The Republic of Love

A
S A BABY,
T
OM
A
VERY HAD TWENTY-SEVEN MOTHERS.
S
O HE SAYS.
That was almost forty years ago.

Ask me more, his eyes beg, ask me for details.

Well, then. At three weeks of age, there he was, this little stringy wailing thing, six and a half pounds of malleable flesh. His mother was sick, desperately sick, a kind of flu that worsened to pneumonia and then depression. In all, she was hospitalized for six months. Where was his father in all this? What father? Ha! That’s another story.

A kindly social worker looked at scrawny, misshapen little Tom (rickets, one foot turning out sideways, not quite right) and said: “Leave him to me.” The next day Tom was installed in the Department of Home Economics at the University of Manitoba. He was moved straight into McDougal Hall, the Home Ec’s neo-Georgian practice house on the banks of the river, the wide Red, and put to sleep in a white enameled crib. Little Tom, the practice baby.

McDougal Hall was a kind of paradise, equipped with a streamlined (for its time) kitchen, built-in cupboards made of fruit-wood, a scalloped colonial cornice around the ceiling, concealed lighting, everything – even a row of clay pots on the windowsill holding geraniums, begonias, pointed spears of chives, and thyme. There was a tiled laundry room down in the basement with a mangle and a Bendix washer, and upstairs, occupying the broad landing, a linen closet with stacked sheets and pillow cases tied prettily with pink ribbons, and wonderful ironed kitchen towels that bespoke a vision of order that would first admonish and then inspire the inhabitants of this house, the fourth-year girls, twenty-seven of them, who took up residence here. A Dr. Elizabeth French, D.Sc. (1900 – 76), occupied the ground-floor suite. From here the daily household duties were organized, the names of those girls assigned to dusting, to silver polishing, to the turning and mending of sheets, to menu planning, soup making, table setting, flower arranging, floor waxing, spot removing – the thousand and one skills needed by young homemakers who came into being in those passionate, scented postwar years. Dr. French herself took shifts of girls out onto the second-floor balcony and demonstrated the correct method for shaking a dust mop. “We’re not just here to play house, girls,” she warned at the planning session that launched each new day. And there they would be, listening and nodding, the twenty-seven sweatered beauties (as Tom Avery will always imagine them) arranged like lovely statuettes in Dr. French’s soft-colored sitting room, primly perched on the Duncan Phyfe sofa and side chairs or else sprawled, adorably, lusciously, on the gold-toned carpet with their full tartan skirts pulled down over rounded knees. Their gaze was tender – air and openness commingled – and their thoughtful chins rested on laced hands. And what hands! Some of those hands were already wearing diamond engagement rings. (These hands are now sixty years old; Tom has had occasion to meet a few of his old “mothers” around town, and he’s seen, and even held, some of their hands affectionately in his own, and listened to remembrances of that charmed time.)

These were the pale pearly hands that dipped baby Tom into
his daily bath water. (“Always test the temperature with your elbow, girls.”) The same hands that buttoned tiny Tom into his miniature shirts and nightgowns and tied his booties in place. (“But not too tight, girls, remember baby’s circulation.”) Fortunate, fortunate Tom Avery. Passed from hand to hand, rocked and tickled, fed, burped, coaxed, rewarded, exposed to the open air – if the weather was mild – and held up to the weak sunlight for five carefully regulated minutes. (“Vitamin D, girls, the sunshine vitamin.”)

Sunlight and sterilized milk, strained cereal and vegetables and coddled eggs and mashed bananas and custard baked in little glass cups. Was baby wet? His diaper was checked hourly, the whitest, softest, most lovingly folded diaper imaginable. A line of these excellent flannelette diapers flapped in the clean air behind McDougal Hall, well away from the shaken dust mops, whipped by the wind and made incomparably fragrant. What went into baby was measured, and what came out as well. His miniature fingernails were trimmed, his weight recorded, his hand-eye skills observed, his small gassy noises noted. Whirled in the air, passed from lap to lap, kissed, oiled, powdered, wrapped tight, little Tom was never allowed to cry for more than a minute, never mind what Dr. French had to say about spoiling, about bad habits starting early.

