The Age of Hope (2 page)

One Saturday afternoon, on a surprisingly warm weekend in late November when she was home for a visit, he dropped by her house on Reimer Avenue, where he found her drinking tea with her mother in the kitchen. She was wearing a dark blue dress that hugged her hips and legs and fell just below the knee, and this accented her calves, though Roy took only one glance at her legs and then looked away. She placed him at the table next to her mother, aware of the meagreness of the house and the furnishings. She wondered briefly if she was ashamed of where she came from, and then her stubbornness set in and she thought that Roy should know and comprehend who he was dealing with. She said, “We were just talking about you, about your fondness for cars. I said that you speak of them as if they were breathing human beings. We don’t even have a car, you know.” She smiled and narrowed her eyes, just to let him know she was having some fun.

“Perhaps I love them too much?” he asked. He thought he should pay attention to her mother, it was only polite, and he had engaged her at first and made small talk, but the time had come now to look at Hope. Her eyes were a distraction, a dusty blue, verging on green, and her nose too was something he tried not to focus on: it was delicate yet forceful, but not too forceful, nor was it too aquiline, though it was aquiline enough. In other words, to Roy’s mind, her nose was perfect. As for the rest of her body, all one hundred pounds of it, he was too respectful to imagine the possibilities, and so he shook his head as if to indicate his own sense of folly and he held his hat in his lap. This was the age when men still wore hats and Roy had a collection of them, at least five, and he would switch them up, the grey for the brown, the wider-brimmed fedora for the snappy-looking black one with the band of charcoal ribbon. She liked his hats, though she wasn’t sure if she liked them because they were striking or because she anticipated the removal of the hat and the revelation of the blond hair on Roy’s head, as if this were an invitation to touch his hair, though she did this with complete freedom only after they were engaged to be married.

On this Saturday, Roy said that he was driving out to a farm near Giroux to repossess a vehicle and he wondered if she didn’t want to join him.

“I would,” she said, and asked if she should change her clothes. “Is this a dangerous mission?”

“No, what you are wearing is just fine, and it isn’t dangerous.”

“But you’re taking back a car from a man who won’t want to give it up.”

“It’s a half-ton, actually, and the wife called me to come get it.”

He was driving the tow truck from the dealership and he laid down a blanket on the passenger’s seat for Hope, telling her to watch for grease and dirt, and then he helped her climb in. There was a stick shift between them and Roy rested his right hand on the knob of the stick shift as he drove. His fingers were shapely and his nails appeared to be manicured. They were very clean for a man who worked in a garage, though she knew that he sold cars and did not spend his time in coveralls sliding beneath the vehicles. The tendons in his hand moved every time he shifted. She thought he might catch her ogling him and so she turned away to look out the window.

He said that the half-ton they were repossessing belonged to a farmer who hadn’t made payments for a year. “We tried to pick it up last month and he ran us off his land. He actually had a rifle and was pointing it and waving it around. No shots were fired.”

“And today? It’ll be different?” She hadn’t imagined that Roy’s life could in any way be touched by violence. She felt oddly thrilled.

“His wife dropped by the garage and told us he would be gone today. We could come and get it. That’s what she said. ‘Come and get it.’ She has some kind of grudge against him.”

The farmyard was derelict, there was nothing better to be said for it. The house was ramshackle and the wife, when she appeared in the yard with a brood of children who swarmed around her along with several chickens, a dog, and three cats, seemed to match the abandonment of the buildings in the yard. She might have been thirty years old, though she looked over forty. Hope was shocked by how worn out and tired she was, a testament to a marriage that can produce both children and poverty, and the confusion as to which came first. Much to-do was made of the backing up of the tow truck to the half-ton. Hope stood off to the side in her high heels, wearing a dark pea coat, with sleeves that had been lengthened so that the original crease of the cuff still showed. The trees in the yard were nearly bare and the wind blew in gusts and lifted the leaves and swirled them about. One of the cats ran beneath the chassis of the pickup and crouched there as if in protest. The eldest son, not yet a teen and wearing pants that were too short, stood with clenched fists. He called out, “You’ll pay for this.”

The mother hit him with an open hand across the face. “Shut your mouth,” she said.

