The Republic of Love (10 page)

“I was what you call a spoiled brat,” Tom told Ted Woloschuk down at the studio five minutes before air time. In front of him on his felt-padded table was a box of Kleenex, a package of cough drops, and a tall glass filled with hot water, lemon juice, and honey. “I was spoiled on a daily basis, but when I was sick I was spoiled rotten. And this, right here in front of me, was my mother’s prize cure, hot lemon and honey.” He raised it to his lips. “May it work its healing magic.”

It was Wednesday night, guest night, and tonight’s guest, on
a telephone hookup from Thunder Bay, was Helen Ryder, who had recently invited a blue-ribbon bull into a friend’s china shop. It was really a charity stunt, she explained, a money raiser for multiple sclerosis, but it turned out to be a crazy kind of community extravaganza. The sidewalk outside the store was full of people peering through the window, trying to see how many teapots and plates the bull knocked off the shelves. Some of them were placing private bets as well as buying raffle tickets on a Royal Doulton cake server. Well, nothing much happened. A lot of money got raised and a lot of excitement was generated, but the bull just stood placidly in the aisle for half an hour, only once or twice sniffing a cup and saucer with his big soft nose.

“People kept asking me if we’d tranquilized him,” Helen Ryder said, “but we didn’t. He’s just a very nice bull. He belongs to my brother who farms about thirty miles from here. His name’s Bobby. The bull, that is, not my brother.”

It always surpises Tom that guests are willing to come on his show in the middle of the night – the Wednesday-night guest slot is between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. – and without getting paid a cent. Hardly anyone ever says no. He can’t understand it, whether it’s vanity or a yearning for a crack at show biz or maybe some naive reverence for the air waves that makes an invitation seem like a summons. He’s also surprised at how chatty even the shy and nervous are at this hour. Of course, late-night radio invites intimacy; he himself finds he can ask outrageous questions. People seem to feel they can say almost anything, open up confidences they wouldn’t dream of touching in the daytime.

“Let me ask you this,” he said in tonight’s wrapup with Helen Ryder. “You made a lot of money for M.S. and you provided some fun for Thunder Bay, but what did you, Helen Ryder, get out of it?”

There was a pause, the kind of shrewd, resonant pause that would be fatal on daytime radio, and then she said: “It’s funny you should ask that. I don’t usually go in for being center stage, it’s not my thing. But I was having a few personal problems at the time. And, I don’t know, I felt this urge to do something wild and
strange. Well, I had my brother who owned this bull, and I had a girlfriend in the china business, and it just sort of fit together. It was a really great feeling. My self-esteem was zilch before, and I kept getting these colds. I thought, hey, maybe there’s some connection. Speaking of colds, you sound like you’ve got a humdinger. What you want to do is get yourself half a dozen oranges and eat them throughout the day, all six in one twenty-four hour period. I guarantee it. I’ll tune in real soon and see how you’re doing, okay?”

“L
OVE IS THE ONLY
enchantment we know,” the woman in the green blazer was saying.

She had a touch of gold on one of her front teeth. Her brown shoes were scuffed on the toes like a child’s.

She was standing in a corner of the Safeway parking lot early Thursday morning when Tom walked over to buy a bag of oranges. She was talking to a rather heavy middle-aged man with a bald head and a face like a dish, and speaking in a tone so mild, speculative, and cheerful that Tom wanted to rush up to her and pay her an elaborate compliment: her eyes, her hair, her grasp of experience, the portentous beauty and simplicity of her utterance.

Later, as he was peeling oranges over a garbage bag, the phrase came to him again: Love is the only enchantment. This, he said to himself, is how a Chinese gong must feel when it’s struck by a hammer in its absolute center.

F
AY
M
C
L
EOD’S FOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE DEAD, BUT SHE DOES HAVE
an active and official godmother, a woman of sixty-five named Onion who was present at her christening thirty-five years ago and who lives a mere two blocks away from her in a condominium on Wellington Crescent. Onion is an ungodly woman, but she takes her godmotherly bond seriously.

