Smoke (11 page)

Doc John tossed off the covers and climbed out of bed nauseous, with the weight of truths still unspoken resting on his shoulders. He stood with the broken frame at his feet, his eyes bleary from lack of sleep and his pyjamas long for his short legs. His heart breaking. He shook, trembled before Alice, before the life he had taken care to build, before its imminent collapse and the fear of what his frightened, angry young bride might do now. “I'm sorry,” he said, in a tone as pure as it was on the day he'd proposed.

She wanted to hate him, Alice remembers that still. She had every right. She wanted to rob him of something precious too, though all she could bring herself to do was dent his pride. Humiliate. The truth was that she hadn't known what to say or do. She'd never met anyone like John, with or without his stories and surprises, and she didn't know, in that moment alone in the dark of their bedroom, if the shiver crawling up and down her spine was because there would be no children or because there would be no John. She wanted him. Was that possible? Her mind chased the rapid beat of her heart and with every passing minute she blamed herself for not storming out. Unable to pull away, she understood that whatever was coming, God help her, was now also her burden to carry. She remembers screaming that he was a criminal. Evil. A weak-blooded man. She said that she wished they'd never met, but she hadn't really meant those things, they just sparked out between her lips to burn him. Good. She wanted him hurt. She discovered that life was not going to unfold exactly as she'd always assumed, that her husband's past was a space largely unrecognizable to her and her future shaped by voids that might never be filled. The rest of the night passed like an endless white scream and she felt nothing but a cold knot wind up tighter and tighter inside.

Alice hadn't realized what she was getting herself into by marrying a man she'd only known a short while. She saw what everyone else did—a dapper older fellow in a crisp, well-pressed suit with polished buttons. A professional man. A person from away who adored her. A physician no less. The whole extended family approved, said he was a fine catch. “You know he don't gamble,” her one aunt chimed in. “He's no big drinker,” the other said. And there was the doctor himself. “I love you better than any man, Alice Armstrong. More than any man will. Won't you please marry me?” That was how he'd put it. Plain and simple. Squashing yellow tulips in her mother's garden on bended knee while looking up at her with big brown eyes that shone as promising as two gold nuggets. It had all seemed so easy. So certain. Questions don't occur when there's pushing from behind. Pushing on all sides, pushing that says how wonderful. How
natural
.

They had met on the train heading to Port Dover. She was on her way to see Guy Lombardo at the Paradise with her aunts and there he sat across from her, observant. Looking for work, he said. He was new to Canada. He kept his eyes cast down, read a medical textbook for much of the trip, she remembers, though she cannot recall its title, and then he fell asleep with his head gently knocking against the windowpane. Alice watched him. His clothes were boughten not homemade. His hands, much like her father's, looked as if they'd never known physical work and seeing them folded in his lap, every part of her cried out with the threat of a premature ending. Stay, she thought. Whoever you are. Stay.

John insisted on helping her and her aunts onto the platform, escorting them to the waiting bus and darting back to his seat on the train. And so a month later Alice was more than happy to make his acquaintance a second time when he turned up in the village to start a new practice. She'd been holding herself back for someone special—it didn't have to be a wild or wicked person as it did for other women. Someone a little different was all. Above average. Someone to hold her interest. And the community did need a physician. With all the driving and travel to surrounding parts, a local doctor's day was long and strenuous and folks had already gone through many young fellows. Only Elgin Baker, in Tillsonburg, was reliable and he couldn't possibly care for them all.

Alice raises her eyes from her handiwork to find that Hazel is also deep in thought so she resumes sewing. She made up her mind that night in their bedroom that she would never speak of John's past again, that as long as he didn't force the conversation upon her she could stay with him and be content. After all, he possessed the sweetest disposition of any man she'd met, including her soft-hearted father, may he rest in peace. John didn't cultivate a temper the way other men did. From the beginning he'd been quiet and slow to furnish an opinion and his air of contemplation had made him appear all the more wise. What most endeared Alice to him though was his steady confidence and his sense of propriety; he was a gentleman through and through—a gentle man—and every one of her girlfriends was secretly green with envy.

John had tried to do penance; Alice remembers that best. He'd spoken of forgiveness and even of adoption, written achingly beautiful and tortured letters and left them under her pillow. She still has every one, folded neatly in its envelope and piled in the corner of her fine linen drawer. All the things that never were, held safe from public scrutiny. The smell of lavender from the sachet she keeps fresh brings those times to mind each morning. How the house was full of cut flowers. How her husband's attention was lavished upon her night and day, unencumbered by distractions. He'd given fully and without hesitation. And with much soul-searching she had forgiven him. Eventually she'd welcomed him back into her bed.

