The Beggar Maid (23 page)

Then she had to tell him.

Anna coughed, her fever went up and down. Rose tried to get the heat up, fiddled with the thermostat, drained the radiators, phoned the landlord’s office and left a message. He didn’t phone back. She phoned him at home at seven o’clock the next morning, told him her child had bronchitis (which she may have believed at the time, but it was not true), told him she would give him one hour to get her some heat or she would phone the newspaper, she would denounce him over the radio, she would sue him, she would find the proper channels. He came at once, with a put-upon face (a poor man trying to make ends meet bedeviled by hysterical women), he did something to the thermostat in the hall, and the radiators started to get hot. The teachers told Rose that he had the hall thermostat fixed to control the heat and that he had never given in to protests before. She felt proud, she felt like a fierce slum mother who had screamed and sworn and carried on, for her child’s sake. She forgot that slum mothers are seldom fierce, being too tired and bewildered. It was her middle-class certainties, her expectations of justice, that had given her such energy, such a high-handed style of abuse; that had scared him.

After two days she had to go back to work. Anna had improved, but Rose was worried all the time. She could not swallow a cup of coffee, for the chunk of anxiety in her throat. Anna was all right, she took her cough medicine, she sat up in bed, crayoning. When her mother came home she had a story to tell her. It was about some princesses.

There was a white princess who dressed all in bride clothes and wore pearls. Swans and lambs and polar bears were her pets, and she had lilies and narcissus in her garden. She ate mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream, shredded coconut and meringue off the top of pies. A pink princess grew roses and ate strawberries, kept flamingoes (Anna described them, could not think of the name) on a leash. The blue princess subsisted on grapes and ink. The brown princess though drably dressed feasted better than anybody; she had roast beef and gravy and chocolate cake with chocolate icing, also chocolate ice cream with chocolate fudge sauce. What was there in her garden?

“Rude things,” said Anna. “All over the ground.”

This time Tom and Rose did not refer so openly to their disappointment. They had begun to hold back a little, maybe to suspect that they were unlucky for each other. They wrote tenderly, carefully, amusingly, and almost as if the last failure had not happened.

In March he phoned to tell her that his wife and children were going to England. He was going to join them there, but later, ten days later. So there will be ten days, cried Rose, blotting out the long absence to come (he was to stay in England until the end of the summer). It turned out not to be ten days, not quite, because he was obliged to go to Madison, Wisconsin, on the way to England. But you must come here first, Rose said, swallowing this disappointment, how long can you stay, can you stay a week? She pictured them eating long sunny breakfasts. She saw herself in the Emperor’s nightingale outfit. She would have filtered coffee (she must buy a filter pot) and that good bitter marmalade in the stone jar. She didn’t give any thought to her morning chores at the station.

He said he didn’t know about that, his mother was coming to help Pamela and the children get off, and he couldn’t just pack up and leave her. It would really be so much better, he said, if she could come to Calgary.

Then he became very happy and said they would go to Banff. They would take three or four days’ holiday, could she manage that, how about a long weekend? She said wasn’t Banff difficult for him, he might run into someone he knew. He said no, no, it would be all right. She wasn’t quite so happy as he was because she hadn’t altogether liked being in the hotel with him, in Victoria. He had gone down to the lobby to get a paper, and phoned their room, to see if she knew enough not to answer. She knew enough, but the maneuver depressed her. Nevertheless she said fine, wonderful, and they got calendars at each end of the phone, so that they could figure out which days. They could take in a weekend, she had a weekend coming to her. And she could probably manage Friday as well, and at least part of Monday. Dorothy could do the absolutely necessary things for her. Dorothy owed her some working time. Rose had covered for her, when she was fogged in, in Seattle; she had spent an hour on the air reading household hints and recipes she never believed would work.

