The Progress of Love (24 page)

She and her daughter, Floris, and her son, George, lived in a narrow, tidy house on a steep street where the houses were close together and so near to the street that you could almost touch the porch railings from the sidewalk. My room was behind the kitchen—a former pantry, with pale-green tongue-in-groove walls. I tried to count the boards as I lay in bed, but always had to give up. In the wintertime, I took all my clothes into bed in the morning and got dressed under the covers. There was no provision for heating a pantry.

Aunt Ena came home worn out from exercising her authority all over town. But she roused herself; she exercised it over us as well. She made us understand—Floris and George and me—that we were all superior people in spite of, or perhaps because of, relative poverty. She made us understand that we had to confirm this every
day of our lives by having our shoes cleaned and our buttons sewn on, by not using coarse language, by not smoking (in the case of women), by getting high marks (me), and by never touching alcohol (everybody). Nobody has a good word to say nowadays for such narrowness and proud caution and threadbare decency. I don’t myself, but I didn’t think at the time that I was suffering much from it. I learned how to circumvent some rules and I went along with others, and in general I accepted that even a superiority based on such hard notions was better than no superiority at all. And I didn’t plan to live on there, like George and Floris.

Floris had been married once for a short time, but she did not seem to have derived any sense of importance from it. She worked in the shoe store and went to choir practice and was addicted to jigsaw puzzles, of the kind that take up a whole card table. Though I pestered her for it, she would not give me any satisfactory account of her romance or her marriage or her young husband’s death from blood poisoning—a story I would have liked to use, to counterbalance MaryBeth’s true tragic story of the death of her mother. Floris had large gray-blue eyes set so far apart that they almost seemed to be looking in different directions. There was an estranged, helpless expression in them.

George had not gone past Grade 4 at school. He worked at the piano factory, where he answered to the name of Dumbo without apparent resentment or embarrassment. He was so shy and quiet that he could make Floris with her tired petulance seem spirited. He cut pictures out of magazines and pinned them up around his room—not pictures of half-clothed pretty girls but just of things he liked the look of: an airplane, a chocolate cake, Elsie the Borden cow. He could play Chinese checkers, and sometimes invited me to have a game. Usually I told him I was too busy.

When I brought MaryBeth home to supper, Aunt Ena criticized the noise the bangles made at the table and wondered that a girl of that age was allowed to pluck her eyebrows. She also said—in George’s hearing—that my friend did not seem to be blessed with a lot of brains. I was not surprised. Neither MaryBeth nor I expected
anything but the most artificial, painful, formal contact with the world of adults.

The Cryderman house was still called the Steuer house. Until not so long ago, Mrs. Cryderman had been Evangeline Steuer. The house had been built by Dr. Steuer, her father. It was set back from the street on a smooth, built-up terrace, and was unlike any other house in town. In fact, it was unlike any other house I had ever seen, reminding me of a bank or some important public building. It was one story high, and flat-roofed, with low French windows, classical pillars, a balustrade around the roof with an urn at each corner. Urns also flanked the front steps. The urns and the balustrade and the pillars had all been painted a creamy white, and the house itself was covered with pale-pink stucco. By this time, both the paint and the stucco were beginning to flake and look dingy.

I started going there in February. The urns were piled high with snow like dishes full of ice cream, and the various bushes in the yard looked as if polar-bear rugs had been thrown over them. There was just a little meandering path to the front door, instead of the broad neat walkway other people shovelled.

“Mr. Cryderman doesn’t shovel the snow because he doesn’t believe it’s permanent,” Mrs. Cryderman said. “He thinks he’ll wake up some morning and it’ll be all gone. Like fog. He wasn’t prepared for this!”

Mrs. Cryderman talked emphatically, as if everything she said was drastically important, and at the same time she made everything sound like a joke. This way of talking was entirely new to me.

