The Progress of Love (35 page)

In the meantime, he had heard a lot from Violet. She phoned him at home, when his mouth was so sore he could hardly talk, and said it was too bad he wasn’t feeling well—otherwise he could have got to meet Heather and Gillian.

“Heather is the tall one,” Violet said. “She has long, fair hair and a narrow build. If she resembles Bonnie Hope at all, it is in her teeth. But Heather’s teeth suit her face better and they are beautifully white. Gillian is a nice-looking sort of girl, with curly hair and a tan. Heather has that fair skin that burns. They wear the same sort of clothes—you know, the army pants and work shirts and boys’ boots—but Gillian always has a belt on and her collar turned up, and on her it looks like more of a style. Gillian is more confident, but I think Heather is more intelligent. She is the one more genuinely interested.”

“What in?” said Dane. “What are they, anyway—students?”

“They’ve been to university,” Violet said. “I don’t know what they were studying. They’ve been to France and Mexico. In Mexico, they stayed on an island that was called the Isle of Women. It was a women-ruled society. They belong to a theater and they make up plays. They make up their own plays. They don’t take some writer’s plays or do plays that have been done before. It’s all women, in this theater. They made me a lovely supper. Dane, I wish you could have been here. They made a salad with artichoke hearts in it.”

“Violet sounds as if she’s on drugs,” said Dane to Theo. “She sounds as if they’ve got her spinning.”

When he could talk again, he called her. “What are those girls interested in, Aunt Violet? Are they interested in old china and jewellery and things?”

“They are not,” said Violet crossly. “They are interested in family history. They are interested in our family and what I can remember about what it was like. I had to tell them what the reservoir was on a stove.”

“What would they want to know that for?”

“Oh. They have some idea. They have some idea about doing a play.”

“What do they know about plays?”

“Didn’t I tell you they’ve acted in plays? They’ve made up their own plays and acted in them, in this women’s theater.”

“What sort of play are they going to make up?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll do it. They’re just interested in what it was like in the old days.”

“That’s all the style now,” Dane said. “To be interested in that.”

“They’re not just letting on to be, Dane. They really are.”

But he thought that she didn’t sound so buoyant this time.

“You know they change all the names,” she said. “When they do make up a play, they change all the names and places. But I think they just like finding out about things, and talking. They’re not all that young, but they seem young, they’re so curious. And lighthearted.”

“Your face looks different,” said Dane to Violet when he finally got to visit her again. “Have you lost weight?”

Violet said, “I wouldn’t think so.”

Dane had lost twelve pounds himself but she did not notice. She seemed cheerful but agitated. She kept getting up and sitting down, looking out the window, moving things around on the kitchen counter for no reason.

The girls had gone.

“They’re not coming back?” said Dane.

Yes, they were. Violet thought they were coming back. She didn’t know just when.

“They’re off to find their island, I guess,” said Dane. “Their island ruled by women.”

“I don’t know,” said Violet. “I think they’ve gone to Montreal.”

Dane didn’t like to think that he could be made to feel so irritable and suspicious by two girls he hadn’t even met. He was almost ready to blame it on the medication he still had to take for his tooth. There was a sense he had of something concealed from him—all around him, but concealed—a tiresome, silly, malicious sort of secret.

“You’ve cut your hair,” he said. That was why her face looked different.

“They cut it. They said it was a Joan of Arc style.” Violet
smiled ironically, much as she used to, and touched her hair. “I told them I hoped I wouldn’t end up burned at the stake.”

She held her head in her hands, and rocked back and forth.

“They’ve tired you,” Dane said. “They’ve tired you, Aunt Violet.”

“It’s going through all that,” said Violet. She jerked her head toward the back bedroom. “It’s what I have to get to work on in there.”

In Violet’s back bedroom there were boxes of papers, and an old humpbacked trunk that had belonged to her mother. Dane thought that it was full of papers, too. Old high-school notes, normal-school notes, report cards, records and correspondence from her years with the phone company, minutes of meetings, letters, postcards. Anything that had writing on it, she had probably kept.

