What Is Left the Daughter (3 page)

I think I was five or six when I first met Tilda. I remember how my mother put it: "You're about to have a very special surprise, darling. Aunt Constance and Uncle Donald couldn't have children of their own. God saw to that—no, no, I mean God has graced their lives with a new little girl. They've named her Tilda. They're all coming to visit this afternoon."

Tilda's real parents had lived in Glenholme, which is fairly close to the Economys. There was no immediate family, or none willing to take Tilda, age two, when her parents died within three months of each other. The only word about that I ever heard was "wasting disease."

Anyway, my aunt's dentist appointment was at nine the next morning. While Tilda sat in the waiting room, my uncle took the opportunity to ship out two sleds directly from the train station. I'd gone along. "My very first customers from British Columbia," he said. "You just can't get any further away in Canada than that, can you? Excepting Eskimo territories, and I'd be God's biggest fool to think Eskimos would need one of my sleds." By one o'clock they were back on the road. I can still see them driving off. My aunt sat in the middle, her face swollen, still groggy from laughing gas. She leaned against Tilda's shoulder. When my uncle's truck got five or six houses down the block, Tilda, without turning to look back, stretched her arm out the window and waved goodbye. It's my self-generated theory that Tilda assumed I'd be watching from the porch, not wanting her to leave—that she somehow knew, far in advance of me, that I already loved her, even though we'd spent virtually no time alone and had made only small talk.

Two habits were set early on in my life in Middle Economy. One was set by my uncle, the other was set by me. Starting the first day of my apprenticeship, my uncle insisted that I join him every workday morning for breakfast in the kitchen at six
A.M.
, allowing us to be in the work shed by six-forty-five sharp. Then, with his permission, at ten I'd drive my DeSoto over to the bakery owned and operated by Mrs. Cornelia Tell and spend my half-hour break over a coffee.

The bakery was in the center of town. On one side was
MAUD'S SEWING
(Maud Dunne sat in the window working her sewing machine), on the other
BAIT AND TACKLE
. Early on, I'd got a sample of how Cornelia Tell questioned all motives for politeness. I'd sat down and said, "Would it be too much trouble if I got a scone with my coffee?" Cornelia Tell shot back, "Even if it does cause me trouble, do you still want a scone?" I never put it that way again, believe me. I just said, "I'd like a scone." That same morning, while I sat eating a cranberry scone and drinking my coffee, Cornelia Tell was behind the counter, swirling frosting on cupcakes. "Today being Tuesday," she said, "do you know who you're going to meet back home at lunch?"

"I have no idea," I said.

"You'll be sitting down for lunch with Lenore Teachout. She's originally from Great Village, not too far down the road. Her parents still live there."

"And why would Lenore Teachout be at our house today?"

"Because every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday—except earlier this week she had a cold—Lenore carries a box of pencils, a pencil sharpener, a notebook and an exercise book called
Shorthand Self-Taught
over to your house. She knocks on your door and your aunt lets her inside and serves tea. Then Lenore listens to your radio. She writes down what people on the radio say. She practices stenography—do you know what stenography is, Wyatt?"

"There's a stenographer in Magistrate's Court, right?"

"Right as rain. And that's the employment Lenore Teachout aspires to. And it's very sensible of her. Because Lenore potentially could find work in any Canadian city where there's a busy courthouse."

"Why does she practice stenography in our house, though?"

"Because she doesn't own a radio."

"You seem to know a lot about her."

"Your aunt Constance and I are dear, dear friends, Wyatt. True, even the dearest of friends keep things from each other, but they don't keep everything from each other. Your aunt keeps very little about Lenore Teachout from me."

"Does Lenore know that?"

"Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, you'll notice how tall Lenore is. She was always tall for her age. Wait here, I'll show you something."

Cornelia Tell went out the door onto the street, then back in an adjacent door that led up a flight of stairs to her rooms. She'd lived above her bakery since her husband, Llewyn, a fisherman, had drowned at sea twenty-three years earlier. When she returned to the bakery she set down a copy of the Great Village Elementary School yearbook for 1914 and paged through the grainy individual portraits of administrators, the school nurse, teachers and students, and a photograph of all the students taken near the flagpole. "Aha!" she said, "found it!" She placed her finger on a quarter-page photograph of a Christmas pageant. "This girl, right here, is Lenore Teachout, age ten. Your aunt Constance brought this to my attention." I bent close and saw that Lenore was costumed up as a camel, on all fours, men's shoes for hooves, a bale of hay on her back, posed next to the Magi and a crèche. "They made her a camel," Mrs. Tell said, "because she was tall for her age, eh?"

