The Republic of Love (15 page)

That phrase – “the lake” – makes Fay smile. “Lake” in this part of the world is used generically, meaning any inland body of water large or small, and the word “cottage” applies equally to a twelve-room house on the Lake of the Woods and a primitive one-room cabin without electricity or running water. The Morris’s cottage is old, dark, comfortable, and smoky, an improvisation of logs and clapboards built on stilts in the late forties by Frank’s father.

Fay and Beverly and Anne, who works as an ethnologist at the center, spend all Sunday morning on the cottage dock, Fay and Beverly stretched out on beach towels, and Anne, who has been in poor health recently, in a reclining canvas chair with a terry-cloth robe drawn over her shoulders. The Morris girls have gone around the Point for a sailing lesson, and Frank Morris is up in the cottage, which is perched on a height of wooded land overlooking the lake, preparing his specialty lunch, known as Frank’s Fish House Salad.

He is a recovered alcoholic, or a
recovering
alcoholic, as he insists on saying, and today is his four hundredth dry day. He wakes up every morning, he says, unable to believe his good fortune, that somehow he’s been given back his life. His counting of days is a form of thanksgiving, and his sobriety wakes him early for a swim, makes him whistle as he scythes down the grass behind the cottage, fills the hummingbird feeder by the door, tinkers with his outboard motor, and admires, proudly, passionately, the spread-out reds and pinks of the sun setting each night over Falcon Lake.

But it seems to Fay, lying on the warm pier and listening to the cool sulky slap of lake water beneath her, breathing in its flat fishy odor, that Frank Morris has been blinded by his dramatic renewal and doesn’t even see how his wife, Anne, is slipping away.
Where will they all be in a year? It frightens her. Will Frank still be up there on his glory wagon, Anne still occupying that chair, her body chilly even at the height of summer? And Beverly? And herself, will she still be bluffing along, hearty and brave, posing questions, boarding buses, attending showers, buying hospitality gifts, writing thank-you notes, and trying not to get too mouthy and mean?

F
AY’S GODMOTHER
, Onion, has sprung an immense surprise: she is going to get married. The wedding is tonight, a Monday – and why not a Monday night, Onion says tartly – in a hospital room at the St. Boniface stroke unit, where over the weekend Strom Symonds has manifested several small signs of recovery. The muscles on the left side of his face have pulled back to form a leather puckering which might be a smile, or a sneer; one eye blinks and glitters; a throttled sound like a monkey’s beep comes out of his corded lips; the fingers of his left hand twitch as though all his seventy-year-old volition, all his withheld eloquence, were concentrated there in a terrace of brown knuckle-bone and grained skin.

Onion is a nonbeliever, but she’s phoned the office of the Unitarian Church, which has sent over a tall fat young woman named Dot, and it is she who stands at the foot of Strom’s bed and reads the brief marriage ceremony. The window is wide open on this warm night, and the floor nurse, Gloria – her name in the form of a brooch is pinned to her uniform – has set up a fan in the doorway. Seated around the bed with Fay are her mother and father; her sister, Bibbi; her brother, Clyde, and his wife, Sonya; and Robin Cummerford, the young doctor who has been looking after Strom since he was brought to the hospital. Strom wears a pair of blue pajamas; everyone else is in loose summer clothes, including Onion, who appears to have dressed hurriedly, in an old denim skirt and a white blouse that is rather severely cut. She wears a yellow grin, a comical boniness of tooth and jaw that says: I have lost my wits. And Fay recalls something her mother once
said about Onion, that she was a darling woman (Fay’s mother called all of her friends darling women) but was possessed of a heart not easily made glad.

To Fay the wedding scene seems set into motion by the heft of accumulated postponement. Why, after all this time? Sonya has brought flowers from her back yard, phlox and daisies, and these stand in two large vases, one of them on the bed table – which also holds a water flask and what looks to Fay at first to be an interesting piece of sculpture but is, in fact, a plastic urinal. There is no wedding music, since no one could think of how to provide it without disturbing the other patients or bringing about stretches of extreme self-consciousness.

But there are, at least, wedding rings. These had been selected, rather frantically, by Fay and Onion, who had met at a jeweler’s downtown at noon today. Plain gold bands were decided on; they’d guessed at Strom’s ring size and, to their surprise, have got it right.