The twenty-seven mothers pressed him close to their tender sweater fronts. They would have given him anything, their own breast milk had there been any to offer. With the softest of brushes they smoothed his half dozen silken hairs. Such love, such love – ah God, he’d never know love like that again. They praised his given name, Tommy, Tomikins, or else Wee Fellow or Mister Sweetmeat or Little Puff-Cheeks. They loved him just for being alive, for doing nothing to deserve their love. No wonder he thrived and babbled; his rounded boneless limbs flopped and contracted and grew strong – the cleanest, brightest, most polished, ventilated, and smiled upon infant west of the Red River, maybe in the whole world.

I
T’S
G
OOD
F
RIDAY
,
A COLD SPRING MORNING, AND
F
AY
M
C
L
EOD
, a woman of thirty-five, is lying in bed beside a man she no longer loves.

His name is Peter Knightly. “Happy Good Friday,” he murmurs against her mussed hair, moving toward her under the blanket. He says this in his modified Midlands accent – which always sounds to Fay like someone doing an imitation of an Englishman – and at the same time he’s working her thighs apart with his right hand. We can stay in bed, his right hand is saying, we can take our time, and then his thumb moves sideways, elaborately positioning itself.

Yesterday she loved him, but today she doesn’t.

No, that’s not quite true. She’s known for a while. The knowledge has been working away at her, giving off its muted signals. For one thing, she finds that she looks in the mirror a lot lately, squinting, making rude faces, and some mornings she sits on the edge of her bed, hunched there for minutes at a time, shivering.
She has a longing to scrub herself down, cut off her hair, floss her teeth until her gums bleed, buy herself a lacy peach half-slip. She’s caught herself calculating lately, with her breath drawn in sharply, the length of time she and Peter have been together: three years, one thousand days.

This morning she finds it hard to concentrate on Peter Knightly’s thumb, what it’s doing. Nevertheless, she registers his words – Good Friday. An official holiday. The folklore center where she and Peter both work is closed today, and somehow the next twelve hours will have to be filled.

She ponders this while Peter Knightly’s thumb rotates back and forth – persistent, and very cunning, twiddling away. She’s going to have to tell him, today, that it’s over. Going on like this is making her sick. Her stomach, right this minute, is burning, and she knows it’s not hunger or even pain, but some species of angry embarrassment. The worst of it is that all this – this predicament, this loss and damage – it’s her own doing.

Now Peter’s mouth has fixed itself on her left nipple, whispering and sliding, a suave licking. Oh, this is very familiar. He’s learned after all this time how to please. Don’t ever stop, she thinks, but knows he is about to travel over to her right nipple. Dutifully. Fairly.

Her hand comes to rest on his back, where she discovers an appalling patch of dry skin.

She tries to concentrate on the reverberations of Good Friday. The thoughts spill and roll. Does he know, she wonders, rocking him gently back and forth, that Good Friday has pagan roots? That it is the ultimate day of contradictions? Celebration mixed with gloom. Suffering with satiety. The dolorous and the delightful. Winter and spring. Cold and hot. Did he know, she silently pursues, that in certain quaint corners of England the entire population rolls a giant barrel of beer through the streets, and that this barrel has its origin in the bloodied heads of animal sacrifices?

She is a woman plagued with information, burdened with it, and always checking an impulse to pass it on to others. Is Peter Knightly, her lover of a thousand wasted days, aware that in certain
Slavic villages young men on Good Friday fashion squirt guns from reeds and spray each other with water, and that this, of course, has strong sexual implications?

What is he thinking about at this moment? Is he thinking about anything?

Does he realize the importance of Easter eggs? Could anything be more symbolically charged than an egg, a lustrous, fragile egg snatched from a hen house and piously engraved?

No, it’s not just her stomach that hurts, it’s her heart. It hurts for both of them, and for the passage of time. Shouldn’t time add up to something?

“Well,” Peter says to Fay – and his voice comes out in aggrieved gasps – “You seem a long way off this morning.”

He pulls away, slides his arms from around her body, smoothing the blanket binding over her shoulder in a way that is faintly conciliatory. But his face, drained and hurt, gives him away. Why do you always have to spoil everything? his face says as he retreats to the bathroom.

I
F
F
AY
M
C
L
EOD
no longer loves Peter Knightly, there is still the question of whether she can live without him, live alone that is. She is thirty-five years old, after all, and should know something about compromise.