The Other Side of the Bridge (9 page)

They’d been saying something and again he hadn’t heard it. His mother’s voice had risen almost to a shout. There was a short silence, and then his father said, “Excuse me,” and got up and left the room.

Ian’s mother stayed where she was, the tears shining on her cheeks. She was staring at the serving dish. After a minute she took a deep breath and said, “That is typical. His leaving the room at a time like this is typical. But I am glad, because I have other things to say to you. He knows about them—your father knows about them—but I wanted to tell you privately, by ourselves.”

She went on to say them, these other things. She said she hadn’t fully realized how little she’d had in life until she fell in love with a man who was in love with her. Genuinely in love. A man who was prepared to give things up for her. She said she and Robert Patterson were in love and were going to get married as soon as their respective divorces came through. In the meantime, they were leaving Struan as soon as possible. Robert had already identified a teaching job in Toronto.

Here she looked up; Ian didn’t look at her but he could feel her gaze. She said, “I want you to come with us, of course. Robert will be happy to have you; he thinks you’re a very fine boy. His children will stay with their mother, but we hope you will come with us. Will you? Will you come with us to Toronto?”

Robert Patterson taught geography at the high school. Ian was in his class. He was a newcomer to Struan, having come from somewhere down south three or four years ago. He had a wife and two young children. He was tall and thin and had wire-rimmed glasses and a sarcastic manner. There was no way
anyone
could love him.

Ian’s mother said, “I am sorry to give you so little time, but we wanted to have everything settled, Robert and I, before telling you. I know it will be hard for you at first, leaving your friends and so on. But we’ll be able to give you so much more. You know what Toronto is like.”

His incredulity and confusion were so great he was unable to think. He struggled to find some order within himself, some coherent thought. After a few minutes, during which his mother waited silently, it came to him that there was one question he needed the answer to straight away. Maybe there were other questions, but they were unimportant compared to this one. He tried to assemble it in his mind, to think how to phrase it, but when at last he managed to gather together the words and tried to voice them, he found he couldn’t speak. His jaws felt wired together with tension. Finally he managed. He said, aiming the words at the tablecloth because he could not look at her, “If I won’t go, will you go anyway?”

There was more silence, during which he tried to breathe normally. When she finally spoke, what she said was, “Ian, I want you to come with me. With us.”

Which was not the answer to his question, so he asked it again. He weighed out the words to make sure that she would understand, and that he himself would understand, their full meaning, now and forever.

“If I won’t go with you, will you go anyway? Will you go without me?”

This time, struggling with the shaking of her voice, she said, “Darling, you do not know what it has been like, all these years.”

By which he understood, finally, that he was not important to her. Not that important.

Afterward he was impressed by his response—how calm it sounded. How polite. He said, “I’ll stay here with Dad, if that’s all right. But thank you for asking me.”

And then he excused himself and left the room.

The dogs barked when they first got his scent, but then they remembered him from earlier in the day and came to greet him, wagging their tails. He stepped off the driveway when the dogs came up, into the shadow of the trees. He didn’t know why he was here. The last thing he wanted was for Laura to see him and come out and start talking to him. The thought of her knowing what had happened filled him with shame almost beyond endurance. What would she think—what would anyone think—of a boy who meant so little to his own mother that she would walk off and leave him? In all his life he had never heard of such a thing. He’d heard of men abandoning their families, but never a woman. Never a mother.

He stood uncertain in the shadows for a few moments and then cautiously moved toward the house. He went around to the back, where the kitchen was. He wanted to see her, that was all. He just needed to know she was still there.

The farmhouse seemed bigger in the darkness than it had during the day. The house and the barn and sheds were solid blocks of night against the blue-black of the sky. The kitchen light was on and there were lights in two of the bedrooms upstairs. Laura was in one of the bedrooms; he saw her moving back and forth, folding things, hanging things in the cupboard in the corner of the room. He could tell she was talking to someone, though he couldn’t hear her voice or see anyone else. Probably the little girl. Julie. She must be putting Julie to bed. The boy, Carter, was in the other lighted bedroom—Ian had seen him cross the room. The baby must be asleep somewhere else.

Arthur and the old man were downstairs in the kitchen, Arthur at the table, the old man huddled in a chair by the stove. Arthur was working on something, but Ian wasn’t close enough to see what it was. He could have moved closer, but then he wouldn’t have been able to see into the upstairs rooms. Anyway, he didn’t care what Arthur was doing. It was only Laura he wanted to see. The dogs, who had followed him around to the back of the house, waited curiously beside him for a while and then wandered off. From within the barn he could hear the heavy, quiet movements of the horses.