For a long time, Alice asked herself questions she couldn't bear to utter out loud. If he was half the man she'd thought and yet she wanted him, what kind of woman did that make her? She watched her friends Hazel Johnson and Laura Claxton start their families, pushing prams up to town, and Isabel McFiddie act as if there were no greater station in the world than that of motherhood. Alice watched her husband out of the corner of her eye too, and noticed things about him she hadn't noticed before. How modest he was, even in slumber. The way, when they lay together as man and wife, he touched her tenderly and yet never wanted to have tenderness directed at him. How his eyelids fluttered while he slept and left her wondering what other untold confessions tossed and turned beneath them, looking for a chance to escape. She drifted off, always keeping her thoughts to herself. She now knew there was something more, something other than what they'd openly discussed, but she wouldn't admit it to herself until much later, and never to another living soul. Alice hadn't been any more able or willing to face the answers back then, so she'd simply permitted time to pass and come to accept John as he was, accept that people are often less than what we expect and more than what we imagine, and despite all of this there can be more good life lived in one square foot than in all the miles leading away from home.

Did
she now wish, as Hazel had intimated, that she'd chosen differently though? Travelled abroad or married a man more like George Walker? A man who worked with his hands until they were cracked and blistered? A man with a deep voice and a loud, commanding personality? A man who could give her children? No, not really. Not once she got over having been deceived. The disclosure had changed her too, not only altered the way she saw her husband but permanently altered her sense of herself as a Christian, as a woman, and as a wife. How could it not? She'd learned that two people could become tangled together in unexpected ways. She'd discovered that good people do questionable things, and that the details of those things can be held at bay. She made up her mind, all right. She would carry on with John. At least with him the worst of it was probably over. She would be his and he would be hers, and whatever had happened before all of that she didn't want to know.

She could have pressed the issue of children and they would have adopted; John had had Elgin Baker look into it once. But Alice discovered, much to her own surprise, that she did not crave the full-time responsibility of children. Growing up she had babysat often. It was the security of love, not diapers and minding, she'd really been after. Family was more than blood and babies. Cracking the door to his previous life open, even a sliver, John had changed their pattern of relating to one another. He had breached morality by marrying her under false pretences and after her anger had subsided, and trust rebuilt, the door was still ajar. Alice slipped in and out of common decency and found herself. The terrible revelation that John was fallible, that he could be dishonest and disappointingly human, carved out a space for her to be mortal also. By the second year of their marriage she was reborn, loosened into womanhood in a way that her strict religious upbringing had discouraged. She came to feel a greater intimacy with John, discovered the earthbound nature of her own irascible existence. Sacrosanct. Gritty. Sublime. She opened herself. She even flirted with impropriety, sometimes initiating their encounters. If John could be more than one person inside their marriage, so could she.

Alice amply fulfilled what instincts to nurture she did have, through teaching Sunday school and by assisting John with his work, occasionally helping him deliver a baby. Yes, she reconciled to the fact that she'd wanted him more than she'd wanted any other life, including one with children of her own. It was true. Was that a sin? She sometimes wonders still. Am I pitied in the company of my women friends? But of course not, she tells herself. We must all, in our own ways, choose our happiness.

She could have left him, gone to live with one of her aunts in Delhi or with her parents in Ingersoll, or kept the house and learned to drive the car. John wouldn't have fought her. She'd also been young enough and pretty enough to have married again but something stopped her from leaving and it wasn't compassion for John's plight, her own stunned grief, or even her strong belief in the sanctity of her marriage vows. No, if she is to be truly honest with herself and with God she has to admit that she knew what it was as soon as it had crawled under her skin and made a home of her heart that day on the train. The possibility of real passion, simple and sure. The kind that shakes your insides like a favourite verse from the bible. First Corinthians chapter thirteen, if she was to pick one, the verse her father read on her wedding day.
Faith, hope and love; these three. But the greatest of these is love
. My word! Alice thinks. It still tingles her fingertips and explodes her taste buds remembering. Passion that only comes around once in a lifetime, if you're lucky.

So, despite his grim disclosure there was a keening love that defied loss, a pooling, swampy kind of love that sucked her down and through it like an undertow, and she hadn't wanted to rise to the surface, not even after learning there was more she didn't know, not even now, not ever.

Alice rises to attend the kettle and pours the boiling water into a Brown Betty, adds two RediTea bags, sets the lid on top and fits the cozy on for it to steep. She notices that John's chair has stopped rocking and moves swiftly to the window, peering outside. He is sitting on the edge of the chair, spine straight, assembling his clarinet. He slips the delicate cane reed between his lips to moisten it, lifts the longest tenon-and-socket joint from the case and screws the bell onto its bottom. She watches him add the top joint, force the barrel on, then the mouthpiece, slip the ligature over it and take the reed from his tongue and slide it into place. Alice grins when he fusses to line up the sharp tip of the reed with the edge of the mouthpiece. “Hazel,” she says as sternly as if she's reading to her Sunday school class. “When a man gets his best trousers stained in your mother's favourite tulip bed crushing the poor little darlings and smiling up at you with the shiniest, most hopeful grin you've ever seen and all you can think is Yes, yes, yes I will! it
must
be Heaven sent.”

Hazel nods. “Marriage is in sickness and in health.” She measures and cuts another square for the quilt.

“Right.” Alice's tone is easily back to business. “And in many ways it's the luck of the draw.”

BILLS COME DUE