Small Ceremonies (7 page)

Her other story, frequently told, concerned a friend of hers who greatly admired my mother's decorating talents. The friend, a Mrs. Christianson, had written to
Canadian
Homes
suggesting they come to photograph our house for a future issue. For a year my mother waited to hear from the magazine, all the while keeping the house perfect, every chair leg free from dust, every corner cheerful with potted plants. No one ever called, and she came to the conclusion in the end that they were just too hoity-toity (a favorite expression of hers) to bother about Scarborough bungalows.

That was all we had: my father's adventure in the stairwell, which never developed beyond the scientific rationale for fainting, my mother's teapot and rash and her near-brush with fame. And a sort of half-story about something sinister that had happened to Aunt Liddy in Jamaica.

My sister Charleen, who is a poet, believes that we two sisters turned to literature out of simple malnutrition. Our own lives just weren't enough, she explains. We were underfed, undernourished; we were desperate. So we dug in. And here we are, all these years later, still digging.

 

On Tuesday Martin felt a cold coming on. He dosed himself with vitamin C and orange juice and went to bed early. He turned up the electric blanket full blast and shivered. His voice dried to a sandy rasp, but he never complained. It is one of the bargains we have.

Years ago, he claims, I put him under a curse by telling him that I loved him because he was so robust. Can I really have said such a thing? It seems impossible, but he swears it; he can even show me the particular park bench in Toronto where, in our courting days, I paid allegiance to his health. It has, he says, placed him under an obligation for the rest of his life. He is unable to enjoy poor health, he is permanently disbarred from hypochondria, he is obliged to be fit. So he went off to the university, his eyes set with fever and his pockets full of Kleenex.

I know the power of the casual curse. I have only to look at my children to see how they become the shapes we prepare for them. When Meredith was little, for instance, she, like any other child, collected stones, and for some reason we seized on it, calling her our little rock collector, our little geologist. Years later, nearly crowded out of her room by specimens, she confessed with convulsions of guilt that she wasn't interested in rocks any more. In fact, she never really liked them all that much. I saw in an instant that she had been trapped into a box, and I was only too happy to let her out; together we buried the rocks in the back yard. And forgot them.

Another example: Furlong, reviewing my first book for a newspaper, described me, Judith Gill, as a wry observer of human nature. Thus, for him I am always and ever, wry. My wryness overcomes even me. I can feel it peeling off my tongue like very thick slices of imported salami, very special, the acidity measured on a meter somewhere in the back of my brain. Furlong has never once suspected that it was he who implanted this wryness in me, a tiny seedling which flourished on inception and which I am able to conceal from almost everyone else. For Furlong, though, I can be deeply, religiously, fanatically wry.

Just as for me Martin is strong and ruddy, quintessentially robust. But by the end of the week he was ready to give in. “Go to bed,” I said. “Surrender.”

Three days later he was still there, sipping tea, going from aspirin to aspirin.

I brought him the morning mail to cheer him up. “Just look at this,” I said, handing him a milky-white square envelope.

I had already read it. It was an invitation to Furlong's lunch party in celebration of his new book. A one-thirty luncheon and a reading at three; an eccentric social arrangement, at least in our part of the world.

I squinted at the date over Martin's shoulder. “It's a Sunday, I think.”

“It is,” Martin said. “And I think –" his voice gathered in the raw bottom of his throat, “I think it's Grey Cup Day.”

“That's impossible.”

“I'm sure, Judith. Look at the calendar.”

I counted on my fingers. “You're right.”

He muttered something inaudible from the tumble of sheets.

“How could he do it?” I said.

“Well he did.”

“He can't have done it on purpose. Do you think he just forgot when Grey Cup is?”

“Furlong's not your average football fan, you know.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, breathless with disbelief, “to give a literary party on Grey Cup.”

“For ‘one who embodies the national ethos,'” Martin was quoting from a review of
Graven Images,
“he is fairly casual about the folkways of his country.”

“What'll we do?” I said. “What can I tell him.”

“Just that we're terribly sorry, previous engagement, et cetera.”

“But Martin, it's not just us. No one will come. Absolutely no one. Even Roger, worshipper though he be, wouldn't give up the game for Furlong. He'll be left high and dry. And there's his mother to consider.”

“It's what they deserve. My God, of all days.”

“And he's so vain he'll probably expect us to come anyway.”

“Fat chance.”

“I'd better phone him right away.”

“The sooner the better.”

“Right.”

“And Judith.”

“What?”

“Make it a firm no.”

“Right,” I said.

But I didn't have to phone Furlong. He phoned me himself late in the afternoon.

“Judith,” he said, racing along. “I suppose you got our invitation today. From Mother and me.”

“Yes, we did but –"

“Say no more. I understand. It seems I've made a colossal bloop.”

“Grey Cup Day.”

“Mother says the phone's been ringing all day. And I ran into Roger at the university. Poor lad, almost bent double with apology. Of course, the instant we realized, we decided on postponement.”

“That really is the best thing,” I said, relieved that I would not have to admit we put football before literature in this house.

“We'll make it December then, I think. Early December.”

“Maybe you should check the bowl games,” I suggested wanting to be helpful.

“Of course. Mother and I will put our heads together and come up with another date. Now I mustn't keep you from your work, Judith. How is it coming, by the way?”

“Well. I think I can honestly say it's going well.”

“Good. Good. No more novel-writing aspirations?” he asked, and for an instant I thought I heard a jealous edge to his voice.

“No,” I said. “You can consider me cured of that bug.”

“That's what it is, a wretched virus. I can't tell you how I envy you your immunity.”

“It was madness,” I said. “Pure madness.”

