Lady Oracle (24 page)

I was overcome by a wave of guilt, for many reasons. I had left her, walked out on her, even though I was aware that she was unhappy. I had doubted the telegram, suspecting a plot, and I hadn’t even made it back for the funeral. I had closed the door on her at the very moment of her death – which, however, couldn’t be determined exactly, as she had been dead for five or six hours at least by the time my father found her. I felt as if I’d killed her myself, though this was impossible.

That night I went to the refrigerator,
her
refrigerator, and gorged myself on the contents, eating with frantic haste and no enjoyment half a chicken, a quarter of a pound of butter, a banana cream pie, store-bought, two loaves of bread and a jar of strawberry jam from the cupboard. I kept expecting her to materialize in the doorway with that disgusted, secretly pleased look I remembered so well – she liked to catch me in the act – but despite this ritual, which had often before produced her, she failed to appear. I threw up twice during the night and did not relapse again.

My suspicions began the next day, when my father said to me at breakfast, looking at me with his new, sly eyes and sounding as if he’d rehearsed it, “You may find this difficult to believe, but I loved your mother.”

I did find it difficult to believe. I knew about the twin beds, the recriminations, I knew that in my mother’s view both I and my father had totally failed to justify her life the way she felt it should have been justified. She used to say that nobody appreciated her, and this was not paranoia. Nobody did appreciate her, even though she’d
done the right thing, she had devoted her life to us, she had made her family her career as she had been told to do, and look at us: a sulky fat slob of a daughter and a husband who wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t move back to Rosedale, that stomping ground of respectable Anglo-Saxon money where his family had once lived, was he ashamed of her? The answer was probably yes, although during these conversations my father would say nothing; or he would say that he hadn’t liked Rosedale. My mother would say that my father didn’t love her, and I believed my mother.

Stranger still was his need to say to me, “I loved your mother.” He wanted to convince me, that was clear; but it was also clear that he hadn’t really been expecting me to come back from England. He’d already given my mother’s clothes to the Crippled Civilians, he’d made footmarks all over the rug, there were dirty dishes in the sink at least three days old, he was systematically violating all the rules. He said an even more suspicious thing on the second day. He said, “It isn’t the same without her,” sighing and looking at me as he did so. His eyes pleaded with me to believe him, join the conspiracy, keep my mouth shut. I had a sudden image of him sneaking out of the hospital, wearing his white mask so he would not be recognized, driving back to the house, letting himself in with his key, removing his shoes, putting on his slippers and creeping up behind her. He was a doctor, he’d been in the underground, he’d killed people before, he would know how to break her neck and make it look like an accident. Despite his furrows and sighs he was smug, like a man who’d gotten away with something.

I told myself, in vain, that this was not the sort of thing he would do. Anything is the sort of thing anyone would do, given the right circumstances. I began to hunt for motives, another woman, another man, an insurance policy, a single overwhelming grievance. I examined my father’s shirt collars for lipstick, I sifted through official-looking papers in his bureau drawers, I listened in on the few phone
calls he received, crouching on the stairs. But nothing turned up, and I abandoned my search a lot sooner than I would have if I’d been convinced. Besides, what would I have done if I’d found out my father was a murderer?

I switched to speculations about my mother; I could afford to speculate about her, now that she was no longer there. What had been done to her to make her treat me the way she did? More than ever, I wanted to ask my father whether she was pregnant before they got married. And what about that young man in her photograph album, with the white flannels and expensive car, the one she said she’d been more or less engaged to? More or less. Some tragedy lurked there. Had he thrown her over because her father had been a stationmaster for the CPR? Was my father second-best, even though he was a step up for her?

I got out the photograph album to refresh my memory. Perhaps in the expressions of the faces there would be some clue. But in all the pictures of the white-flanneled man, the face had been cut out, neatly as with a razor blade. The faces of my father also were missing. There was only my mother, young and pretty, laughing gaily at the camera, clutching the arms of her headless men. I sat for an hour with the album open on the table before me, stunned by this evidence of her terrible anger. I could almost see her doing it, her long fingers working with precise fury, excising the past, which had turned into the present and betrayed her, stranding her in this house, this plastic-shrouded tomb from which there was no exit. That was what she must have felt. It occurred to me that she might have committed suicide, though I’d never heard of anyone committing suicide by throwing themselves down the cellar stairs. That would explain my father’s furtiveness, his wish to be believed, his eagerness to get rid of her things, which would remind him perhaps that he was partly to blame. For the first time in my life I began to feel it was
unfair that everyone had liked Aunt Lou but no one had liked my mother, not really. She’d been too intense to be likable.