Once inside that house, you never got a view of outside, except through the kitchen window over the sink. The living room was where Mrs. Cryderman spent her days, lying on the sofa, with ashtrays and cups and glasses and magazines and cushions all around her. She wore a Chinese dressing gown, or a long dark-green robe of brushed wool, or a jacket of quilted black satin—quickly ash-sprinkled—and a pair of maternity pants. The jacket would flap open and give me a glimpse of her stomach, already queerly swollen. She had the lamps turned on and the wine-colored curtains drawn
across the windows, and sometimes she burned a little cone of incense in a brass dish. I loved those cones, a dusty-pink color, lying snug as bullets in their pretty box, retaining their shape magically as they turned to ash. The room was full of marvels—Chinese furniture of carved black wood, vases of peacock feathers and pampas grass, fans spread against the faded red walls, heaps of velvet cushions, satin cushions with gold tassels.

The first thing I had to do was tidy up. I picked up the city newspapers strewn on the floor, put the cushions back on the chairs and sofas, gathered up the cups with cold tea or coffee in them and the plates with their hardened scraps of food and the glasses in which there might be slices of soggy fruit, dregs of wine—sweet, weakened, but still faintly alcoholic mixtures. In the kitchen, I drank anything that was left and sucked the fruit to get the strange taste of liquor.

Mrs. Cryderman’s baby was expected in late June or early July. The uncertainty of the date was due to the irregularity of her menstrual cycle. (This was the first time I had ever heard anybody say “menstrual.” We said “monthlies” or “the curse” or used more roundabout expressions.) She herself was certain that she got pregnant on the night of Mr. Cryderman’s birthday when she was full of champagne. The twenty-ninth of September. The birthday was Mr. Cryderman’s thirty-third. Mrs. Cryderman was forty. She said she might as well own up to it, she was a cradle robber. And she was paying the price. Forty was too old to have a baby. It was too old to have a first baby. It was a mistake.

She pointed out the damage. First, the pale-brown blotches on her face and neck, which she said were all over her. They made me think of the flesh of pears beginning to go rotten—that soft discoloration, the discouraging faint deep bruises. Next, she showed her varicose veins, which kept her lying on the sofa. Cranberry-colored spiders, greenish lumps all over her legs. They turned black when she stood up. Before she put her feet to the floor, she had to wrap her legs in long, tight, rubbery bandages.

“Take my advice and have your babies while you’re young,” she said. “Go out and get pregnant immediately, if possible. I
thought I was above all this. Ha-ha!” She did have a little sense, because she said, “Don’t ever tell your aunt the way I talk to you!”

When Mrs. Cryderman was Evangeline Steuer, she didn’t live in this house, only visited it from time to time, often with friends. Her appearances in town were brief and noteworthy. I had seen her driving her car with the top down, an orange scarf over her dark page-boy hair. I had seen her in the drugstore, wearing shorts and a halter, her legs and midriff sleek and tanned as if bound in brown silk. She was laughing that time, and loudly admitting to a hangover. I had seen her in church wearing a gauzy black hat with pink silk roses, a party hat. She didn’t belong here; she belonged in the world we saw in magazines and movies—a world of glossy triviality, of hard-faced wisecracking comedians, music in public ballrooms, pink neon cocktail glasses tipped over bar doors. She was our link with that world, our proof that it existed, and we existed with it, that its frittering vice and cruel luxury were not entirely unconnected with us. As long as she stayed there, making her whirlwind visits home, she was forgiven, perhaps distantly admired. Even my Aunt Ena, who had to deal with the broken glass in the fireplace, the fried chicken trodden into the rug, the shoe polish on the rim of the bathtub, was able to grant Evangeline Steuer some unholy privilege—though perhaps it was only the privilege of being an example of how money made you shameless, leisure made you useless, self-indulgence marked you out for some showy disaster.

But now what had Evangeline Steuer done? She had become a Mrs., like anybody else. She had bought the local newspaper for her husband to run. She was expecting a baby. She had lost her function, mixed things up. It was one thing to be a smoking, drinking, profane, and glamorous bachelor girl, and quite another thing to be a smoking, drinking, profane, and no longer glamorous expectant mother.