The boy looked at Hope, his face full of shame and hatred, so much so that Hope could not hold his eyes. Roy had seen the slap and heard the words but he said nothing. He beckoned, indicating that she should climb into the tow truck, and then they were off, wending their way up the narrow drive, past sway-backed granaries. Hope turned to look back and she saw the mother leaning forward and holding the older son by the shoulders and she was talking and then her hands were in the air. Roy said, “Acch. I never should have sold them the truck.”

“That’s right. Why did you? Did you see that boy?”

“I saw him. He’s growing up way too fast.”

It was an odd thing to hear and she wondered if Roy’s heart wasn’t bigger than he let on. Not that he was full of bravado and male bluster. He wasn’t. He could be surprisingly soft.

The thing was—she would realize this only much later, after she had spent numerous weekends with Roy, him picking her up when she was free from her training so that they would spend the day together driving about, sharing thoughtful intimacies, talking about what they wanted in life, driving out to Lockport for a hot dog—the thing was he never smelled of alcohol. She knew the smell from her father. A sweetish bitter scent, sometimes minty, often sour, caught not so much when the subject breathed but more so as he passed by, as if the pores emitted the secrets of a closet drinker. Not Roy. Ever. When she asked him about it, he said that he wasn’t against drinking, he just didn’t have the taste for it.

She started to yearn for his company. Her thoughts turned constantly to him and she began to make mistakes on the ward, errors that were not life-threatening to the patients, but little mistakes that accumulated. Sister Andrea cornered her one afternoon and, wagging her finger, asked, “Is it a man, Hope Plett? Every year one or two girls think they are extremely special, the only ones to have ever experienced love, and so they blindly run off following their animal instincts. You are a nurse, not a trollop. What do you want?”

Indeed, what did she want? She told Roy that she would not see him for a while. She needed to focus on her studies.

“You’re breaking up with me?” Roy asked.

“Oh, no. No.” She paused. “If you could wait. Give me some time.”

“How much time?”

She was almost halfway through the first year of a two-year program and she couldn’t imagine that he would wait eighteen months.

“Till Christmas. I’ll have a two-week break then. I’ll be home. Sister Andrea hates me. I have to make her at least respect me.” She imagined that if he loved her, he would say yes. She did not know yet if she loved him.

“Sister Andrea, the prune?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. But at Christmas, I want you to meet my family.”

She went up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. They were standing outside the residence in St. Boniface. The wind was cold, the sky promised snow, and even so, his face was warm. “I’ll write you a letter every day.”

Over the coming weeks, she ached to see him, to talk to him in person, but she ignored her feelings and focused on being a good nurse, studying late into the night and then pouring her thoughts into the letters she wrote him, aware that the written word allowed her to be more audacious. The first time she wrote the words “I love you, Roy,” she stared at them and for a time considered ripping up the letter and starting again, but then she added “I do” to the end of the sentence and she folded the letter and sealed it. Mailed it the next day. Roy did not write as eloquently as she did and she waited for his own declaration back. He did not write those words, however. Instead, in the rare letter she received, he spoke of his work and the cars he had sold and the new models that would be arriving in the showroom in spring. The Styleline Deluxe convertible had leather seats and Powerglide transmission. The top opened and closed automatically. “It’s a beauty,” he wrote. “At Christmas I’ll give you a ride. Top up, of course.” She was disappointed that he couldn’t come out and say that he loved her, or even that he missed her.

And then one morning Petra announced that she had got married over the weekend. She reached into her purse and took out a ring, put it on, and showed it off.

“But how?” Hope said.

“Oh, Hope, you’re hopeless. It’s so easy.” Petra’s black eyes appeared to hold a vision of the future that was limitless. “I’m quitting. At Christmas. Aldo has a good job as a plumber’s apprentice, he just bought a house, and I’m thinking there’s no way he’ll wait for me. He’s too good a catch.”

“But if he loves you, why wouldn’t he wait?”

“Now he doesn’t have to wait, does he?”

“Aren’t you worried? That you might be throwing something away? Or about what people will say?”

Petra wasn’t at all worried, and Hope wished that she had some of her roommate’s nerve, her devil-may-care attitude.