She said that all these papers had to be sorted out. It had to be done before the girls got back. There were things she had promised them.

“What things?”

“Just things.”

Were they coming back soon?

Violet said yes. She expected so, yes. As she thought of this, her hands were patting and rubbing at the tabletop. She took a bite of a cookie, and crumbled what was left of it. Dane saw her sweep the crumbs into her hand and put them in her coffee.

“That’s what they sent,” she said, and pushed in front of him a card he had noticed that was propped against her sugar bowl. It was a homemade card with childishly crayoned violets on it, and red hearts. She seemed to intend that he should read it, so he did.

Across the bottom, in capitals, had been written:
LONGING TO SEE DOCUMENTS. PLEASE NEXT TIME. LOVE AND GRATITUDE
.

“What is all this about?” said Dane. “Why do you have to sort things out for them? Why can’t they just go through the whole mess and find what they want for themselves?”

“Because I am so ashamed!” said Violet vehemently. “I don’t want anybody to see.”

He told her there was nothing, nothing, to be ashamed of.

“I shouldn’t have used the word ‘mess.’ It’s just that you’ve accumulated a lot, over the years. Some of it is probably very interesting.”

“There is more to it than anybody knows! And I am the one has to deal with it!”

“Anti-patriarchal rage,” said Dane, taking up the card again. “What do they mean by that?” He wondered why they used capitals for Female Craziness and Frustration and Oppression.

“I’ll tell you,” said Violet. “I’ll just tell you. You don’t know what I’ve got to contend with. There’s things that are not so nice. I went in there and opened up that old trunk to have a look at what was inside, and what do you think I found, Dane? It was full of filth. Horse manure. Set out in rows. On purpose. Inside my trunk in my own house, that’s what I find.” She began to sniffle, in an uncharacteristic, unattractive, self-pitying way.

When Dane told Theo this, Theo smiled, then said, “I’m sorry. What did she say then?”

“I told her I’d go and look at it, and she said she’d cleaned it all out.”

“Yes. Well. It looks as if something snapped, doesn’t it? I thought I could see it coming.”

Dane remembered what else she’d said, but he didn’t mention it. It didn’t matter.

“That’s a disgusting trick, isn’t it?” she’d said, whimpering. “That’s the trick of a stunted mind!”

Violet’s front door was standing open at noon the next day when Dane drove down her road, heading out of town. He didn’t usually
take this route. That he did today was not surprising, considering how much Violet had been on his mind in the last several hours.

He must have come in the door just as the flames started up in the kitchen. He saw their light ahead of him on the kitchen wall. He ran back there, and caught Violet heaping papers on top of the gas stove. She had turned on the burners.

Dane grabbed a scatter rug from the hall to shield himself so that he could turn off the gas. Burning papers flew into the air. There were heaps of paper all over the floor, some papers still in boxes. Violet was evidently intending to burn them all.

“Oh, Jesus, Aunt Violet!” Dane was yelling. “Jesus, Jesus, what are you doing! Get out of here! Get out!”

Violet was standing in the middle of the room, rooted there like a big dark stump, with scraps of fiery paper flying all around her.

“Get out!” Dane yelled, and turned her around and pushed her toward the back door. Then, all of a sudden, her speed was as extraordinary as her stillness had been. She ran or lurched to the door, opened it, and crossed the back porch. Instead of going down the steps, she went off the edge, falling headfirst into some rosebushes that Wyck had planted.

Dane didn’t know right away that she had fallen. He was too busy in the kitchen.

Luckily, paper in heaps or bundles doesn’t catch fire as readily as most people think it does. Dane was more afraid of the curtains catching, or the dry paint behind the stove. Violet wasn’t anything like the careful housekeeper she used to be, and the walls were greasy. He brought the scatter rug down on the flames that were shooting up from the stove, then remembered the fire extinguisher that he himself had bought for Violet and insisted she keep on the kitchen counter. He went stumbling around the room with the fire extinguisher, chasing flaming birds that fell down as bits of charred paper. He was impeded by the piles of paper on the floor. But the curtains didn’t catch. The wall behind the stove had broken out in paint blisters, but it didn’t catch either. He kept at the chase, and in five minutes, maybe less, he had the fire out. Just the bits of
burned paper, dirty moth wings, were lying over everything—a mess.

