Dear Life: Stories (6 page)

“And after that,” she said, “after that I wasn’t allowed to see her anymore. My mom never wanted me anyway to hang around with kids that had TB. But Reddy talked her into it, he said he’d stop it when he had to. So he did and I got mad. But she wouldn’t have been any fun anymore she was too sick. I’d show you her grave but there isn’t anything to mark it yet. Reddy and me are going to make something when he gets time. If we’d’ve gone straight along on the road instead of turning down where we did we would have come to her graveyard. It’s just for people that don’t have anybody to come and take them home.”

By this time we were down on level ground approaching the San.

She said, “Oh I almost forgot,” and brought out a fistful of tickets.

“For Valentine’s Day. We’re putting on this play at the school and it’s called
Pinafore
. I got all these to sell and you can be my first sale. I’m in it.”

I was right about the house in Amundsen being where the doctor lived. He took me there for supper. The invitation seemed to come rather on the spur of the moment when he
met me in the hall. Perhaps he had an uneasy memory of saying we would get together to talk about teaching ideas.

The evening he proposed was the one for which I had bought a ticket for
Pinafore
. I told him that and he said, “Well I did too. It doesn’t mean we have to show up.”

“I sort of feel as if I’d promised her.”

“Well. Now you can sort of unpromise her. It will be dreadful, believe me.”

I did as he told me, though I did not see Mary, to tell her. I was waiting where he had instructed me to be, on the open porch outside the front door. I was wearing my best dress of dark green crepe with the little pearl buttons and the real lace collar, and had rammed my feet into suede high-heeled shoes inside my snow boots. I waited past the time mentioned—worried, first, that Matron would come out of her office and spot me, and second, that he would have forgotten all about it.

But then he came along, buttoning up his overcoat, and apologized.

“Always a few bits and bobs to clear up,” he said, and led me under the bright stars around the building to his car. “Are you steady?” he said, and when I said yes—though I wondered about the suede shoes—he did not offer his arm.

His car was old and shabby as most cars were in those days. It didn’t have a heater. When he said we were going to his house I was relieved. I could not see how we would manage with the crowd at the hotel and I had hoped not to make do with the sandwiches at the café.

In the house, he told me not to take off my coat until the place was warmed up a bit. He got busy at once making a fire in the woodstove.

“I’m your janitor and your cook and your server,” he said.
“It’ll soon be comfortable here and the meal won’t take me long. Don’t offer to help, I prefer to work alone. Where would you like to wait? If you want to you could look over the books in the front room. It shouldn’t be too unbearable in there with your coat on. The house is heated with stoves throughout and I don’t heat up a room if it isn’t in use. The light switch is just inside the door. You don’t mind if I listen to the news? It’s a habit I’ve got into.”

I went into the front room, feeling as if I had more or less been ordered to, leaving the kitchen door open. He came and closed it, saying, “Just until we get a bit of warmth in the kitchen,” and went back to the somberly dramatic, almost religious voice of the CBC, giving out the news of this last year of the war. I had not been able to hear that voice since I left my grandparents’ apartment and I rather wished that I could have stayed in the kitchen. But there were quantities of books to look at. Not just on bookshelves but on tables and chairs and windowsills and piled on the floor. After I had examined several of them I concluded that he favored buying books in batches and probably belonged to several book clubs. The Harvard Classics. The Histories of Will and Ariel Durant—the very same that could be found on my grandfather’s shelves. Fiction and poetry seemed in short supply, though there were a few surprising children’s classics.

Books on the American Civil War, the South African War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, the campaigns of Julius Caesar.
Explorations of the Amazon and the Arctic. Shackleton Caught in the Ice. Franklin’s Doom, The Donner Party, The Lost Tribes: Buried Cities of Central Africa, Newton and Alchemy, Secrets of the Hindu Kush
. Books suggesting someone anxious to know, to possess great scattered lumps
of knowledge. Perhaps not someone whose tastes were firm and exacting.

So when he had asked me, “Which Russian novel?” it was possible that he had not had so firm a platform as I had thought.

When he called “Ready,” and I opened the door, I was armed with this new skepticism.

I said, “Who do you agree with, Naphta or Settembrini?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“In
The Magic Mountain
. Do you like Naphta best or Settembrini?”

“To be honest, I’ve always thought they were a pair of windbags. You?”

“Settembrini is more humane but Naphta is more interesting.”

“They tell you that in school?”

“I never read it in school,” I said coolly.

He gave me a quick look, the eyebrow raised.

“Pardon me. If there’s anything in there that interests you, feel free. Feel free to come down here and read in your time off. There’s an electric heater I could set up, since I imagine you are not experienced with woodstoves. Shall we think about that? I can rustle you up an extra key.”

“Thank you.”

Pork chops for supper, mashed potatoes, canned peas. Dessert was an apple pie from the bakery, which would have been better if he had thought to heat it up.

He asked me about my life in Toronto, my university courses, my grandparents. He said that he supposed I had been brought up on the straight and narrow.

