Authors: Bergen David
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #C429, #Kat, #Extratorrents
The Age of Hope
David
Bergen
The Age of Hope
A NOVEL
To Doris
Contents
H
ope Plett would certainly have married her first love if he hadn’t died in a plane crash minutes after flying at a low altitude over her house. As the small plane passed overhead, a hand appeared out of the cockpit window and she shouted, “Hello, Jimmy.” Though Jimmy Kaas could not hear her and she knew this was so, she felt that she should say something, as he had gone to all that trouble of creating a drama. The plane made a steep climb and then disappeared in the direction of the golf course. She learned that he had crashed while attempting a “touch-and-go” on the grass landing strip. His family, a small Norwegian island in a sea of Anabaptists, left town shortly after his death.
She sometimes thought of Jimmy, though not with any great emotion. She had cried for a day after his death, and she had cried at his funeral, and for a month she had felt that her heart was broken, but then her emotions settled down and she began to understand his death as something that had happened to him, not to her. Years later, after she had children, the death of her first boyfriend became an interesting story, one of romance cut short. She liked to play up the tragic aspect of the moment: a young life snuffed out, her broken heart, Jimmy’s strong jaw and debonair clothes, the scarves he wore. And always, in the telling, she arrived at the point where she became cavalier, almost indifferent. “Jimmy was too arrogant, in any case. He came from money and he felt entitled. The relationship wouldn’t have worked.” There was an undertone of dismissal in her voice, as if she were implying that he had not been good enough for her. The simple fact was that hers was a plain life, full of both poverty and pride.
The year was 1948. She lived in a small town called Eden, Manitoba, in the middle of Canada, fifty miles above the American border. She was the only child of Grace and Ernie Plett. Grace was a slightly built Scottish woman from Kenora, Ontario, who had got a job teaching elementary school in Eden, a predominantly Mennonite town, in 1929. Grace met Ernie at the Saturday night dances that were held in a hall three miles out of town. Though Ernie came from a strict Mennonite background, he took wholehearted joy in things of the flesh, a drinker in a town of teetotallers. He paid close attention to Grace, wooed her with his panache and wit, and she married him.
Hope was born in 1930 and was raised not as her friends were, with German spoken in the home and the Bible as an anchor, but in a looser fashion. Her parents continued to attend the Saturday dances and when Hope was young they took her along. Only occasionally, perhaps once a month, did she attend church with her mother. Her father was typically sleeping off the night before, and at any rate, he had no use for religion. Eden had many churches and the reasoning in town went thus: the closer you were to God, the more you were blessed. Blessed, Hope discovered, had a monetary value. The wealthiest people in town were usually perceived as the most pious. Misfortune and bad luck tumbled down around the heads of the poor. Her parents’ heads. Her own. And yet, even at a young and tender age, she thought the reasoning must be faulty. God, she thought, could not be as simple as that. Her own father, a baker for a local businessman, was a hard worker. Yes, he also drank and he spent time with the English townspeople and he did not go to church, but he worked ten hours a day, six days a week, baking bread and rolls and buns, which the wealthy then happily purchased. And if his rewards were few, it might be that Mr. Buhler, his boss, did not pay him enough. Her mother said, “Mennonites have a hard time having fun, except for your father, who’s having too much fun.”
Hope understood early on, then, that she was different, not only in the matter of faith and background, but also in the matter of property and status. So she learned to observe and blend in. She picked up her German from the children she played with on the block. Her mother did not speak German: in fact, she refused to learn. During the war years, she was asked to patrol the school playground and deter the students from speaking the language of the enemy. Hope, when she heard of this, was ashamed for herself and for her mother and for the children who didn’t know better. Though perhaps shame was too strong a word. Indignity? She could not have been certain, but her young life hovered at the edges of indignity, as if she might never be good enough, though as she grew older she discovered that a smidgen of arrogance could carry her a long way.
As an only child, Hope received much attention from her parents, though she wasn’t exactly spoiled. Her family rented a small house on Reimer Avenue, they did not own a car, and new clothes were rare. Most of her finer clothes were handed down to her by Frida, a second cousin who lived in Altona, west of the Red River, fifty miles away. Frida was slightly taller than Hope, and bigger across the chest, and so Hope’s mother had to shorten the dresses and cuff the slacks and take in the tops. Still, for all the lack of finer things, Hope was a bit of a knockout, and sometimes, at extended family gatherings, Frida would look at Hope’s outfit and marvel, saying in Low German, “Now but that dress never looked so sharp on me when I had it once. Very Sunday.” Any onlooker would have said that beauty had fallen down on her. Her dark hair was an anomaly in a town of blond Russian Germans, and by the age of eighteen she had begun to pull it back loosely so that it framed her face and exposed her eyebrows and her slightly crooked though very open smile.
She wasn’t vain, though she knew what vanity looked like, and knowing this, she avoided it. Nor was she falsely humble. She could be stubborn and dismissive of foolishness in others, but for the most part she was level-headed and had already begun to use the phrase that invariably popped up when hardship or misfortune presented itself: “This too shall pass.”
So when Arnold Dick sat beside her at a bonfire party held by the Mennonite Brethren young people and said that he intended to go to Africa, possibly the Congo, as a missionary, and that God had indicated to him that Hope should be his wife, she knew what to say. She felt the heat of the fire on her knees and ankles. The smoke drifted upwards and made her eyes burn and water. Arnold, noticing this, thought that she was moved to tears over his proposal, and he was reaching out to take her hand when she said, “That’s ridiculous, Arnold. God hasn’t talked to me about this and until he does, I’ll be making other plans. I’m sorry. But thank you for thinking of me.”