When he saw Violet on the ground between the rosebushes, he thought the worst. He was afraid she had had a stroke, or a heart attack, or at the very least broken her hip in the fall. But she was conscious, struggling to push herself up, groaning. He got hold of her, and lifted her. With many grunts and exclamations of dismay coming from them both, he helped her to the back steps and set her down.

“What’s this blood on you?” he said. Her arms were smeared with dirt and blood.

“It’s from the roses,” Violet said. He knew then, by her voice, that there was nothing broken in her.

“The roses scratched me something fierce,” she said. “Dane, you’re a terrible sight. You’re a terrible sight, you’re all black!”

Tears and sweat ran together down his face. He put his hand up to his cheek, and it came away black. “Smoke,” he said.

She was so calm that he thought perhaps she had had a tiny stroke, a loss of memory, just enough to let her mind skip over the fire. But she hadn’t.

“I didn’t even use any coal oil,” she said. “Dane, I didn’t use coal oil or anything. What would make it flare up like that?”

“It wasn’t a wood stove, Aunt Violet. It was on top of the gas burners.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“You must have thought you were burning papers in the wood stove.”

“I must have. What a thing to do. And you came and put it out.”

He was trying to pick the black bits of paper out of her hair, but they disintegrated under his fingers. They fell to smaller bits, and were lost.

“I have you to thank,” said Violet.

“What we ought to do now,” he said, “is take you over to the hospital, just to make sure you’re all right. You could have a rest
for a few days while we see about cleaning up the kitchen. Would that be all right?”

She made some groaning but peaceable sound that meant yes.

“Then maybe you’d like to come out and stay with us for a while.”

He would talk to Theo that night; they would have to manage something.

“You’d have to watch me that I didn’t burn the place down.”

“That’s all right.”

“Oh, Dane. It’s no joke.”

Violet died in the hospital, the third night, without any warning. A delayed reaction, perhaps. Shock. Dane burned all the papers in the back-yard incinerator. She never told him to; she never mentioned what she had been doing. She never mentioned the girls again, or anything that had happened that summer. He just felt that he should finish what she had started. He planned, as he burned, what he would say to those girls, but by the time he finished, he thought he was being too hard on them—they had brought her happiness, as much as trouble.

While they were still sitting on the back steps, in the hot, thinly clouded early afternoon, with the green wall of corn in front of them, Violet had touched her scratches and said, “These remind me.”

“I should put some Dettol on them,” said Dane.

“Sit still. Do you think there is any kind of infection that hasn’t run its course through my veins by now?”

He sat still, and she said, “You know, Wyck and I were friends, Dane, a long, long time before we were able to get married?”

“Yes.”

“Well, these scratches remind me of the way we met, to be friends the way we were, because of course we knew each other by sight. I was driving my first car, the V-8 that you wouldn’t remember, and I ran it off the road. I ran it into a bit of a ditch and I couldn’t get out. So I heard a car coming, and I waited, and then I couldn’t face it.”

“You were embarrassed you’d run off the road?”

“I was feeling badly. That was why I’d run off the road. I was feeling badly for no reason, or just a little reason. I couldn’t face anybody, and I ran off into the bushes and right away I got stuck. I turned and twisted and couldn’t get loose, and the more I turned the more I got scratched. I was in a light summer dress. But the car stopped anyway. It was Wyck. I never told you this, Dane?”

No.

“It was Wyck driving someplace by himself. He said, stay still there, and he came over and started pulling the berry canes and branches off me. I felt like a buffalo in a trap. But he didn’t laugh at me—he didn’t seem the least surprised to find a person in that predicament. I was the one who started laughing. Seeing him going round so dutiful in his light-blue summer suit.”