counters.

This is the most recent version of the same conversation they’ve been having for days. This time they sit in the living room of Bernadette’s townhouse, her fussy ivory furniture covered with doilies. Mary can feel her sister’s sympathy starting to wane, slipping towards boredom.

‘I don’t understand how he could shirk his responsibility this way.’ Mary finds she can’t help repeating herself, as if one of these times it will start to make sense. ‘It‘s just so out of character.’

Bernie fusses with the clasp of her necklace, which has slid down beside the sapphire pendant. ‘This must be killing him. He was always such a mama’s boy.’

‘He was?’

‘Oh, yes. So dependent on you.’

‘Him dependent on me?’

‘On your approval.’

Mary considers this. She had always felt it was the other way around. She had leaned on Allen so heavily after Bud died. She had often wondered if it was part of the reason he had taken so long to marry, his sense of obligation to her.

‘And the cards. The cards.’ Mary lets out a groan, shaking her head.

‘I’ll go get them right now. You just say the word. I’ll sit on his doorstep until he hands over every last one of them.’ Bernie repeatedly stabs the arm of her chair with her index finger for emphasis. Her bosom shakes, and Mary wonders if she should wear a blouse with such a low neckline, but she doesn’t say anything.

As girls, they’d shared the same skinny-minny figure. Mary is still fairly trim, but Bernie has plumped up. She’s not overweight by any stretch of the imagination, but her hips are wider. Ironic, Mary thinks, for the sister who had never borne a child.

Bernie has mentioned how men seem to appreciate her fleshier figure. ‘They like a little meat on the bone,’ she’d said once. Mary didn’t like to talk about it. She’d made one brief attempt at dating long after Bud was gone, a widower from church. They’d had dinner, and he’d joked about his cooking, or warming up, frozen dinners. His daughters had encouraged him to date and Mary could see why: they wanted someone to take him off their hands. Getting remarried made sense for a man. Mary could imagine him sitting in her living room, in her favourite armchair, watching football while she fussed over a pot roast. She was done raising children and failed to see what a man could offer her in her golden years. And she had come to enjoy watching British comedies on PBS.

It’s tempting to let Bernie get the cards from Allen. Mary wants the girls to have them, to prove that they were thought of and loved all these years despite how it must have seemed. The cards feel like a sort of exoneration to Mary, although she knows it isn’t so easy to escape culpability. Ignorance is no excuse.

Bud tried to quit smoking several times over the course of their marriage. The first time, he chewed so many pencils to splinters that Mary started buying him liquorice. It came in long strands twisted together and Bud would hold one end clamped between his back molars and the other end between the nicotine-stained fingers of his right hand. He went off to work with a wax paper bag of these in his coat pocket and he came home smelling of a sweet mixture of liquorice and tobacco.

The last time he tried to quit, she had him pull the furniture away from the walls so she could sponge them clean. She squeezed the yellow-brown water into a bucket and told him she wasn’t doing it again. She told him to take the bucket into the backyard and dump it as far from her tomato plants as possible.

When he started excusing himself from the table mid-meal, Mary had been unconcerned. She pictured him blowing smoke out of the bathroom window, gargling mouthwash. She preferred to let him think he was tricking her than deal with him smoking all through the house again. He’d come back to the table and she wouldn’t even look puzzled, composing a pleasantly naïve expression on her face.

Well, little did she know how naïve she really was, how dumb. It was Allen who first suspected it was something else. By the time she got him to see a doctor, the prostate cancer had gone too far.

Like that, all this business about Allen and the girls. Mary felt all over again that wash of embarrassment and dread. How could she have missed so much? Where to begin to set things right?

Abby walks through the door first and Juliet shuffles in behind. It reminds Mary of when they were girls, Abby taking the lead, taking the blame, Juliet seeming somehow fragile, in need of protection.

Mary hugs them both at once. She has set out the plate of cookies already and tells them to sit down while she puts the kettle on for tea.

They sit next to each other on the couch, shooting each other sideways glances and talking quietly out of the corners of their mouths. Mary takes a seat across from them in a blue armchair with a high back.

‘How was your Thanksgiving, Juliet?’ Mary asks.

‘It was fine. Quiet.’

‘Well, I hope you’ll be able to make it for Christmas.’

Juliet slides her glance sideways again, as if Abby can help her make a graceful refusal.

‘We should invite Hannah and Lilly as well,’ Mary continues.

Juliet raises her head. ‘That sounds really nice, but . . .’ She shrugs.

‘Abby says it’s been three years since you’ve seen them?’

‘Yes.’ Juliet looks down at her shoes.

‘I think it’s time we fixed that. Don’t you?’

‘Well, I don’t see how . . .’

The kettle screeches. ‘It’s easy. I’ll buy their airplane tickets,’ Mary says, getting to her feet and heading for the kitchen. She comes back with a tray of fancy teacups and saucers decorated in the rose pattern from her wedding. She has a matching creamer and a tiny bowl of sugar cubes with a pair of silver tongs. The girls take their cups and saucers from the tray and busy themselves with adding the sugar and stirring their tea with tiny silver spoons.

‘Nana, that’s a very generous offer,’ Juliet begins, then falters.

‘Have a cookie, dear.’ Mary takes a long sip of her tea.

Juliet reaches for one.

‘Allen will be out of state for the holidays,’ Mary says, pausing for effect. ‘I don’t see any reason why anyone else should miss the festivities.’