Hope’s mother felt that it was important to expose her to the wider world. They went to the city to watch movies and to take in the occasional ballet. She put an emphasis on rigorous intellectual pursuits and believed that books, imagination, and clear thinking were necessary for a flourishing life. She explained that a satisfying life was made up of two essentials. Hope was struck by the force of that word, “essentials,” as if life were a machine made up of nuts and bolts. The essentials were: find something that you love doing, and find someone whom you enjoy spending time with because you’re going to be with him till you die. “Some of us find only one of those things. A lucky few find both,” her mother said. Hope wondered if she would be one of the lucky few.
At the age of nineteen, she decided to pursue nursing as a career and began a two-year intensive training at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, where she lived in residence. Her roommate was an Italian girl, Petra, who had a boyfriend even though dating and marriage were not allowed during the two-year program. Petra often broke curfew, returning in the middle of the night smelling of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Hope always woke when Petra entered the room, and Petra knew this, because immediately, as she leaned in to the mirror to remove her makeup, she started up a soft intimate monologue. Hope was shocked to hear her talk of having sex. None of her school friends had ever admitted to this. One night Petra said, matter-of-factly, “Jesus. The trouble with sex. I told Aldo he had to pull out but I’m not sure if he was quick enough. It’s really exhausting, all this bobbing and weaving. I’d like to make love in a proper bed, in my own house, without the fear of the head nurse, or God, or the priest. Christ.” She was a short girl, with a full chest that Hope coveted, and she was standing now in the middle of the room, in her underwear, her weak mouth turned down. Hope envied her freedom, or at least the appearance of freedom.
She studied Hope in the dim light. “If the boys could see
you
in your uniform, Hope, they’d go crazy.” She removed her bra, turning away, and Hope turned her head away as well. She knew it wasn’t only the boys. The older men on C Ward, the ones with quick hands and dirty mouths, they too liked Hope in her uniform. She shushed them, lightly slapped their arms, and pretended not to hear. The head nurse, Sister Andrea, an older nun with the kind of cruel tongue that arrives with dashed hopes, told Hope one day that she would have to be careful with her looks. “Who do you think you are? We must strike the snake before it rears its ugly head.” After that admonishment, Hope began to pull her hair back more severely. She smiled less frequently. She tried to bark at the patients. To no avail. She was still admired.
At Petra’s family cottage one fall day, she met a young man named Anthony who wooed her for a month or so, pushed his nose against her neck in the darkness of his car. She felt not a hint of passion. Anthony was a large indistinct boulder on the road of life and she gently shouldered him aside. It was difficult to breathe around certain men and she began to think it might be best if she never married.
When she returned home for the weekends the first year, she attended one of the smaller Mennonite churches and found herself in a Sunday school class for adults her age taught by a man named Roy Koop. Roy was four years older and had spent two years in Flint, Michigan, at the General Motors School. He now worked in his father’s GM dealership. He was a tall thin young man with sharp elbows and a strong jaw. His hair was blond and cut short and this made his small ears appear even smaller. He often wore suits. He sold cars after all and needed to make a good impression. The suits he wore were sometimes dark blue, sometimes charcoal, and she wondered if her own clothes were noticeably inferior, though she had a knack for accessories such as scarves and paste jewellery and belts that she pulled tight at her thin waist. She was aware that her body was appealing and that her face was striking. She had skin like the cream that rises to the top of the milk pail before it is skimmed. She wondered sometimes if her beauty made her seem superficial, though she didn’t believe she was shallow, and in fact saw herself as a thinking woman.
She discovered that she could breathe around Roy. He wasn’t silly like the younger men she had known. He was thoughtful and took notice of her and always smiled in a shy manner whenever he greeted her with “Hello, Hope.” Here was a man who could pay attention. He had an intimate knowledge of automobiles and could recognize the make and model of a car simply by the taillight. Over a period of Sundays, she approached him after church, and together they would stand beside his 1949 Chevy and she talked. At first about herself, keeping it brief and self-deprecating.
She had spilled a bedpan over her shoes one day. Sister Andrea, “a dried-up prune,” had upbraided her for ten minutes. “She wants to make me into a smaller version of her. I’m afraid she might be succeeding.”
“A prune? I don’t think so.”
She did a slight pirouette. She was wearing a knock-off Dior that her mother had sewn for her. Floral-print cotton, bright greens and pinks. A cinched-in waist and a wide black belt like a strip of fallow earth, and below the earth her legs, in real stockings and high heels. He certainly noticed. She touched the flank of his car. “Chevrolet,” she said.
“The only car worth driving.”
“It’s yours?”
“Every salesman gets a car. It’s easier to sell them if you’re seen driving them. So, it’s not mine.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“You want a ride? Do you have a way home?”
A Chevy Fleetline fastback, two-door, with an immaculate interior. Over the next month, when Hope returned home for the weekends, she and Roy took long drives in the country, the late fall sky the colour of pewter, Crosby on the radio, the dust floating out behind them like a tail, and sometimes, when their windows were rolled down, the dust found its way inside, leaving a light coat on the interior of the car. One time Roy pulled to the shoulder and got out and walked around and opened the door for her. “Your turn,” he said, and she found herself behind the wheel as he instructed her on how to let out the clutch slowly while pushing down on the gas pedal. The car was big and cumbersome and it jerked and stalled and she started it again, determined not to make a fool of herself. Three on the tree. This was the term he used for the gearshift, which was on the column of the steering wheel. He placed his hand over hers and gently showed her the movements. And then they were moving, picking up speed, and she squealed softly, the same noise she would make several months later when he first kissed her, one of pleasure and surprise, as if there were an engine deep inside of her that had been switched on. Sometimes they ended up in the city, where they went to a movie or out for a meal, but it was in the cocoon of the car, in that enclosed space where she could observe his fine hands on the wheel and where he talked to her about his dreams of one day owning his own dealership, that she felt at home with him.