After some time—he didn’t know whether long or short—the light in Julie’s bedroom went off. He felt a sudden clench of anxiety, as if a life raft had slipped out from under him, but a minute later Laura appeared in the kitchen, carrying the baby. He could see her better than when she was upstairs: the line of sight was more direct.

She was still wearing the pale blue dress she had worn earlier and her hair was still tied back, but it was looser, as if she allowed it its own way at the end of the day. She said something to Arthur and he looked up at her and nodded, and then returned to his work. Laura went over to one of the big armchairs by the fire, lowered herself and the baby into it, and then, quietly, discreetly, undid her dress and put the baby to her breast.

Ian watched. It was more erotic, and at the same time more painful, than anything he had ever known.

The day his mother left, he would not look at her. She left after breakfast, but he skipped breakfast. He stayed in his room. It was Sunday, but no one had suggested church. She came up to his room. He heard her footsteps, heard her stop at the closed door. He imagined her, facing the door.

After a minute she knocked. He waited a bit, and then said, “Yes?” in a tone completely devoid of interest.

“May I come in?”

“If you want.”

He heard the door open, heard her cross the room. He was at his desk, with his books spread out as if he were studying. He didn’t turn around. She came to a stop behind him. He began to copy a section out of a book.

She said, “Ian?”

He waited a minute, as if he’d been concentrating and it had taken time for her interruption to filter through to him. “Yes?”

“Aren’t you going to come down and say good-bye?” Her voice was shaking.

“I have work to do.”

She was crying. He couldn’t see her and she made no sound, but he knew. He didn’t care. He imagined what tomorrow was going to bring, and the next day, and the next, as the people of Struan heard the news.

She said, struggling to control her voice, “Darling, how can I go if you won’t say good-bye?”

“Good-bye,” he said.

FOUR

WHEAT CROP IS BIGGEST SINCE 1932

THE AVERAGE PRODUCTION OF A COW

—Temiskaming Speaker,
September 1938

A
ll the way through high school Arthur didn’t have a girlfriend.

There were plenty of girls in his class at school and he liked the look of many of them, but he didn’t know how to approach them. What were you supposed to say? Hello, my name’s Arthur? They already knew his name! He should have approached them back in grade nine, when some of them—the ones from the small communities out in the sticks—were still strangers. But back in grade nine he hadn’t been interested.

Sometime during his first year in grade ten that had changed almost overnight. One minute girls were irrelevant, and the next, he couldn’t stop looking at them. He and his friends would hang about during recess and lunch hour, watching the girls walk by in little gabbling groups. That was one of the problems—females didn’t come individually—they came in packs. You’d have to walk up to a whole pack, which was out of the question.

By the time he was sixteen (legally old enough to leave school, but of course his mother wouldn’t let him) most of the boys he knew had worked it out and were at least able to talk to girls, if nothing more. Some of the more advanced, more confident ones even professed to be fed up with “wimmen” already. “They ain’t worth the trouble, Art. Take it from me, they just ain’t worth the trouble.”

Arthur would have liked the chance to find that out for himself, but there was no way. His friend Carl urged him on. “Go on, Art, what you waitin’ for? Just go up and ask her.” But it was no use. He didn’t know how.

Jake, on the other hand, was born knowing. As with schoolwork, Jake had no trouble with girls at all.

When Arthur was seventeen and just entering grade eleven (having taken two years over grade ten), Jake started high school. He was twelve. Five years behind Arthur in age, two years behind him in school, ahead of him already in the matter of girls. Arthur would see him chatting to them in the schoolyard, easily, casually, as if they were friends instead of a different species. In fact, Jake had more friends who were female than male. Other boys were a bit suspicious, maybe even a little afraid of him. He had the ability to get people into trouble—anyone who had been through primary school with him knew that.

Arthur had forgotten how bad it was having Jake in the same school. When he started high school he’d had two glorious years without him, and now, looking back, he saw that he hadn’t appreciated those years enough. Jake took to high school as if it had been invented just for him—all those new subjects to excel in, all those new teachers to impress! He talked about the things he was learning at the supper table every night. “They don’t teach you arithmetic anymore, they teach you
mathematics,
and there are
three different
mathematics. There’s algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry. Geometry’s all about lines and stuff. And trigonometry’s about triangles and how to work out angles and stuff. And algebra’s where you use letters instead of numbers….”