Friend of My Youth (15 page)

She could be striving toward him, now as much as then. Full of damaging hopes, and ardor, and accusations. She didn’t let herself then—she thought about an exam, or groceries. And if she let herself now, it would be like testing the pain in a lost limb. A quick test, a twinge that brings the whole shape into the air. That would be enough.

She was a little drunk herself by this time, and she thought of saying to Dudley Brown that perhaps he
was
making those two
women happy. What could she mean by that? Maybe that he was giving them something to concentrate on. A hard limit that you might someday get past in a man, a knot in his mind you might undo, a stillness in him you might jolt, or an absence you might make him regret—that sort of thing will make you pay attention, even when you think you’ve taught yourself not to. Could it be said to make you happy?

Meanwhile, what makes a man happy?

It must be something quite different.

“I hired a looker from out Shawtown,” Murray’s father said. “She’s a Delaney, but so far she doesn’t seem to have any bad habits. I put her in Men’s Wear.”

This was in the spring of 1955. Murray was just out of college. He’d come home and seen at once what fate was waiting for him. Anybody could see it, written on his father’s darkened, scooped-out face, rising almost daily in his father’s stomach—the hard loaf that would kill before winter. In six months Murray would be in charge, sitting in the little lookout office that hung like a cage at the back of the store, over Linoleum.

Zeigler’s then was still called Zeigler’s Department Store. It was about the same age as the town itself. The present building—three stories high, red brick, the name in angled gray brick letters that had always looked, to Murray, puzzlingly jaunty and Oriental—had gone up in 1880, replacing an earlier building of wood. The store did not deal in groceries or hardware anymore, but they still had Men’s, Ladies’, and Children’s Wear, Dry Goods, Boots and Shoes, Draperies, Housewares, Furniture.

Murray strolled by to have a look at the looker. He found her penned behind rows of cellophaned shirts. Barbara. She was
tall and well developed, as his father in a lowered and regretful voice had said. Her thick black hair did not curl or lie flat—it sprang up like a crest from her wide white forehead. Her eyebrows were thick and black as well, and glossy. Murray found out later that she put Vaseline on them, and plucked out the hairs that would have met above her nose.

Barbara’s mother had been the mainstay of a back-country farm. When she died, the family migrated to Shawtown, which was a rackety half-rural settlement on the edge of Walley. Barbara’s father did odd jobs, and her two brothers had got into trouble with cars and breaking and entering. One later disappeared. The other married a managing sort of girl and settled down. It was that one who was coming into the store at this time and hanging around, on the pretext of visiting Barbara.

“Watch out for him,” Barbara told the other clerks. “He’s a jerk, but he knows how to stick things to his fingers.”

Hearing about this, Murray was impressed by her lack of family feeling. He was an only child, not spoiled but favored, and he felt himself bound by many ties of obligation, decency, and love. As soon as he got home from college, he had to go around greeting all the people who worked in the store, most of whom he’d known since childhood. He had to chat and smile on the streets of Walley, affable as a crown prince.

Barbara’s brother was caught with a pair of socks in one pocket and a package of curtain hooks in the other.

“What do you think he wanted the curtain hooks for?” Murray asked Barbara. He was anxious to make a joke of this, showing her how nothing was held against her on her brother’s account.

“How should I know?” said Barbara.

“Maybe he needs counselling,” said Murray. He had taken some sociology courses, because he had hoped at one time to become a United Church minister.

Barbara said, “Maybe he needs to be hanged.”

Murray fell in love with her then, if he was not in love
already. Here is a noble girl, he thought. A bold black-and-white lily out of the Swamp Irish—Lorna Doone with a rougher tongue and a stronger spine. Mother won’t like her, he thought. (About that he was entirely right.) He was happier than he’d been at any time since he lost his faith. (That was an unsatisfactory way of putting it. It was more as if he’d come into a closed-off room or opened a drawer and found that his faith had dried up, turned to a mound of dust in the corner.)

He always said that he made up his mind at once to get Barbara, but he used no tactics beyond an open display of worship. A capacity for worship had been noticeable in him all through his school days, along with his good nature and a tendency to befriend underdogs. But he was sturdy enough—he had enough advantages of his own—that it hadn’t got him any serious squelching. Minor squelches he was able to sustain.

Barbara refused to ride on a float as the Downtown Merchants’ contestant for the Queen of the Dominion Day Parade.

“I absolutely agree with you,” said Murray. “Beauty contests are degrading.”

“It’s the paper flowers,” said Barbara. “They make me sneeze.”

Murray and Barbara live now at Zeigler’s Resort, twenty-five miles or so northwest of Walley. The land here is rough and hilly. The farmers abandoned it around the turn of the century and let it go back to bush. Murray’s father bought two hundred acres of it and built a primitive cabin and called the place his hunting camp. When Murray lost the store in Walley, and the big house and the little house on the lot behind the store, he came up here with Barbara and their two small children. He drove a school bus to get some cash income, and worked all the rest of the time building eight new cabins and renovating the one that was there, to serve as the lodge and as living quarters for his family. He learned carpentry, masonry, wiring, plumbing. He
cut down trees and dammed the creek and cleaned the creek bed and trucked in sand, to make a swimming pond and a beach. For obvious reasons (as he says), Barbara handled the finances.

Murray says that his is a common story. Does it deserve to be called a classic? “My great-grandfather got the business going. My grandfather established it in all its glory. My father preserved it. And I lost it.”