“In sickness and in health,” Onion repeats dryly, affecting a wince, drawing wide the corners of her mouth and raising her eyebrows. Strom, who is supported by three large pillows, beeps back his assent, his fingers aflap and his one good eye madly dancing.

Presents are opened: a VCR from Fay’s parents; two soft leather wallets made by Bibbi, a hand-woven blanket in light Icelandic wool from Clyde and Sonya, a set of high-power binoculars from Fay (who is rather proud of this inspired choice), and a pair of matching dressing gowns from Dr. Cummerford, hospital greenies. No one is sure if this is meant to be a joke, whether it is a gesture of practicality or intended to salute the curious valor and contradictions of the event; everyone stares with discomfort as the gift is unwrapped and revealed.

Then Clyde uncorks two bottles of champagne, and even Strom drinks a little, through a plastic drinking straw. Onion reaches under the bed and produces a chocolate cake, and for an hour everyone eats, drinks, brushes crumbs from the bed sheet and discusses with varying degrees of heat the situation in South
Africa – until a voice over the loudspeaker announces that visiting hours are over. Gloria hustles in with her tray of medications and apple juice, making noises. It’s time for everyone to go home, and they do, except for Strom – and Onion, who elects to sit with him for a few minutes longer, until he falls asleep.

“S
O, HOW’RE YOUR MERMAIDS
coming along?” Mac Jaffe asks Fay.

“Never mind her mermaids,” Iris interrupts. “She’s in the middle of telling me about Onion. And Strom Symonds. They got married. Last night. At St. Boniface Hospital. During visiting hours, yet.”

“Well, well,” Mac Jaffe says.

The three of them are sitting in the Jaffes’ striking black-and-white kitchen in a newly converted warehouse on Ballentyne Street – or, rather, Fay is sitting. She feels lanky and powerful perched here on a bar stool, as though her bones had been whittled clean; Iris is standing at a chopping block snipping fresh dill and throwing it into a bowl of green beans, and Mac is standing in the doorway, just home from a day at his office in the Grain Exchange, where he advises, consults, whatever – Fay’s never entirely understood what it is that Mac Jaffe does, except that he appears to do it well and to be amply rewarded. Condominiums in this building start at two hundred thousand dollars, and the Jaffes have bought one of the penthouses, six rooms roofed and sided with immense sheets of tinted glass. Fay’s here a lot. “Hey, get yourself over here,” Iris says to her at least once a week, “I need your elbows on my table.”

Iris Corning Jaffe, who is the same age as Fay, divides her life down the middle. Half the time she works as an actress, picking up small parts on radio or television, doing occasional commercials, and every summer taking a part in one of the musicals at Rainbow Stage. When she isn’t being an actress, she’s trying to get pregnant, so far without success. What she’s done to this end forms a production in itself, from sexual gymnastics to tarot cards to taking
her ova to Toronto, where they were placed in a Petri dish with Mac Jaffe’s sperm and encouraged to reproduce. Recently, perhaps with tongue in cheek, perhaps not, Iris drank a glass of tea made with lilac blossoms and suffered an allergic reaction so severe that her understudy at Rainbow Stage had to be summoned. A short, slight, curly headed woman with a cool oval of a face, Iris is Fay’s oldest and closest friend. They’ve known each other since they were four, two girls growing up on the same tree-shaded block of Ash Avenue. Yaf and Siri they called each other when they were younger – their names spelled backward. Among their ancient rituals is the exchange of elaborate compliments. “Well-snipped dill,” Fay will say to Iris. “Exquisitely combed hair,” Iris will say to Fay, or “That lip gloss brings out your essential you-ness,” or “Your shoulder blades are looking particularly goodish today.” They love the word “goodish,” as in goodish sunsets, goodish travel bargains, goodish men. Iris is a woman of emphatic gestures and a nervous resonant voice, who worries about becoming what she calls “actressy,” one of those self-dramatizing dollies she despises, and occasionally resembles.

“Why oh why?” she asks Fay, wagging the kitchen shears. “Why would Onion, after all these years, go through with it?”

“Is that garlic I smell?” Mac asks. “It smells beautiful in this room.”

“Have a drink, Mac,” Iris commands. “Fay and I’ve already had two.”

“No one really knows,” Fay says. “It’s odd, but not one of us actually asked her. You know how private Onion can be. You never want to step over that invisible line. But my mother thinks it’s guilt, that Onion’s always been the one to postpone marriage, not Strom, and that now she wants to make amends before it’s too late. My father just thinks she’s gone soggy in the head, he thinks retirement’s tipped her judgment, given her too much time to regret and grieve.”