She had nearly two weeks to make the arrangements. She spoke to
the teacher again and the teacher said she could come. She bought a sweater. She hoped she would not be expected to learn to ski, in that time. There must be walks they could take. She thought they would spend most of their time eating and drinking and talking and making love. Thoughts of this latter exercise troubled her a bit. Their talk on the phone was decorous, almost shy, but their letters, now that they were sure of meeting, were filled with inflammatory promises. These were what Rose loved reading and writing, but she could not remember Tom as clearly as she wanted to. She could remember what he looked like, that he was not very tall, and spare, with gray waving hair and a long, clever face, but she could not remember any little, maddening things about him, any tone or smell. The thing she could remember too well was that their time in Victoria had not been completely successful; she could remember something between a curse and an apology, the slippery edge of failure. This made her especially eager to try again, to succeed.

She was to leave Friday, early in the morning, taking the same bus and plane she had planned to take before.

Tuesday morning it began to snow. She did not pay much attention. It was wet, pretty snow, coming straight down in big flakes. She wondered if it would be snowing in Banff. She hoped so, she liked the idea of lying in bed and watching it. It snowed more or less steadily for two days, and late Thursday afternoon when she went to pick up her ticket at the travel agency they told her the airport had been closed. She did not show or even feel any worry; she was a bit relieved, that she would not have to fly. How about trains, she said, but of course the train didn’t go to Calgary, it went down to Spokane. She knew that already. Then the bus, she said. They phoned to make sure the highways were open and the buses were running. During that conversation her heart began to pound a bit, but it was all right, everything was all right, the bus was running. It won’t be much fun, they said, it leaves here at half past twelve, that’s twelve midnight, and it gets into Calgary around 2
P.M.
the next day.

“That’s all right.”

“You must really want to get to Calgary,” the grubby young man said. This was a most ramshackle informal travel agency, set up in a hotel lobby outside the door of the beer parlor.

“It’s Banff, actually,” she said brazenly. “And I do.”

“Going to do some skiing?”

“Maybe.” She was convinced he guessed everything. She didn’t know then how commonplace such illicit jaunts were; she thought the aura of sin was dancing round her like half-visible flames on a gas burner.

She went home thinking she would be better off, really, sitting on the bus, getting closer and closer to Tom, than lying in bed unable to sleep. She would just have to ask the teacher to move in tonight.

The teacher was waiting for her, playing Chinese checkers with Anna. “Oh, I don’t know how to tell you,” she said, “I’m so awfully sorry, but something’s happened.”

She said her sister had had a miscarriage and was in need of her help. Her sister lived in Vancouver.

“My boyfriend is driving me down tomorrow if we can get through.”

This was the first Rose had heard of any boyfriend, and she immediately suspected the whole story. Some flying chance the girl was off on; she too had smelled love and hope. Somebody’s husband, maybe, or some boy her own age. Rose looked at her once-acned face now rosy with shame and excitement and knew she would never budge her. The teacher went on to embroider her story with talk of her sister’s two little children; both boys, and they had been just longing for a girl.

Rose started phoning, to get somebody else. She phoned students, wives of the men she worked with, who might be able to give her names; she phoned Dorothy who hated children. It was no use. She followed leads that people had given her, though she realized these were probably worthless, given only to get rid of her. She was ashamed of her persistence. At last Anna said, “I could stay here by myself.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I did before. When I was sick and you had to go to work.”

“How would you like,” said Rose, and felt a true sudden pleasure at so easy and reckless a solution, “how would you like to come to Banff?”

They packed in a great rush. Fortunately Rose had been to the Laundromat the night before. She did not allow herself to think about what Anna would do in Banff, about who would pay for the extra
room, about whether Anna would in fact agree to having a separate room. She threw in coloring books and storybooks and messy kits of do-it-yourself decorations, anything she thought might do for amusement. Anna was excited by the turn of events, not dismayed at the thought of the bus ride. Rose remembered to call ahead of time for the taxi to pick them up at midnight.

They almost got stuck driving down to the bus depot. Rose thought what a good idea it had been to call the taxi half an hour ahead of time, for what was usually a five-minute drive. The bus depot was an old service station, a dreary place. She left Anna on a bench with the luggage and went to buy their tickets. When she came back Anna was drooped over the suitcase, having given way to sleepiness as soon as her mother’s back was turned.