Rafe, the condo doorman, who greets Fay by name when she comes to visit Onion, wears a strange sky-blue uniform that makes him look like a character in a Spanish operetta. He is a compulsive chatterer but a persevering mechanic, tinkering endlessly with the fountain in the lobby, an affair of plastic and anodized copper that at least twice a week overshoots its rim and soaks the soft gray carpet. Onion Boyle lives twelve floors up in an apartment that overlooks the Assiniboine River.

Onion. She acquired her name – just how and why no one can remember – when she was in medical school, one of only three women enrolled at that time. Fay’s mother, Peggy, another of the
three, was called Carrot, though the name didn’t stick. The third girl, known as Rhubarb Leaf, married a Baptist missionary and went with him to India, where she still lives, a passionate, pious woman who every Christmas writes a letter to her former classmates, beginning: “My dear Carrot and Onion, may the Light of Jesus direct these poor words of mine.” Onion, reading these letters, gives a snort of impatience. She is known for her tart pessimism and salty tongue.

Until her retirement a year ago, she worked as a pathologist, and during most of that time – nearly forty years – she was engaged: engaged to be married, with a ring, a diamond solitaire, large and rather forlorn looking in its four platinum claws, to another pathologist, a man named Strom Symonds. Fay should know Strom well after all these years, but she doesn’t. He is a thick, white-bodied, silent bachelor with hair whiskering out of his ears, a golfer, a fisherman, a lover of big-band music, a dancer of rumbas, only now he is a patient in the stroke unit at St. Boniface Hospital, speechless and paralyzed. Once, years ago, he had turned to Fay in a restaurant and said, “Without Onion there is nothing of value in this world for me, nothing.”

Why have Onion and Strom never married? Fay, who drops in on Onion at least once a week, usually on Friday evenings on her way home from the Handel Chorale, has never come out and asked. Fay and Onion generally have a glass of wine together, sometimes two or three, since Onion is shyly fond of drink, and talk with easy pleasure about local politics, women’s rights, nutrition, heart disease, the biography of Lucy Maude Montgomery and how that poor tortured woman suffered all her life from cystitis, the weather, the latest adventures of Rafe and the lobby fountain, and, quite often lately, as the tide drops in the wine bottle, Strom’s blood count, Strom’s medication, Strom’s failing pulse rate – but they never touch on the reason Onion and Strom have chosen to live separately all these years. (Fay’s mother believes it must be a sexual problem, a dysfunction, with one of them, or perhaps both, but Fay defends the values of the single life, vigorously or mildly, depending on how she’s feeling.)

Tonight Fay tells Onion what she’s told no one else – how hard it’s been for her to adjust to living alone again, without Peter. The last few weeks of their parting were so senselessly drawn out, and now his absence is so – so sudden. Her evenings feel airless and unbalanced. At first there was a sense of relief, but now she wonders if she made a mistake, if she and Peter shouldn’t have persevered, making the best of things, as most people seem to do. “What do you think?” Fay asks Onion.

Of all the people in the world, she can speak most directly to Onion. It’s always been like this. Onion is not quite family, not quite friend, but a presence that hovers between the two. Their investment in each other’s lives rests on consideration rather than instinct, on something that has been constructed out of happy accident and allowed to have its way. Fay loves her but would never formulate the thought in words, never say, I love Onion. It would embarrass them both.

At 9:30 in the evening there is still enough tattered sunlight to coat the river, a pink border meeting a band of blue and bending out of sight. Fay keeps her eyes on the large window and waits for Onion to respond with her usual snagging, ironic voice, to say something dissonant and loyal, like “I always did have my doubts about that man” or “I never thought he was good enough for you.” She seems about to speak, a pulse starting behind her lips, but all she does is lean back on the headrest of her chair and close her eyes, sighing.

Fay has seen this chair a thousand times, but tonight she notices how ill-proportioned it is, one of those ubiquitous Danish designs from the late fifties. Doesn’t Onion mind that aggressively grained teak and hard-souled orange upholstery? Why does she hang on to something this ugly?

She is a lean old obdurate woman with legs like sticks of chalk. Lunch for her is an apple. Dinner is a boiled egg. No scent of any kind attaches to her. To speak of devotion to the world of the senses would make her sniff. Her face is spare, clean, organized, alert, but tonight her half-closed eyes are adrift. Fay wonders if she is thinking about Strom in his hospital room across the river.
Can she be grieving as she sits there, feeling her loss, her injury, that shell of the self that breaks against another? Perhaps. Probably. Yes.

