The Best Thing for You (27 page)

He was a wonderful man, they told her, and she responded feelingly, I’ll never forget him.

Her parents came, and embraced her formally. Her mother exchanged pecks with her mother-in-law and even gave her husband a hug, their first. Her father shook hands all around, straightened his cuffs, and then they left.

Peretti came. He kissed her mother-in-law on both cheeks and shook her husband’s hand and then he came for his tea. He sat beside her in his overcoat on the low sofa, stirring his tea with a tiny silver spoon, and told her in a low voice that the paper would be willing to give her husband some more assignments and maybe she could let him know at a time when she thought it might help, some time before his two weeks’ leave
was up. They had been very impressed, Peretti said, with the Bonner assignment.

But that was a misunderstanding.

Peretti shrugged and said, predictably: No one noticed. It’s not as though he was passing off work that wasn’t his. Don’t you want him to have this break?

Anna? her husband kept saying. He seemed dazed, but of course everyone understood.

After the last of the mourners had left and his mother had gone up for a lie-down he wanted to make love again and that, too, was predictable, life in the jaws of death, what have you.

Her father-in-law had been a salesman in sporting goods and had died at a bad time. Young men bought sporting goods, but most of the young men were at war. As commissions dropped he had suckled down his savings and his pension too. The upshot was that Buddy’s mother would be staying with them indefinitely while her husband and the lawyers decided whether to put the house on the market. It all came out in the reading of the will.

I will never leave you like that, he said that night, over and over in the dark.

Bernard Pass?

She and Buddy followed the secretary into an office.

Now, the agent said when they were comfortably seated, life insurance is always an excellent investment, but particularly for a young couple such as yourselves.

She had finished at the meat counter and was back in the aisles of canned goods when he caught up with her, in his butcher boy’s striped cap and apron, and said, I thought you’d started going someplace else.

She told him about the funeral. We had all this food left over, she explained. Little pastries. It lasted days.

Meet me.

Don’t be silly.

Meet me.

I can’t.

He began to speak in a low, fast voice, trailing her down the aisle. An old woman turned to look.

When she got home, her mother-in-law was sitting at the kitchen table reading
Candide.
She had not realized her mother-in-law read French.

Oh, yes, dear, she said, watching purchases emerge from the string bag. My parents had a
bonne
before the crash. I adored her. You’ve spent a lot today.

There are three of us now.

Oh, I eat like a bird. What’s that?

Cake.

In a tin, her mother-in-law said. Is it English? My goodness. Imported cake in a tin.

It was a moist chocolate cake in a tin the size of a soup tin with so few nuts inside they were like mistakes. It had been her treat when she was a child.

It’s not dear, she said. Just a little. She stopped, unable to say, just a little treat.

Buddy never liked sweets, her mother-in-law said. Nor did his father. She bit her lip.

Let me make you some tea.

You don’t really remember the crash, do you, and after? So many luxuries we just take for granted now.

The tin caught the light, flashing like code as she lifted it into the cupboard. She decided against tea. Instead she said, I was thinking. I was thinking I’d go over to your house tomorrow and air it out, do a bit of dusting. It’s good for a house to seem inhabited.

There was a moment, then, when her mother-in-law might have said no. Instead: How thoughtful.

It was Buddy’s idea.

But how thoughtful, her mother-in-law said more warmly.

Upstairs in her little sitting room she found the empty slot on the bookshelf where
Candide
had been. Her hands were trembling like the boy’s had. But it’s all right, she told herself. You hate
Candide.

Her notebook lay open on the chair. She couldn’t remember if she had left it that way. She had of course written:

One must not anger old women; it is they who make the reputations of the young.

On her knees, then, in her kerchief, scrubbing a clean floor. She had the whole afternoon. She was going to dust the cabinets and beat the mats and strip the beds too, if there was time, remake the house into something her mother-in-law might want to come back to.

There was a light drumming on the windowpane.

You’re early, she said, squinting into the backyard. It had recently rained and now the sun was out, striking a painful glare off leaves and windows. It took her strange seconds to find him, standing colourless against the back wall of the house, his feet in
the wet muck where the sun never touched. She said, Shouldn’t you be in school?

I cut.

Well, hurry up.

He ambled into the sun. His skin was awful but he had a slow smile she realized she was seeing for the first time. He was nothing now but she saw he might grow into something. Closer, he said, Are you always going to boss me?

Take your shoes off.

She sat him at the table and tried to keep working. Finally she said, Stop staring at me. Go find something to do.

Like what?

Go strip the beds upstairs and bring the laundry down here to me.

Now, alone, she could think more clearly. She recalled the last time she had seen her father-in-law, the previous month, a day that had seemed to pour thick and endless as syrup. She had been shopping in a big department store downtown, purposefully approaching each escalator though she wanted nothing, picking fretfully through racks of cheap blouses on two, hefting skillets on three, sitting in upholstered chairs and squeezing the armrests, though for what quality she didn’t know, on five. Closing her eyes briefly she realized she was waiting to go to bed, the hours stretching out like an immense acreage between her and sleep. When she opened her eyes again she saw her father-in-law. He was one department over, showing hockey sticks to a couple of businessmen probably returning from a long late lunch. She watched them, in the middle distance, like a play: her father-in-law trying to demonstrate the correct grip, the businessmen mocking him for what he was, a servant, their faces shining with good health and innocent liquored malice. When they were gone she crossed the broad aisle separating
furniture from sporting goods and greeted him warmly, kissing his cheek. So like her husband, the way his face lit up! They chatted briefly, not too long so she wouldn’t get him in trouble, and then she bought a box of golf balls, for her father she said. For the rest of the afternoon she had thought, He is still up there – as she made her escape, down one escalator after another, out onto the street, golf balls in a trash can, onto the streetcar, walking under the absurd trees – he is still up there, working, while I am free in the world.

Half an hour later he had not come down.

Here you are, she said.

He lay on the stripped mattress of her husband’s parents’ bed, curled away from her, pants around his knees, the belt still in its loops. Bedding lay on the floor like a mound of egg white. He mumbled, Is this your bedroom?

She didn’t answer but leaned on the door jamb, watching. I could help, she thought as he sweetly laboured; but if I were to touch him or show him a breast he might die, and then I’d be back at zero. I’ll wait.

A rarity, an argument. They had to do it in whispers.

I am not neglecting her.

She says –

She says what? That I’m too busy cleaning our house and her house and doing the shopping and the washing and the mending and heaven knows what else to sit with her while she tells me everything I’m doing wrong?

She says you invent excuses to get away from her and I just about believe it. You’re always trying to get off on your own with some book. I would have thought you’d have a little more compassion. Put yourself in her shoes, why don’t you? What if I died?

He looked up at her with an oil-and-vinegar blend of satisfaction and uncertainty. They were getting ready for bed. Her mother-in-law must have taken him aside while she herself was doing the supper dishes, given him this bone to worry, and now that he had slobbered over it for an hour alone he must needs drop it at her feet. Self-pity was a trait he had, a boyish trait like the freckles in his ears, that needed scouring away.

If you died I wouldn’t want somebody’s child wife fidgeting over me every minute. Somebody’s spoiled child wife. (Her mother-in-law had called her this once, behind her back but not out of her hearing, and she was deft with it in argument.)

He made a movement, a chop of the hand dismissing the stuff of the quarrel, as though it was a game he played for her sake that he had now tired of and wished to end. I’m asking you to spend more time with her, Anna. Maybe she’s being a little irrational right now but she’s grieving. Surely you can forgive her that. Baby, please.