It was partly my failure as well. Had I been wrong to take my life in my own hands and walk out the door? And before that I had been the fat mongoloid idiot, the defective who had shown her up, tipped her hand: she was not what she seemed. I was a throwback, the walking contradiction of her pretensions to status and elegance. But after all she was my mother, she must once have treated me as a child, though I could remember only glimpses, being held up by her to look at myself in the triple mirror when she’d brushed my hair, or being hugged by her in public, in the company of other mothers.

For days I brooded about her. I wanted to know about her life, but also about her death. What had really happened? And especially, if she’d died in her pink housecoat and mules, why had she turned up in my front parlor wearing her navy-blue suit from 1949? I decided to find Leda Sprott and ask her for a private sitting.

I looked her up in the phone book, but she wasn’t there. Neither was the Jordan Chapel. I took a streetcar to the district where it had stood, and walked up and down the streets, searching for it. Finally I found the house; no doubt about it, I remembered the gas station on the corner. But a Portuguese family lived there now, and they could tell me nothing. Leda Sprott and her tiny band of Spiritualists had vanished completely.

I stayed with my father for nine days, watching my mother’s house disintegrate. Her closets and dresser drawers were empty, her twin bed stood made but unused. Dandelions appeared on the lawn, rings around the bathtub, crumbs on the floor. My father did not exactly resent my presence, but he didn’t urge me to stay. We had been silent conspirators all our lives, and now that the need for silence was removed, we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. I used to imagine that my mother was keeping us apart and if
it weren’t for her we could live happily, like Nancy Drew and her understanding lawyer Dad, but I was wrong. In fact she’d held us together, like a national emergency, like the Blitz.

Finally I got a room by myself, on Charles Street. I couldn’t really afford it, but my father told me he was planning to sell the house and move into a one-bedroom apartment on Avenue Road. (He eventually married again, a nice legal secretary he met after my mother’s death. They moved to a bungalow in Don Mills.)

For a while after my mother’s death I couldn’t write. The old plots no longer interested me, and a new one wouldn’t do. I did try – I started a novel called
Storm over Castleford
– but the hero played billiards all the time and the heroine sat on the edge of her bed, alone at night, doing nothing. That was probably the closest to social realism I ever came.

The thought of Arthur contributed to my depression. I should never have left, I told myself. We’d kissed goodbye at the airport – well, not the airport exactly, but he’d seen me to the BOAC bus terminal – and I’d told him I’d come back as soon as I could. I’d written him faithfully every week, and I’d explained that I couldn’t return just yet as I didn’t have the money. For a while he’d answered; odd letters, full of news about his leaflet activities, which he signed “Yours sincerely.” (I signed mine, “Love and a thousand kisses, XXXX.”) But then there was silence. I didn’t dare to think about what had happened. Was there another woman, some pamphlet-distributing chippy? Maybe he’d simply forgotten about me. But how could he, when I’d left most of my luggage in his apartment?

I got a job as a makeup demonstrator at the cosmetics counter in Eaton’s, selling mascara. But I cried a lot at night and my eyes were puffy, so they switched me to wigs. Not even the good wigs, the synthetic ones. It wasn’t very interesting work, and the customers’ fruitless quest for youth and beauty depressed me. Occasionally when no
one was looking I would try on the wigs myself, but it was mostly the gray ones. I wanted to see how I would look when I was older. I would soon be old, I felt, and nothing would happen to me in the meantime because I wasn’t interested in anything or anyone. I’d been deserted, I was convinced of it now. I was miserable.