“You can sleep on the bus.”

Anna straightened up, denied being tired. Rose hoped it would be warm on the bus. Perhaps she should have brought a blanket, to wrap around Anna. She had thought of it, but they had enough to carry already, with the shopping bag full of Anna’s books and amusements; it was too much to think of arriving in Calgary straggle-haired, cranky and constipated, with crayons spilling from the bag and a trailing blanket as well. She had decided not to.

There were just a few other passengers waiting. A young couple in jeans, looking cold and undernourished. A poor, respectable old woman wearing her winter hat; an Indian grandmother with a baby. A man lying on one of the benches looked sick or drunk. Rose hoped he was just in the bus depot getting warm, not waiting for the bus, because he looked as if he might throw up. Or if he was getting on the bus, she hoped he would throw up now, not later. She thought she had better take Anna to the washroom here. However unpleasant it was, it was probably better than what they had on the bus. Anna was wandering around looking at the cigarette machines, candy machines, drink and sandwich machines. Rose wondered if she should buy some sandwiches, some watery hot chocolate. Once into the mountains, she might wish she had.

Suddenly she thought that she had forgotten to phone Tom, to tell him to meet the bus not the plane. She would do it when they stopped for breakfast.

Attention all passengers waiting for the bus to Cranbrook, Radium Hot Springs, Golden, Calgary. Your bus has been canceled. Bus due to leave here at twelve-thirty has been canceled.

Rose went up to the wicket and said what is this, what happened, tell me, is the highway closed? Yawning, the man told her, “It’s closed past Cranbrook. Open from here to Cranbrook but closed past that. And closed west of here to Grand Forks so the bus won’t even get here tonight.”

Calmly, Rose asked, what were the other buses she could take?

“What do you mean, other buses?”

“Well, isn’t there a bus to Spokane? I could get from there to Calgary.”

Unwillingly he pulled out his schedules. Then they both remembered that if the highway was closed between here and Grand Forks, that was no good, no bus would be coming through. Rose thought of the train to Spokane, then the bus to Calgary. She could never do it, it would be impossible with Anna. Nevertheless she asked about trains, had he heard anything about the trains?

“Heard they’re running twelve hours late.”

She kept standing at the wicket, as if some solution was owing to her, would have to appear.

“I can’t do anything more for you here, lady.”

She turned away and saw Anna at the pay phones, fiddling with the coin return boxes. Sometimes she found a dime that way.

Anna came walking over, not running, but walking quickly, in an unnaturally sedate and agitated way. “Come here,” she said, “come here.” She pulled Rose, numb as she was, over to one of the pay phones. She dipped the coin box toward her. It was full of silver. Full. She began scraping it into her hand. Quarters, nickels, dimes. More and more. She filled her pockets. It looked as if the box was refilling every time she closed it, as it might in a dream or a fairy tale. Finally she did empty it, she picked out the last dime. She looked up at Rose with a pale, tired, blazing face.

“Don’t say anything,” she commanded.

Rose told her that they were not going on the bus after all. She phoned for the same taxi, to take them home. Anna accepted the change in plans without interest. Rose noticed that she settled herself
very carefully into the taxi, so that the coins would not clink in her pockets.

In the apartment Rose made herself a drink. Without taking off her boots or her coat Anna started spreading the money out on the kitchen table and separating it into piles to be counted.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I can’t be-
lieve
it.” She was using a strange adult voice, a voice of true astonishment masked by social astonishment, as if the only way she could control and deal with the event was to dramatize it in this way.

“It must be from a long distance call,” said Rose. “The money didn’t go through. I suppose it all belongs to the phone company.”

“But we can’t give it back, can we?” said Anna, guilty and triumphant, and Rose said no.

“It’s crazy,” Rose said. She meant the idea of the money belonging to the phone company. She was tired and mixed-up but beginning to feel temporarily and absurdly lighthearted. She could see showers of coins coming down on them, or snowstorms; what carelessness there was everywhere, what elegant caprice.