“Don’t pay any attention to me, Jessie. I never had to lie around like this before. I was always in the action before. All that brute of a doctor does is tell me I’ll be worse before I’m better. ‘Whatever goes in has to come out. Five minutes’ pleasure, nine months’ misery.’ I said to him, ‘What do you mean,
five
minutes?’ ”
I did pay attention. I had never got such an earful or eyeful before. I told MaryBeth everything. I described the living room, Mrs. Cryderman’s outfits, the bottles in the buffet with their gold and green and ruby-colored contents, the tins of unfamiliar eatables in the kitchen cupboards—smoked oysters, anchovies, pureed chestnuts, artichokes, as well as the big tinned hams and fruit puddings. I told about the veins, the bandages and blotches—making these things sound even worse than they were—and about Mrs. Cryderman’s long-distance conversations with her friends. Her friends’ names were Bunt, Pookie, Pug, and Spitty, so you could not tell if they were men or women. Her own name, among them, was Jelly. After she finished talking to them on the phone, she told me about money they had lost or accidents they had had or practical jokes they had played, or very complicated and unusual romances they were having.

Aunt Ena noticed that I was not getting much ironing done. I said that it was not my fault—Mrs. Cryderman kept me in the living room, talking. Aunt Ena said there was nothing to stop me setting up the ironing board in the living room if Mrs. Cryderman insisted on conversation.

“Let her talk,” Aunt Ena said. “You iron. That’s what you’re paid for.”

“I don’t mind you ironing in here, but you’ll have to scram out the minute Mr. Cryderman gets home,” Mrs. Cryderman said. “He hates that—any kind of domestic stuff going on where he’s around.”

She told me that Mr. Cryderman had been born and brought up in Brisbane, Australia, in a big house with banana trees all around, and that his mother had colored maids. I thought this sounded a little mixed up, as if
Gone With the Wind
had got into Australia, but I thought it might be true. She said that Mr. Cryderman had left Australia and become a journalist in Singapore, and then he was with the British Army in Burma when they were defeated by the Japanese. Mr. Cryderman had walked from Burma into India.

“With a little bunch of British soldiers and some Americans
and native girls—nurses. No hanky-panky, though. All those girls did was sing hymns. They’d all been Christianized. ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’! Anyway, they were in no condition to carry on. Sick and wounded, walking day after day in the terrible heat. Charged by wild elephants. He’s going to write a book about it. Mr. Cryderman is. They had to build their own rafts and float downriver. They had malaria. They walked over the Himalayas. They were heroes and nobody has even heard about it.”

I thought that sounded fishy, too. Terrible heat in the Himalayas, which were known to be covered with eternal snow.

“I said to Bunt, ‘Eric fought with the British in Burma,’ and Bunt said, ‘The British didn’t fight in Burma—the Japs wiped their ass on the British in Burma.’ People don’t know a damn thing. Bunt couldn’t walk to the top of Yonge Street.”

Years later, maybe a quarter of a century later, I read about the walk that General Stilwell led out of Burma into India, through the pass above Tamu and down the Chindwin River. In the party were some British commandos, dirty and half starved. Eric Cryderman might have been one of them.

The meeting of Mr. and Mrs. Cryderman took place when he showed up one day to sublet her apartment in Toronto. He was planning to work as a journalist in Canada. She was planning to drive to Mexico with friends. She never made it. As soon as she saw Mr. Cryderman, that was that. Her friends all told her not to marry him. Seven years younger than she was, divorced—with a wife and child somewhere in Australia—and he had no money. Everybody said he was an adventurer. But she was not daunted. She married him within six weeks and didn’t invite any of them to the wedding.

I thought that I should contribute something to the conversation, so I said, “Why were they against him just because he was adventurous?”

“Ha-ha!” said Mrs. Cryderman. “That wasn’t what they meant. They meant he was after my money. Which I can’t even persuade him to live on while he writes a book about his experiences. He has to be independent. He has to write about what the fool bridesmaids
wore and the trousseau tea and all the blather at the town council, and it’s driving him crazy. He is the most talented man I ever met, and someday you’ll be bragging that you knew him!”

As soon as we heard Mr. Cryderman at the door, I whisked the ironing basket away into the kitchen, as directed. Mrs. Cryderman would call out, in a new, silly-sweet, mocking, anxious voice, “Is that my honey-boy home? Is that Little Lord Fauntleroy? Is it the Mad Dingo?”

Mr. Cryderman, taking off his boots in the hall, would reply that it was Dick Tracy, or Barnacle Bill the Sailor. Then he would come into the living room and go straight to the sofa, where she lay with arms outstretched. They did smacking kisses, while I beat an awkward retreat with the ironing board.