Dear Life: Stories (4 page)

While Katy slept beside her in the bunk that night Greta wrote a letter to Peter. A long letter that she intended to be funny, about all the different sorts of people to be found on the train. The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on. Katy’s generally agreeable behavior. Nothing about the loss, of course, or the scare. She posted the letter when the prairies were far behind and the black spruce went on forever, and they were stopped for some reason in the little lost town of Hornepayne.

All of her waking time for these hundreds of miles had been devoted to Katy. She knew that such devotion on her part had never shown itself before. It was true that she had cared for the child, dressed her, fed her, talked to her, during those hours when they were together and Peter was at work. But Greta had other things to do around the house then, and her attention had been spasmodic, her tenderness often tactical.

And not just because of the housework. Other thoughts had crowded the child out. Even before the useless, exhausting, idiotic preoccupation with the man in Toronto, there was the other work, the work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life. That struck her now as another traitorous business—to Katy, to Peter, to life. And now, because of the picture in her head of Katy alone, Katy sitting there amid the metal clatter between the cars—that was something else she, Katy’s mother, was going to have to give up.

A sin. She had given her attention elsewhere. Determined, foraging attention to something other than the child. A sin.

They arrived in Toronto in the middle of the morning. The day was dark. There was summer thunder and lightning. Katy had never seen such commotion on the west coast, but Greta told her there was nothing to be afraid of and it seemed she wasn’t. Or of the still greater, electrically lit darkness they encountered in the tunnel where the train stopped.

She said, “Night.”

Greta said, No, no, they just had to walk to the end of the tunnel, now that they were off the train. Then up some steps, or maybe there would be an escalator, and then they would be in a big building and then outside, where they would get a taxi. A taxi was a car, that was all, and it would take them to their house. Their new house, where they would live for a while. They would live there for a while and then they would go back to Daddy.

They walked up a ramp, and there was an escalator. Katy halted, so Greta did too, till people got by them. Then Greta picked Katy up and set her on her hip, and managed the suitcase with the other arm, stooping and bumping it on the moving steps. At the top she put the child down and they were able to hold hands again, in the bright lofty light of Union Station.

There the people who had been walking in front of them began to peel off, to be claimed by those who were waiting, and who called out their names, or who simply walked up and took hold of their suitcases.

As someone now took hold of theirs. Took hold of it, took hold of Greta, and kissed her for the first time, in a determined and celebratory way.

Harris.

First a shock, then a tumbling in Greta’s insides, an immense settling.

She was trying to hang on to Katy but at this moment the child pulled away and got her hand free.

She didn’t try to escape. She just stood waiting for whatever had to come next.

O
N
the bench outside the station I sat and waited. The station had been open when the train arrived but now it was locked. Another woman sat at the end of the bench, holding between her knees a string bag full of parcels wrapped in oiled paper. Meat—raw meat. You could smell it.

Across the tracks was the electric train, empty, waiting.

No other passengers showed up and after a while the stationmaster stuck his head out and called, “San.” At first I thought he was calling a man’s name, Sam. And another man wearing some kind of official outfit did come around the end of the building. He crossed the tracks and boarded the electric car. The woman with the parcels stood up and followed him, so I did the same. There was a burst of shouting from across the street and the doors of a dark-shingled
flat-roofed building opened, letting loose several men who were jamming caps on their heads and banging lunch buckets against their thighs. By the noise they were making you would think the car was going to run away from them at any minute. But when they settled on board nothing happened. The car sat while they counted each other and said who was missing and told the driver he couldn’t go yet. Then somebody remembered that it was the missing man’s day off. The car started, though you couldn’t tell if the driver had been listening to any of this, or cared.

All the men got off at a sawmill in the bush—it would not have been more than a ten-minute walk—and shortly after that the lake came into view, covered with snow. A long white wooden building in front of it. The woman readjusted her meat packages and stood up and I followed. The driver again called “San,” and the doors opened. A couple of women were waiting to get on. They greeted the woman with the meat and she said it was a raw day.

All avoided looking at me as I climbed down behind the meat woman.

There was no one to wait for at this end, apparently. The doors banged together and the train started back.

Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling. And the building beyond with its deliberate rows of windows, and its glassed-in porches at either end. Everything austere and northerly, black-and-white under the high dome of clouds.

But the birch bark not white after all as you got closer. Grayish yellow, grayish blue, gray.

So still, so immense an enchantment.

“Where you heading?” the meat woman called to me. “Visiting hours over at three.”

“I’m not a visitor,” I said. “I’m the teacher.”

“Well they won’t let you in the front door anyway,” said the woman with some satisfaction. “You better head along with me. Didn’t you bring a suitcase?”

“The stationmaster said he’d bring it later.”

“The way you were just standing there looked like you were lost.”

I said that I had stopped because it was so beautiful.

“Some might think so. Less they were too sick or too busy.”

Nothing more was said until we entered the kitchen at one end of the building. Already I was in need of its warmth. I did not get a chance to look around me because attention was drawn to my boots.

“You better get those off before they track the floor.”

I wrestled off the boots—there was no chair to sit down on—and set them on the mat where the woman had put hers.

“Pick them up and bring them with you, I don’t know where they’ll be putting you. You better keep your coat on, too, there’s no heating in the cloakroom.”