"She doesn't look too happy there," I said.

"Unhappiness followed Lenore all the way up to her adult life," Cornelia Tell said, "though lately she seems less unhappy, which bodes well. Anyway, who in their right mind would ever say a person was
supposed
to be happy? In your life happiness is either cut to your length or isn't."

"Thanks, Cornelia, for all the this-and-that about Lenore Teachout, whom I'm about to share lunch with," I said.

"You're very welcome." She noticed that I had a few bites of scone and half a cup of coffee left. "Let's see, what else?" she said. "Well, Lenore had a year at Dalhousie University. The first in her family to go to college. Too bad Halifax proved to be all distractions. Lenore made a whirlwind marriage to a fellow student, then just as whirlwind a divorce. Have to hand it to her, though, she fit a lot into that month of February! I remember Lenore saying, 'True, I failed my academic course work. But I kept my ears open and got highly educated in the thoughts of men and women.' According to rumor—I suspect a rumor started by Lenore herself—during her time in Halifax she kept over a thousand pages of a journal full of conversations. I don't know where she got the moxie, but she didn't merely eavesdrop, she actually wrote down what she'd overheard!"

"A thousand pages," I said. "That's impressive."

"I once asked her, 'Lenore, don't you annoy people, writing down their every word like that?' And do you know, she got all huffy and said, 'Well, Cornelia, aren't you grateful someone took down all those actual conversations found in the Bible? What if nobody had bothered? Where would we all be then?'"

"I'll have to think about that one," I said.

"You do that," Cornelia Tell said.

I paid for my scone and coffee, stepped outside the bakery, smoked a Chesterfield and then drove back to the house. In the shed, while my uncle measured and cut crosspieces, I sanded planks for an hour or so, trying not to respond to his sidelong glances or deep sighs, which were judgments of my work. It didn't much bother me. Finally, he said, "You go on in, Wyatt. I'm skipping lunch today, I'm pretty sure. Aggravated stomach. Maybe bring out a thermos of tea when you come back, okay?"

"Sure thing, Uncle Donald."

"You're doing fine, by the way. Honestly, better than I expected."

"Damning with faint praise, but thanks."

When I entered the house through the back door, I heard Tilda talking to someone in the kitchen. Taking off my work shoes, I listened in.

"—what with Wyatt sleeping in the room next to mine, I don't feel nearly as comfortable walking around in my birthday suit, eh? Not that he can see through walls or anything. It's just that I like to be—how's Mom say it? 'Elegant in my dailiness.' It just wouldn't feel right somehow. From now on I'll have to change directly from clothes to nightshirt, no lingering in between. Hardly a sacrifice, is it, considering how grateful Wyatt must be to have a home with relatives, employment, not having to go it alone in Halifax. Wouldn't you agree, Lenore?"

"Fully agree with everything," Lenore said.

"Did you catch every last word?" Tilda asked.

"I think so," Lenore said.

"Read it back to me, then."

Lenore began, "'You know, Lenore, what with Wyatt sleeping in the room next to mine—'" But I shuffled loudly, on purpose, into the kitchen. Tilda turned toward me, holding a tray, which held two cups of tea, a porcelain hippopotamus full of sugar, two cloth napkins and a spoon. "Oh, Wyatt!" she said. "Speak of the devil."

I looked away. Tilda must've thought it was out of embarrassment.

Then I glanced at Lenore. Factoring in her ten-year-old self from the yearbook, I thought, Yes, she appears to be about thirty-seven or thirty-eight. She had a lovely face, including deep worry lines, cascading brown hair. She was wearing the same sorts of clothes that Tilda wore, dungarees, sensible shoes, flannel shirt. But Lenore wore eyeglasses. Tilda set the tray on the table. "Wyatt," she said, "I'd like you to meet our friend and neighbor Lenore Teachout. She's here quite often to practice her stenography. Or the stenographic art. Didn't you once call it that, Lenore, the stenographic art?"