“Regret and grieve,” Iris picks up. “That sounds like the title of one of those murky German movies. The other night we saw – ”

“Clyde thinks Onion has deluded herself into thinking that Strom will make a complete recovery, and that they’ll have this lovely bit of wedded bliss together. Sonya thinks Onion has a subconscious desire to be a bourgeois housewife and that she’s suppressed it all these years. I don’t know. I think it’s one of those necessary gestures. That she can’t let go of him somehow until she’s sealed their life, with a ceremony. Okay, I’m talking like a folklorist, God forbid, but I don’t think she’s crazy at all. I think she’s listening to her instincts for once. And Bibbi more or less agrees.”

“Don’t tell me Bibbi was there, too?”

“Yes.”

“How is Bibbi? Does she seem happy? Do you think she is? Happy, that is.”

Fay shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t asked her for ages. But I’m going to see her tomorrow night. We’re going out to that new Greek restaurant on Arlington. Maybe I’ll ask her.”

“I always loved Bibbi,” Mac says. “I hate to see her wasting her life.”

Fay says, “I don’t know about that, Mac. I’m not sure she’s wasting her life. Anyway, she’s not even thirty yet.”

“Almost.”

“Dinner’s ready.” Iris says this with a mock curtsy. “You two guys ready?”

“Ready,” Mac says.

“Ready,” says Fay. “Where’ll I sit? My usual place?”

F
AY’S SISTER
, B
IBBI
– her baby sister, she sometimes calls her – is one of only three women cobblers in Canada, one of only twenty-four in North America, of sixty-two in the English-speaking world – at least as far as anyone’s counted. She learned the trade in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she found herself at the age of nineteen, having hitchhiked from Manitoba and arriving with four dollars in her pocket. She lived that winter with a young alcoholic shoe-repair man and within eight months had learned
the trade. “I can make anything,” she says. She repairs all manner of shoes, belts, bags, and luggage. Her shoe-repair shop is on Selkirk Avenue, in Winnipeg’s North End, and for the last five years she’s lived above the shop with her lover, Jake Greary, a professional communist.

Jake scorns the entrepreneurial system, and so the shop is run as a co-op, and most of Bibbi’s labor is bartered for goods and services, with the result that she’s almost always short of cash. Jake Greary, who has remained unmoved by the crumbling of the Eastern bloc, also disapproves of Bibbi’s middle-class parents and refuses to enter their house. An austere and joylessly resolute man, he thinks Bibbi’s godmother, Muriel Brewmaster, is a joke, a healthy woman who has never worked at anything in her life. He despises Bibbi’s brother, Clyde, calling him a tool of the system. His hatred of Fay – they have met only twice – seems to derive from the fact that as a folklorist she accepts public money for nonproductive ends, lives in a clean apartment with attractive furniture, and insists on paying the bill when she and Bibbi go out for a meal. He works in a glove factory by day and attends meetings most nights. Wednesday night is his union meeting, and it’s on Wednesday nights that Fay usually meets Bibbi.

These evenings are a little tricky, since Bibbi insists on simple food and spartan surroundings. The new Greek place, Spiro’s, with its cloth napkins and subtle lighting, clearly makes her uncomfortable, but she compensates by ordering a plate of plain rice and vegetables and accepting only a single glass of chilled retsina.

She is as tall as Fay but with fuller breasts, shapely and rounded breasts, lovely even beneath the dark, stretched, slightly soiled sweatshirt she wears tonight. Her hair, unlike Fay’s, is very light brown, almost blond, and she wears it in a thick loose braid that comes halfway down her back. She has a beautiful and collected face. People have always exclaimed about the glory of Bibbi’s facial bones, sometimes with a hint of disbelief or regret in their voices – this
extraordinary creature, those eyes, that coloring, that natural grace, all that intelligence, too, and for what?

Her younger sister’s beauty has never given Fay anything but the most intense pleasure, not that she expects anyone to believe this; it’s almost more than she can believe herself.

“Tell me what’s new on the mermaid front,” Bibbi asks Fay, then sits back and listens with the whole of her face and body.

The two of them can talk about anything – anything, that is, but Jake Greary and whether or not Bibbi is happy.

“Are you happy, Bibbi?” Fay asks tonight, looking down at her plate, cutting her almond pastry carefully in half with the side of her fork.