He doesn’t mind telling people. Not that he waylays them and unburdens himself immediately. Guests are used to seeing him always at work. Repairing the dock, painting the rowboat, hauling in groceries, digging up drains, he looks so competent and unfrazzled, so cheerfully committed to whatever job he’s doing, that they take him for a farmer turned to resort-keeping. He has the kind of patience and uninquisitive friendliness, the unathletic but toughened and serviceable body, the sunburned face, the graying boyishness that they might expect of a country man. But the same guests come back year after year, and sometimes they become friends who are invited on their last night to eat dinner at the family table. (It is considered an achievement, among the regulars, to become friends with stately Barbara. Some never manage it.) Then they may get to hear Murray’s story.

“My grandfather used to go up on the roof of our building in Walley,” Murray says. “He went up on the roof and he threw down money. Every Saturday afternoon. Quarters, dimes, nickels—five-cent pieces, I guess you called them then. It drew the crowds. The men who started Walley were flashy fellows. They weren’t well educated. They weren’t genteel. They thought they were building Chicago.”

Then something different happened, he says. In came the ladies and the rectors and the grammar school. Out with the saloons and in with the garden parties. Murray’s father was an elder of St. Andrew’s; he stood for the Conservative Party.

“Funny—we used to say ‘stood for’ instead of ‘ran for.’ The store was an institution by that time. Nothing changed for decades. The old display cases with curved glass tops, and the
change zinging overhead in those metal cylinders. The whole town was like that, into the fifties. The elm trees weren’t dead yet. They’d started. In the summer there were the old cloth awnings all around the square.”

When Murray decided to modernize, he went all out. It was 1965. He had the whole building covered in white stucco, the windows blocked in. Just little, classy, eye-level windows left along the street, as if intended to display the Crown jewels. The name Zeigler’s—just that—written across the stucco in flowing script, pink neon. He chucked the waist-high counters and carpeted the varnished floors and put in indirect lighting and lots of mirrors. A great skylight over the staircase. (It leaked, had to be repaired, was taken out before the second winter.) Indoor trees and bits of pools and a kind of fountain in the ladies’ room.

Insanity.

Meanwhile the mall had opened south of town. Should Murray have gone out there? He was too mired in debt to move. Also, he had become a downtown promoter. He had not only changed the image of Zeigler’s, he had changed himself, becoming a busy loudmouth on the municipal scene. He served on committees. He was on the building committee. That was how he discovered that a man from Logan, a dealer and developer, was getting government money for restoring old buildings when the fact of the matter was that he was tearing the old buildings down and preserving only a remnant of the foundation to incorporate into his new, ugly, badly built, profitable apartment blocks.

“Aha—corruption,” says Murray when he recalls this. “Let the people know! I ranted to the newspaper. I practically ranted on the street corners. What did I think? Did I think the people
didn’t
know? It must have been a death wish. It was a death wish. I got to be such a ranter and public entertainment that I was turfed off the committee. I’d lost credibility. They said so. I’d also lost the store. I’d lost it to the bank. Plus the big house my grandfather built and the little house on the same lot, where
Barbara and I and the kids were living. The bank couldn’t get at them, but I sold them off, to get square—that was the way I wanted to do it. Lucky thing my mother died before the crash came.”

Sometimes Barbara excuses herself while Murray is talking. She could be going to get more coffee, she might come back in a moment. Or she might take the dog, Sadie, and go for a walk down to the pond, in among the pale trunks of the birch and poplar trees and under the droopy hemlocks. Murray doesn’t bother explaining, though he listens, without appearing to do so, to hear her come back. Anybody who becomes their friend has to understand how Barbara balances contact with absences, just as they have to understand that Barbara doesn’t want to
do
anything. She does plenty, of course. She does the cooking, she manages the resort. But when people find out how much she has read, and that she’s never been to college, they sometimes suggest that she should go, she should get a degree.

“What for?” says Barbara.

And it turns out that she doesn’t want to be a teacher, or a scholar, or a librarian, or an editor, or to make television documentaries, or review books, or write articles. The list of things that Barbara doesn’t want to do is as long as your arm. Apparently she wants to do what she does—read, and go for walks, eat and drink with pleasure, tolerate some company. And unless people can value this about her—her withdrawals, her severe indolence (she has an air of indolence even when she’s cooking an excellent dinner for thirty people)—they don’t remain among the company she tolerates.

When Murray was busy renovating and borrowing money and involving himself in municipal life, Barbara was reading. She had always read, but now she let it take up more and more of her time. The children had started to school. Some days Barbara never left the house. There was always a coffee cup by her chair, and a pile of fat dusty books from the library,
Remembrance of Things Past, Joseph and His Brothers
, books by lesser
Russians whom Murray had never heard of. Barbara has a real mania for reading, his mother said—isn’t she worried about bringing all those books from the library into the house? You never know who has been handling them.

Reading such heavy books, Barbara grew heavier herself. She did not get really fat, but she put on twenty or twenty-five pounds, well distributed over her tall, never delicate frame. Her face changed, too—flesh blurred its firm lines, making her look softer and in a way younger. Her cheeks puffed out and her mouth looked more secretive. Sometimes she had—she still has—the expression of a self-absorbed and rather willful little girl. Nowadays she reads skimpy-looking books by Czechs or Japanese or Rumanians, but she is still heavy. Her hair is still long, too, and black, except around the face, where it has gone white, as if a piece of veiling had been thrown over it.

Murray and Barbara are driving down out of the hills, from twisting, hilly roads to the flat, straight grid of the farmland. They are driving to Walley, for a special reason. Two weeks ago Barbara discovered a lump in the flesh of one of her buttocks. She was drying herself after coming out of the pond—it was the last swim, the last spurt of warm weather of the year. The lump was about the size of a marble. “If I wasn’t so fat, I’d probably have found it sooner,” she said, without particular regret or alarm. She and Murray spoke of the lump as they would of a bad tooth—a nuisance that had to be dealt with. She had it removed in the hospital in Walley. Then there had to be a biopsy.