“My grandfather is a liberal clergyman sort of in the Paul Tillich mode.”

“And you? Liberal little Christian granddaughter?”

“No.”

“
Touché
. Do you think I’m rude?”

“That depends. If you are interviewing me as an employer, no.”

“So I’ll go on. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“In the forces I suppose.”

I said, In the Navy. That struck me as a good choice, accounting for my never knowing where he was and not getting regular letters. I could manage that he did not get shore leave.

The doctor got up and fetched the tea.

“What sort of boat is he on?”

“Corvette.” Another good choice. After a while I could have him torpedoed, as was always happening to corvettes.

“Brave fellow. Milk or sugar in your tea?”

“Neither one thanks.”

“That’s good because I haven’t got any. You know it shows when you’re lying, you get hot in the face.”

If I hadn’t got hot before I did then. My flush rose from my feet up and sweat trickled down under my arms. I hoped the dress would not be ruined.

“I always go hot when I drink tea.”

“Oh I see.”

Things could not get any worse so I resolved to face him down. I changed the subject on him, asking about how he operated on people. Did he remove lungs, as I had heard?

He could have answered that with more teasing, more superiority—possibly his notion of flirtation—and I believed that if he had done so I would have put on my coat and
walked out into the cold. And perhaps he knew that. He began to talk about thoracoplasty, and explain that it was, however, not so easy on the patient as collapsing and deflating a lung. Which interestingly enough even Hippocrates had known about. Of course removal of the lobe had also become popular recently.

“But don’t you lose some?” I said.

He must have thought it was time to joke again.

“But of course. Running off and hiding in the bush, we don’t know where they get to—Jumping in the lake—Or did you mean don’t they die? There’s cases of things not working. Yes.”

But great things were coming, he said. The surgery he went in for was going to become as obsolete as bloodletting. A new drug was on the way. Streptomycin. Already used in trial. Some problems, naturally there would be problems. Toxicity of the nervous system. But there would be a way found to deal with that.

“Put the sawbones like me out of business.”

He washed the dishes, I dried. He put a dish towel round my waist to protect my dress. When the ends were efficiently tied he laid his hand against my upper back. Such firm pressure, fingers separated—he might almost have been taking stock of my body in a professional way. When I went to bed that night I could still feel that pressure. I felt it develop its intensity from the little finger to the hard thumb. I enjoyed it. That was more important really than the kiss placed on my forehead later, the moment before I got out of his car. A dry-lipped kiss, brief and formal, set upon me with hasty authority.

The key to his house showed up on the floor of my room, slipped under the door when I wasn’t there. But after all I couldn’t use it. If anybody else had made me this offer I would have jumped at the chance. Especially if it included a heater. But in this case his past and future presence would be drawing all ordinary comfort out of the situation and replacing it with a pleasure that was tight and nerve-racking rather than expansive. I would not be able to stop shivering even when it wasn’t cold, and I doubted whether I could have read a word.

I thought that Mary would probably appear, to scold me for missing
Pinafore
. I thought of saying that I had not been well. I’d had a cold. But then I remembered that colds in this place were a serious business, involving masks and disinfectant, banishment. And soon I understood that there was no hope of hiding my visit to the doctor’s house, in any case. It was a secret from nobody, not even, surely, from the nurses who said nothing, either because they were too lofty and discreet or because such carryings-on had ceased to interest them. But the aides teased me.

“Enjoy your supper the other night?”

Their tone was friendly, they seemed to approve. It looked as if my particular oddity had joined up with the doctor’s familiar and respected oddity, and that was all to the good. My stock had risen. Now, whatever else I was, I at least might turn out to be a woman with a man.

Mary did not put in an appearance all week.

“Next Saturday,” were the words that had been said, just before he administered the kiss. So I waited again on the front porch and this time he was not late. We drove to the house and I went into the front room while he got the fire going. There I noticed the dusty electric heater.

“Didn’t take me up on my offer,” he said. “Did you think I didn’t mean it? I always mean what I say.”

I said that I hadn’t wanted to come into town for fear of meeting Mary.

“Because of missing her concert.”

“That’s if you’re going to arrange your life to suit Mary,” he said.

The menu was much the same as before. Pork chops, mashed potatoes, corn niblets instead of peas. This time he let me help in the kitchen, even asking me to set the table.

“You may as well learn where things are. It’s all fairly logical, I believe.”

This meant that I could watch him working at the stove. His easy concentration, economical movements, setting up in me a procession of sparks and chills.

We had just begun the meal when there was a knock at the door. He got up and drew the bolt and in burst Mary.

She was carrying a cardboard box which she set on the table. Then she threw off her coat and displayed herself in a red-and-yellow costume.

“Happy late Valentine’s Day,” she said. “You never came to see me in the concert so I brought the concert to you. And I brought you a present in the box.”

Her excellent balance allowed her to stand on one foot while she kicked off first one boot, then the other. She pushed them out of her way and began to prance around the
table, singing at the same time in a plaintive but vigorous young voice.