No heat, no light, except what came through a little window I could not reach. It was like being punished at school. Sent-to-the-cloakroom. Yes. The same smell of winter clothing that never really dried out, of boots soaked through to dirty socks, unwashed feet.

I climbed up on a bench but still could not see out. On the shelf where caps and scarves were thrown I found a bag with some figs and dates in it. Somebody must have stolen
them and stashed them here to take home. All of a sudden I was hungry. Nothing to eat since morning, except for a dry cheese sandwich on the Ontario Northland. I considered the ethics of stealing from a thief. But the figs would catch in my teeth, to betray me.

I got myself down just in time. Somebody was entering the cloakroom. Not any of the kitchen help but a schoolgirl in a bulky winter coat, with a scarf over her hair. She came in with a rush—books thrown on the bench so they scattered on the floor, scarf snatched so her hair sprung out in a bush and at the same time, it seemed, boots kicked loose one after the other and sent skittering across the cloakroom floor. Nobody had got hold of her, apparently, to make her take them off at the kitchen door.

“Hey, I wasn’t trying to hit you,” the girl said. “It’s so dark in here after outside you don’t know what you’re doing. Aren’t you freezing? Are you waiting for somebody to get off work?”

“I’m waiting to see Dr. Fox.”

“Well you won’t have to wait long, I just rode from town with him. You’re not sick, are you? If you’re sick you can’t come here, you have to see him in town.”

“I’m the teacher.”

“Are you? Are you from Toronto?”

“Yes.”

There was a certain pause, perhaps of respect.

But no. An examination of my coat.

“That’s really nice. What’s that fur on the collar?”

“Persian lamb. Actually it’s imitation.”

“Could have fooled me. I don’t know what they put you in here for, it’ll freeze your butt off. Excuse me. You want to see the doctor, I can show you. I know where everything is,
I’ve lived here practically since I was born. My mother runs the kitchen. My name is Mary. What’s yours?”

“Vivi. Vivien.”

“If you are a teacher shouldn’t it be Miss? Miss what?”

“Miss Hyde.”

“Tan your hide,” she said. “Sorry, I just thought that up. I’d like if you could be my teacher but I have to go to school in town. It’s the stupid rules. Because I have not got TB.”

She was leading me while she talked, through the door at the far end of the cloakroom, then along a regular hospital corridor. Waxed linoleum. Dull green paint, an antiseptic smell.

“Now you’re here maybe I’ll get Reddy to let me switch.”

“Who is Reddy?”

“Reddy Fox. It’s out of a book. Me and Anabel just started calling him that.”

“Who is Anabel?”

“Nobody now. She’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. It happens around here. I’m in high school this year. Anabel never really got to go to school at all. When I was just in public school Reddy got the town teacher to let me stay home a lot, so I could keep her company.”

She stopped at a half-opened door and whistled.

“Hey. I brought the teacher.”

A man’s voice said, “Okay Mary. Enough out of you for one day.”

“Okay. I heard you.”

She sauntered away and left me facing a spare man of ordinary height, whose reddish fair hair was cut very short and glistened in the artificial light from the hallway.

“You’ve met Mary,” he said. “She has a lot to say for herself.
She won’t be in your class so you won’t have to undergo that every day. People either take to her or they don’t.”

He struck me as between ten and fifteen years older than myself and at first he talked to me just in the way an older man would do. A preoccupied future employer. He asked about my trip, about the arrangements for my suitcase. He wanted to know how I would like living up here in the woods, after Toronto, whether I would be bored.

Not in the least, I said, and added that it was beautiful.

“It’s like—it’s like being inside a Russian novel.”

He looked at me attentively for the first time.

“Is it really? Which Russian novel?”

His eyes were a light, bright grayish blue. One eyebrow had risen, like a little peaked cap.

It was not that I hadn’t read Russian novels. I had read some all through and some partway. But because of that eyebrow, and his amused but confrontational expression, I could not remember any title except
War and Peace
. I did not want to say that because it was what anybody would remember.

“War and Peace.”

“Well, it’s only the Peace we’ve got here, I’d say. But if it was the War you were hankering after I suppose you would have joined one of those women’s outfits and got yourself overseas.”

I was angry and humiliated because I had not really been showing off. Or not only showing off. I had wanted to say what a wonderful effect this scenery had on me.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

“I guess I was really expecting some sort of old lady teacher come out of the woodwork,” he said, in some slight
apology. “As if everybody of reasonable age and qualifications would have got back into the system these days. You didn’t study to be a teacher, did you? Just what were you planning to do once you got your B.A.?”

“Work on my M.A.,” I said shortly.

“So what changed your mind?”

“I thought I should earn some money.”

“Sensible idea. Though I’m afraid you won’t earn much here. Sorry to pry. I just wanted to make sure you were not going to run off and leave us in the lurch. Not planning to get married, are you?”

“No.”

“All right. All right. You’re off the hook now. Didn’t discourage you, did I?”

I had turned my head away.

“No.”

“Go down the hall to Matron’s office and she’ll tell you all you need to know. You’ll eat your meals with the nurses. She’ll let you know where you sleep. Just try not to get a cold. I don’t suppose you have any experience with tuberculosis?”