 

“That was Furlong on the phone,” I told Martin when I took up his supper tray. Soup, toast, a piece of cheese. He was sitting up reading the paper and looking better.

“And? What did he have to say for himself?”

“All a mistake. He never thought of Grey Cup. So don't worry, Martin. It's been postponed. Way off in the future. Sometime in December.”

“We might even be snowed in with luck,” he said going back to his paper. “Anyway, that's the end of that story.”

 

Story, he had called it. He was right, it was a story, a fragment of one anyway. A human error causing human outcry and subdued by a human retraction. A comedy miniaturized.

It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping; our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.

 

Names are funny things, I tell Richard. We are having lunch one day, and he has asked me how I happened to name him Richard.

“I liked the ‘r' sound,” I tell him. “It's a sort of repetition of the ‘r' in your father's name.”

“And Meredith?” he asks. “Where did you get that?”

“I'm not sure,” I tell him, for the naming of our babies is a blur to me. Each time I was caught unprepared; each time I felt a compulsion amidst the confusion of birth, to pin a label, any label, on fast before the prize disappeared.

Meredith. It is, of course, an echo of my own name, the same thistle brush of “th” at the end, just as Richard's name is a shadow of Martin's. Unconscious at the time; I have only noticed it since.

“I'm not sure,” I tell Richard. “Names are funny things. They don't really mean anything until you enlist them.”

Now he confides a rare fact about Anita Spalding, introducing her name with elaborate formality.

“You know Anita Spalding? In Birmingham?”

“Yes,” I say, equally formal.

“Do you know what she does? She calls her parents by their first names.”

“Really?”

“Like she calls her father John. That's his first name. And she calls her mother Isabel.”

“Hmmmm.” I am deliberately offhand, anxious to prolong this moment of confidence.

But he breaks off with, “But like you say, names are funny things.”

“Richard,” I say. “Do you know what Susanna Moodie called her husband?”

There is no need to explain who Susanna Moodie is. After all these months she is one of us, one of the family. Every day someone refers to her. She hovers over the house, a friendly ghost.

“What did she call her husband?” Richard asks.

“Moodie,” I tell him.

“What's wrong with that? That was his name wasn't it?”

“His last name. Don't you get it, Richard? It would be like me calling Daddy, Gill. Would you like a cup of tea, Gill? Well, Gill, how's the old flu coming along? Hi ya, Gill.”

“Yeah,” Richard agrees. “That would be kind of strange.”

“Strange is the word.”

“Why'd she do it then? Why didn't she call him by his first name?”

“I don't know,” I tell him. “It was the custom in certain levels of society in those days. And there's her sister, Catherine Parr Traill. She called her husband Mr. Traill. All his life. Imagine that. Moodie is almost casual when you think of Mr. Traill.”

“I guess so,” he says doubtfully.

“I like to think of it as a sort of nickname. Like Smitty or Jonesy. Maybe it was like that.”

“Maybe,” he says. “I suppose it depends on how she said it. Like the expression she used when she said it. Do you know what I mean?”

I did know what he meant, and it was a common problem in biography. Could anyone love a man she called by his surname? Was such a thing possible? I would have to hear whether it was said coldly or with tenderness. One minute of eavesdropping and I could have travelled light-years in understanding her.

It was Leon Edel, who should know about the problems of biography if anyone does, who said that biography is the least exact of the sciences. So much of a man's life is lived inside his own head, that it is impossible to encompass a personality. There is never never enough material. Sometimes I read in the newspaper that some university or library has bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes of letters and papers connected with some famous deceased person, and I know every time that it's never going to be enough. It's hopeless, so why even try?

That was the question I found myself asking during the year we spent in England. My two biographies, although they had been somewhat successful, had left me dissatisfied. In the end, the personalities had eluded me. The expression in the voice, the concern in the eyes, the unspoken anxieties; none of these things could be gleaned from library research, no matter how patient and painstaking. Characters from the past, heroic as they may have been, lie coldly on the page. They are inert, having no details of person to make them fidget or scratch; they are toneless, simplified, stylized, myths distilled from letters; they are bloodless.

There is nothing to do but rely on available data, on diaries, bills, clippings, always something on paper. Even the rare photograph or drawing is single-dimensional and self-conscious.

And if one does enlarge on data, there is the danger of trespassing into that whorish field of biographical fiction, an arena already asplash with the purple blood of the queens of England or the lace-clutched tartish bosoms of French courtesans. Tasteless. Cheap. Tawdry.

That year in England I was restless. I started one or two research projects and abandoned them. I couldn't settle down. Everything was out of phase. My body seemed disproportionately large for the trim English landscape. I sensed that I alarmed people in shops by the wild nasal rock of my voice, and at parties I overheard myself suddenly raucous and bluff. It was better to fade back, hide out for a while. I became a full-time voyeur.

On trains I watched people, lusting to know their destinations, their middle names, their marital status and always and especially whether or not they were happy. I stared to see the titles of the books they were reading or the brand of cigarette they smoked. I strained to hear snatches of conversations and was occasionally rewarded, as when I actually heard an old gentleman alighting from his Rolls Royce saying to someone or other, “Oh yes, yes. I did know Lord MacDonald. We were contemporaries at Cambridge.” And a pretty girl on a bus who turned to her friend and said, “So I said to him, all right, but you have to buy the birth control pills.” And then, of course, I had the Spalding family artifacts around me twenty-four hours a day, and on that curious family trio I could speculate endlessly.

It occurred to me that famous people may be the real dullards of life. Perhaps shopgirls coming home from work on the buses are the breath and body of literature. Fiction just might be the answer to my restlessness.