“I really came by,” Fay says, “to invite you to Sunday lunch. I’m having the whole family. Even Bibbi’s coming. Promise me, Onion, that you’ll come.”

L
IKE HER MOTHER
, and even her sister, Bibbi, Fay attaches importance to her immediate surroundings. She likes white walls, dark polished floors, brilliant handmade rugs, interesting furniture, comfortable chairs, good reading lamps, plenty of books and pictures, and, when she can afford it, fresh cut flowers on the coffee table. In her apartment, which has been carved out of a former house, there are nine-foot ceilings and angles of wall that darken subtly in lamplight, and here and there remnants of the original stained glass. She particularly likes the colored window in the kitchen, a design of interlocking leaves and curled yellow flowers dating from the twenties, which casts bright blobby reflections on the kitchen floor and also serves to block out the rundown brick apartment building across the street.

On Saturdays she cleans her apartment. She notices, with a measure of detachment, that she’s been cleaning more thoroughly lately, since her thirty-fifth birthday, since Peter’s departure, since Fletcher Conrad. With her rubber gloves, her brushes and rags and chemicals, she cleans not just avidly but furiously. Jabbing at corners. Scouring. Bashing. Today she finds a trail of black grease on the floor of the utility room and experiences a perverse shiver of satisfaction. She will annihilate it with steel wool, then buff the white tiles back to gloss and perfection.

Such triumph is obscurely worrying, but she’s not yet willing to think about what it means.

Briskly she irons a red cotton tablecloth for tomorrow’s lunch. She loves to see a dining table with a red cloth. Her dining room is small, really only a corner by a window, but in a pinch she can seat ten, though Matthew and Gordon, her nephews, will have to sit on the oak coffee table, raised up on cushions.

It’s bourgeois, she knows, and vaguely discrediting, the gratification she gets from setting a table, the alignment of silver, the lovely rolled napkins. She’ll buy white flowers in Osborne Village this afternoon, just a few, maybe lilies if they have any, and arrange them in a low frosted-glass bowl she has.

All morning there have been rain showers, but now a fan of sunlight cuts across the table, and she stops to admire the effect. How fortunate a woman she is to possess this kind of skewed double vision. To be happy. And to see herself being happy.

H
ERS IS NOT
a reticent family. Everyone, in fact, is talking at once, talking as they cut through the tender chicken breasts and hearts of artichoke, as they reach for another spoonful of rice salad, as they pass the crusty bread, as they raise glasses of white wine to their lips, as they brush crumbs from the tablecloth or mop up a few drops of spilled milk with the corner of a napkin.

Sonya is talking about how she’s getting a permanent groove in her bottom from sitting on the edge of the bathtub and coaching her two sons in the art of effective teeth brushing.

Fay’s mother and father are discussing, and politely disagreeing about, the medical treatment their friend John Brewmaster is undergoing at the Mayo Clinic, and Fay’s brother, Clyde, is stumbling his way toward a statement about the civil-rights aspect of fluoridated water, saying that in the end it all comes down to society’s collective wish.

Yes, Bibbi says, her eyes smiling, that’s all very well, but measuring the will of society has become an impossibility now that pollsters have become our generals and the media our legislators.

Onion says, sharply, hoisting an eyebrow, that something or other is perfectly self-evident, and Fay’s Great-Uncle Arthur, eighty and deaf, is pointing to the example of Mackenzie King, how he wouldn’t survive five minutes under the scrutiny of a television camera, and neither would Roosevelt, for that matter.

Fay is clearing the table and saying, “Now listen everyone, be sure to save room for this marvelous dessert I’ve toiled and slaved over,” eliciting groans of pleasure around the table and an appreciation
for the phrase – toiled and slaved – which is part of an ancient and complex family joke.

And six-year-old Gordon is dreaming, humming, singing over his untouched plate, the light from the window glowing on his smooth forehead, while Matthew whines and whines because his fingers are covered with butter, until Sonya turns to him and says, “Just lick them off, sweetie, we’re all family here.”

O
N MONDAY MORNING
, going to work, Fay missed her bus by seconds. It was raining, a cold rain, and though she waved frantically at the driver, he didn’t see her.