I
sat in exile on the Roman curb, on top of my portable Olivetti in its case, and wept. Pedestrians paused; some said things to me. I wanted Arthur back, I wanted him right here, with me. If I explained, how could he be angry? I’d handled things very badly.…

I stood up, wiped my face with a corner of my scarf, and looked around for a newsstand. I bought the first postcard I could find and wrote on the back of it,
I’m not really dead, I had to go away. Come over quickly. XXX.
I didn’t sign my name or put any address: he would know who it was and where to find me.

After I’d mailed it I felt much better. Everything would be all right; as soon as he got the postcard Arthur would fly across the ocean, we would embrace, I’d tell him everything, he would forgive me, I would forgive him, and we could start all over again. He would see that I couldn’t possibly go back to the other side, so he would change his name. Together we would bury all his clothes and buy new ones, once I’d sold
Stalked by Love.
He would grow a beard or a moustache – something distinguished and pointed, not the amorphous
frizz that made men look like out-of-control armpits – and he might even dye his hair.

I remembered the hair dye. I located the equivalent of a drugstore and spent some time going through the rinses, tints, washes and colorings. I finally settled for Lady Janine’s “Carissima,” a soft, glowing chestnut, autumn-kissed, laced with sunlight and sprinkled with sparkling highlights. I liked a lot of adjectives on my cosmetic boxes; I felt cheated if there were only a few.

To celebrate the birth of my new personality (a sensible girl, discreet, warm, honest and confident, with soft green eyes, regular habits and glowing chestnut hair), I bought myself a
fotoromanzo
and sat down at an outdoor café to read it and eat a
gelato.

If Arthur were here he’d be helping me to read the
fotoromanzo.
We practiced our Italian that way, reading the speeches from the rectangular voice balloons out loud to each other, looking up the hard words in our pocket dictionary and figuring out the meanings from the black-and-white photos. Arthur found this faintly degrading; I found it fascinating. The stories were all of torrid passion, but the women and men never had their mouths open and their limbs were arranged like those of mannequins, their heads sat on their necks precise as hats. I understood that convention, that sense of decorum. Italy was more like Canada than it seemed at first. All that screaming with your mouth closed.

In this one the mother was secretly the lover of the daughter’s fianc
é, fidanzato.
“I love you,” she said, plaster-faced;
Ti amo.
She was wearing a negligee. “Do not despair,” he said, gripping her shoulders. They never seemed to say anything I really needed, like “How much are the tomatoes?” In the next square the woman’s negligee was slipping off her shoulder.

A shadow loomed over me. I started and looked up: it was only a stranger though, white teeth and overpressed suit, nylon tie, pink
and green. I knew that single women weren’t supposed to sit alone in bars, but this wasn’t a bar and it was the middle of the day. Perhaps it was the
fotoromanzo
that had attracted him. I closed it, but he’d already sat down at my table.

“Scusi, signora.
” He asked me a question; I had no idea what it meant. I smiled weakly and said, “
Inglese, no parlo Italiano
,” but he grinned even more intensely. In his eyes our clothes fell to the floor, we fell to the floor, the white glass-topped table overturned and there was broken glass everywhere. Don’t move, Signora, not even your hand with the wedding ring, where is your husband? Or you will cut yourself and there will be a lot of blood. Stay here on the floor with me and let me run my tongue over your belly.

I scrambled to my feet, gathering up my purse, hoisting the typewriter. The man behind the counter grinned as I paid my bill. How could I have allowed it, a man with such pointed shoes and a pink-and-green nylon tie? He reminded me of the vegetable man in the market square, with his grape-colored eyes, caressing the furry peaches, hefting the grapefruits possessively as breasts. My hand slid through his lambswool hair, we surged together on a wave of plums and tangerines, grapevines twined around us.…

Arthur, I thought, you’d better get my postcard fairly soon or something regrettable is going to happen.

It was midafternoon by the time I got back to Terremoto. I went to the post office, as I’d been doing every day, hoping for news from Sam. So far there had been nothing. “Louisa Delacourt,” I said as usual, but this time the woman behind the counter turned her whole body, like the wax fortune-teller at the Canadian National Exhibition, who would pick out a card for you if you gave her a dime. Her hand came through the slot in the window, holding a blue airmail letter.