‘It would be great,’ Abby says. ‘Hannah and Lilly can stay with us.’

‘But the tickets,’ Juliet protests.

Mary sets her cup down. ‘You let me worry about that. I am the head of this family, and if I want to spend some money to have my granddaughters together for Christmas, that is my prerogative.’

Juliet sinks into the couch. ‘It sounds amazing, really, but . . .’ she swallows ‘. . . Deirdre will never take your money.’

‘Will she take yours?’ Mary asks.

‘She hasn’t had a problem with it yet.’

‘Then we’ll just tell her it’s yours. Tell her you saved up.’

Abby blinks.

‘Is that settled?’ Mary asks.

Juliet begins to smile. ‘Okay.’

‘Juliet, I only wish I’d been of more use to you all these years. There’s no excuse for you being so much on your own.’

‘Nana, I’m really sorry—’

‘Shush now.’ Mary leans closer in her chair. ‘You’ve done nothing to be sorry for. Yours was not deceit, only diplomacy. The failure was mine.’

‘You didn’t know.’

Mary sighs. ‘Yes. I didn’t know. I suddenly find myself an old lady who is protected from the truth.’ She leans back and folds her arms across her chest. ‘Beware of old age, my dears.’

Abby stuffs a cookie into her mouth.

‘These things aren’t supposed to happen when you have a family. And you do. And things are going to be different from here on out.’

It rained the day Bud was buried. Allen stood to Mary’s side, holding an umbrella over her head. He stood up straight and tall and wore a dark suit that made him look like he was grown. Rachel stood on her other side, leaning against her as much for physical support as to get out of the rain.

Allen pulled his acceptance letter from Dartmouth College off the refrigerator and replaced it with one from the United States Naval Academy. Mary read it, touching the corner of the paper, her lips moving silently as if she were praying. In exchange for four years of education, he would owe them his service, his body, his life. Mary worried about this price, but knew it was all they could afford.

That year Rachel and Allen were constantly at each other’s throats. He yelled at her if she came home after ten o’clock; once, he chased her date off the front porch after she’d been dropped off late. She screamed at him, loud enough for the neighbours to hear, ‘You’re not my father, Allen!’ He slapped her face and dragged her to her bedroom where Mary could hear her crying through the wall most of the night.

He stayed at school over breaks and sent money home. He helped with Rachel’s tuition at UMass Lowell. Mary doesn’t know what she would have done if he hadn’t been so willing to step into his father’s shoes and take care of them.

In his top dresser drawer, beneath his white rolled socks and military-folded undershirts, Allen keeps a photograph of his three daughters. It’s a wallet-sized portrait they’d taken in the last fall they were still a family. Lilly had fine golden wisps across her tiny head. She was asleep in Juliet’s arms and Allen struggles to remember the exact grey-blue of her eyes, the deepening colour that had just begun to develop. Hannah was grinning, showing off her baby teeth, not looking at the camera. She never could sit still for more than a minute. Somehow Juliet had been persuaded not to brush out her curls, as she had recently taken to doing, generally causing her hair to stand off her head in a frizzy mass. For the photo, her curls were intact. She had her lips pressed together, hiding the braces.

He used to keep this photo in his wallet. It had been sandwiched behind and between other things, so as not to call attention from anyone who happened to be standing nearby when he opened the wallet. Women he’d taken to dinner mostly. It would just prompt questions he didn’t like to get into.

Years ago, he had moved the photo here, where it seemed safer, more private. Already it had faded, the edges worn soft and white, several scratches across the surface.

It was the only picture he had of them, besides the ones from his memory. It was all he had left.

It was saying it out loud that made the difference, Allen thinks. Admitting that he wanted a son. That was what had ruined it all in the end.

Juliet was nine when Hannah was born, already her own little person. Allen had felt so natural being the father of a girl, the way she accepted affection so easily. He never had to worry that he wasn’t toughening her up right, never felt uncomfortable around her tears the way he’d seen other fathers around their crying boys. Like it was a reflection upon them, a weakness revealed against their will. Juliet sidled up to him at parties, tucking herself under his arm as he told a story. He’d allow her a sip of his beer and she’d tip the bottle to her lips, so fast he doubted she got more than a taste of it on her tongue. She didn’t like the flavour, he knew, but it made her feel grown-up.

It wasn’t until the doctor held Hannah up, declared what was already obvious, that Allen realized he’d been hoping for a boy this time. Deirdre must have seen it in his face, but neither of them spoke of it, not until the third pregnancy, the last. Deirdre told him it was the last, emphasized it, making sure he was looking into her eyes when she said it, that he understood.

‘This is the last chance for a boy,’ she’d said. He’d tried to laugh it off, as if it had never occurred to him, as if he didn’t care one way or the other.

She’d laughed right back at him. It had seemed so harmless, all in fun, to acknowledge it, that he had. And once it had been spoken, they talked nearly exclusively about boys’ names. Tyler. Lucas. Jacob. They purchased blankets and tiny socks and hats and bibs in blue. It felt as if they might be able to will it so.

But they were wrong. This time, when the doctor held up the baby and announced her girlhood, Allen’s face fell. Deirdre drew in her breath and then whispered an apology.

‘It’s okay,’ Allen heard himself say, as he patted her shoulder and moved to cut the cord. He felt it was wrong for those to be the first words spoken after a child’s birth, yet he couldn’t think of anything else to say.