"Just the word 'stenography' does the trick," Lenore said. "Glad to meet you, Wyatt."

"Take a close look, Wyatt," Tilda said. "You'll see authentic shorthand, which at first might look like children's squiggles and doodles, but it's a method." I leaned over to inspect Lenore's notebook. "Is this your first opportunity to see shorthand?"

"Yes, it is," I said.

I stared at Tilda, and she stared right back and held her stare. She looked ravishing. (I'll later tell you why I used that word.) Tilda was about an inch taller than me, "shapely and mostly modest about it," as my aunt later said. Tilda had green eyes, the only student who did in her elementary and high school career. A lovely mouth, slightly tilted smile, only slightly, though. "Rambunctious, with a mind of its own" is how she described her thick black hair. Mornings before school she'd attempt to discipline her hair with a hundred strokes of a brush, tightly combed and organized it with no fewer than eight bobby pins and two barrettes, yet still there'd be unruly precincts. At table, Tilda always sat like a marionette held stiffly upright on a string. At age eleven, she'd injured her back in a spill off one of my uncle's sleds. A patch of ice hidden under the snow had spun her every which way and finally into a tree. Once out of hospital, she'd been trussed up and assigned to bed for several weeks. She had to see a specialist in Halifax. He prescribed exercises to keep her limber, one of which was to sit as upright as possible at each meal, let alone at her desk in school. "At first she cried and cried, the pain worse for sitting up so straight," my aunt had said. "But our Tilda impressed us all, what with the diligent work it took to hold her posture."

My aunt walked in carrying a Grundig-Majestic radio, which she placed on the kitchen table, stretched the cord and plugged it into the outlet near the sink. When she looked at us, Tilda's and my eyes were still locked. "Great glory's sake, Wyatt," she said, "cat got your tongue?"

I snapped out of whatever I was in. "Oh, hello, Aunt Constance," I said. "I just came in out of the cold rain into this warm kitchen." No doubt, I'd obviously just described how I'd felt while looking at Tilda. But it must've sounded loony.

"Interesting, since it's not raining out," my aunt said.

I tried to regain some balance and said, "Uncle Donald's not feeling well enough to eat. He'd like tea later, though."

"Well, sit yourself down, then," my aunt said. "How's my husband treating you out there, anyway?"

"I'm learning a lot," I said.

I noticed Lenore writing away, taking down everything she heard.

"Don't let him bend over your work and hurry you," my aunt said. "You're not a sewing machine."

"No, I won't."

I sat down opposite Lenore. Once she had served carrot soup and bread, my aunt sat opposite Tilda. I ate too fast, which my aunt noticed. "Wyatt," she said, "in this house, if a meal's not satisfying, you want it over with fast, one way or the other."

Tilda and Lenore exchanged glances, and I said, "No, no, the soup's delicious. I think I just need some air. The shed's close quarters, Aunt Constance, that's all. I think I'll take a short walk down the road and back."

"It's a nice day for a walk," my aunt said.

"The soup was delicious," I said.

"You've said that twice. The second time convinced me less, but thank you," my aunt said.

I stood up from the table and started toward the front door. "You don't have any shoes on," Tilda said.

"Maybe in Halifax they take walks in stocking feet," Lenore said.

"Don't trip on the dog porch," Tilda said.

See, Marlais, in local parlance "dog porch" meant the floor. So by saying I shouldn't trip on the dog porch, Tilda was declaring how I could hardly handle the simplest thing—a conversation—which was true enough. Though more to the point, it was the sudden new import of Tilda's loveliness that had got me so tongue-tied.

Then, for some reason, I sat down at the table again. "Is there enough for seconds?" I asked.

"Seconds, thirds and fourths," my aunt said.

"I'll serve myself, thanks," I said. I went to the stove and ladled more soup into my bowl. I sat down and ate at a deliberately slow pace. My uncle came in and said, "My poor stomach's making me call it quits for the day, I'm afraid. Say, Wyatt, why'd you take your shoes off? I nearly killed myself stumbling over them."

"Do you want a bromide?" my aunt asked.

"Maybe later," he said. "I'll just sit here for a while and have some tea. Then I'll go in and lie down. Probably a nap."

"Well, you were up to all hours with those radio bulletins, Donald," my aunt said.

"I have to keep up with the war," my uncle said. "Some choose not to."