Hope wrote Roy to tell him that her roommate had suddenly got married. “She was worried that he wouldn’t wait for her. Impetuous, wouldn’t you say? And not very trusting.” Still, she wondered if there might be girls in Eden who were making Roy all knock-kneed and weak. She wanted to say, “Please tell me that this isn’t so,” but she didn’t, because that would appear to be desperate. Instead, she wrote that on Sunday mornings, at 6 a.m., when she woke, she stood by her window, which looked out onto the street, and had happy memories of seeing his car idling at the curb. “I wonder if what I want and what I expect from life are the same thing. Sometimes at night I wake from a deep sleep and all is dark. And I am aware of being alone. I mean this in the strongest way. Even when we are surrounded by others and there is laughter and food and conversation, do we let others know who we are? Oh my, you will probably find my thoughts alarming. I am fine. I am working hard. I look forward to Christmas.”

Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, after washing a few clothes by hand and ironing her uniform, she would walk across the river from St. Boniface into downtown Winnipeg to Eaton’s and the Bay, where she would wander through the women’s clothing departments and admire the clothes and the shoes on display. She loved to touch the expensive cloth of a certain dress, holding it up in front of her as she gazed into a mirror. There were times when she imagined that she might have enough money to buy this dress or those shoes, black with tan piping. She had her eye on a coral silk taffeta dress. The price was impractical but she kept coming back to stare at and touch it, and one day, just because, she tried it on. The sleeves were short and flouncy and the neckline plunged slightly, but not too much. A small bow centred the navel. The hem came just below the knee and set off her bared calves. She stepped out of the change room and studied herself. The shopgirl was behind her.

“It’s perfect,” the shopgirl said.

Hope, turning sideways to observe her profile, said, “I look flat.”

“No, no. You can carry it off, no problem. I have just the thing.” And she hurried off and returned with a Maidenform bra and told Hope to try it on. “You’ll be amazed at the difference.”

Hope loved the effect, but wondered if she might not be fooling herself, and especially Roy. She blew up her cheeks and tossed her head. She truly didn’t recognize herself, and for some reason this pleased her.

The following Saturday her cousin Frida drove in from Altona and met her at the Bay. Hope tried on the dress for her.

“Fine, very fine,” Frida said in Low German. She whistled. “Your breasts are bigger.”

Hope giggled. “I know.”

Hope had told Frida about Roy, and that she was going to meet his family at Christmas.

Frida said now, “If I had your looks? Man alive, I’d marry you.”

“Oh, stop it.” Hope showed Frida the price tag. She shrugged and returned to the dressing room.

A week later a box was delivered to her room at the residence. In it was the dress and the bra. A note in the package read, “Merry Christmas, Hope. Knock him out.”

She called Frida immediately. “You can’t afford this, Frida,” she said. “I’m going to return it.”

“You’ll do no such thing. Anyway, you can’t return a gift.”

“But, Frida, it’s far too generous. What will I buy for you?”

“When you marry Roy, get me a deal on a car.” She laughed in her way, with a little snort.

“It’s amazing, Frida. You’re amazing.”

“Yeah, amazing Frida.”

On Boxing Day, she went for turkey dinner at Roy’s house. She wore the dress and pulled her hair up, allowing several tendrils to tumble as if at random. She clipped on a pair of her mother’s pearl earrings and painted her lips a soft rose, to blend in with the dress. Her gloves, off-white, extended to her elbows. When Roy saw her he tilted his head and said, “Wow.” As he helped her into her well-worn car coat, his hands brushed her arms and shoulders. He whispered, “You’re beautiful.”

“Thank you,” she said. She carried with her a box of chocolate mints that had cost a fair bit. When she handed them to Mrs. Koop, there seemed to be little recognition of the gift. The box was placed on a side table in the hallway and forgotten. Mrs. Koop was pleasantly cool until Hope, at the dinner table, spoke a few words of Low German, and Roy’s mother lifted her head in surprise. Roy’s father, Ernest Koop, bald and garrulous, sat at the head of the table. She had heard about him. He came from a family of six brothers who were constantly in competition. They all owned businesses of some sort. They were rowdy, aggressive, and growing up there had been fisticuffs and general mayhem in the house. Their mother, now dead, had suffered her six sons mostly in silence, with the occasional futile outburst.