Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Post and Beam

Lionel told them how his mother had died.

She had asked for her makeup. Lionel held the mirror.

“This will take about an hour,” she said.

Foundation cream, face powder, eyebrow pencil, mascara, lip-liner, lipstick, blusher. She was slow and shaky, but it wasn’t a bad job.

“That didn’t take you an hour,” Lionel said.

She said, no, she hadn’t meant that.

She had meant, to die.

He had asked her if she wanted him to call his father. His father, her husband, her minister.

She said, What for.

She was only about five minutes out, in her prediction.

They were sitting behind the house-Lorna and Brendan’s house-on a little terrace that looked across at Burrard Inlet and the lights of Point Grey. Brendan got up to move the sprinkler to another patch of grass.

Lorna had met Lionel’s mother just a few months ago. A pretty little white-haired woman with a valiant charm, who had come down to Vancouver from a town in the Rocky Mountains, to see the touring Comédie Française. Lionel had asked Lorna to go with them. After the performance, while Lionel was holding open her blue velvet cloak, the mother had said to Lorna, “I am so happy to meet my son’s belle-amie.”

“Let us not overdo it with the French,” said Lionel.

Lorna was not even sure what that meant. Belle-amie. Beautiful friend? Mistress?

Lionel had raised his eyebrows at her, over his mother’s head. As if to say, whatever she’s come up with, it’s no fault of mine.

Lionel had once been Brendan’s student at the university. A raw prodigy, sixteen years old. The brightest mathematical mind Brendan had ever seen. Lorna wondered if Brendan was dramatizing this, in hindsight, because of his unusual generosity towards gifted students. Also because of the way things had turned out. Brendan had turned his back on the whole Irish package-his family and his Church and the sentimental songs-but he had a weakness for a tragic tale. And sure enough, after his blazing start, Lionel had suffered some sort of breakdown, had to be hospitalized, dropped out of sight. Until Brendan had met him in the supermarket and discovered that he was living within a mile of their house, here in North Vancouver. He had given up mathematics entirely and worked in the publishing office of the Anglican Church.

“Come and see us,” Brendan had said. Lionel looked a bit seedy to him, and lonely. “Come and meet my wife.”

He was glad to have a home now, to ask people to.

“So I didn’t know what you’d be like,” Lionel said when he reported this to Lorna. “I considered you might be awful.”

“Oh,” said Lorna. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Wives.”

He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life-the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying about on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic-all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel’s tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face. There had to be a pause then, a shifting back to the level of worthwhile human contact. Once he sang very softly, to the tune of “O Tannenbaum,” “O married life, o married life.” He smiled slightly, or Lorna thought he did, in the dark. This smile seemed to her like the smile of her four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, when she whispered some mildly outrageous observation to her mother in a public place. A secret little smile, gratified, somewhat alarmed.

Lionel rode up the hill on his high, old-fashioned bicycle-this at a time when hardly anybody but children rode bicycles. He would not have changed out of his workday outfit. Dark trousers, a white shirt that always looked grubby and worn around the cuffs and collar, a nondescript tie. When they had gone to see the Comédie Française he had added to this a tweed jacket that was too wide across the shoulders and too short in the sleeves. Perhaps he did not own any other clothes.

“I labor for a pittance,” he said. “And not even in the vineyards of the Lord. In the Diocese of the Archbishop.”

And, “Sometimes I think I’m in a Dickens novel. And the funny thing is, I don’t even go for Dickens.”

He talked with his head on one side, usually, his gaze on something slightly beyond Lorna’s head. His voice was light and quick, sometimes squeaky with a kind of nervous exhilaration. He told everything in a slightly astonished way. He told about the office where he worked, in the building behind the Cathedral. The small high Gothic windows and varnished woodwork (to give things a churchy feeling), the hat rack and umbrella stand (which for some reason filled him with deep melancholy), the typist, Janine, and the Editor of Church News, Mrs. Penfound. The occasionally appearing, spectral, and distracted Archbishop. There was an unresolved battle over teabags, between Janine, who favored them, and Mrs. Penfound, who did not. Everybody munched on secret eats and never shared. With Janine it was caramels, and Lionel himself favored sugared almonds. What Mrs. Penfound’s secret pleasure was he and Janine had not discovered, because Mrs. Penfound did not put the wrappers in the wastepaper basket. But her jaws were always surreptitiously busy.

He mentioned the hospital where he had been a patient for a while and spoke of the ways it resembled the office, in regard to secret eats. Secrets generally. But the difference was that every once in a while in the hospital they came and bound you up and took you off and plugged you in, as he said, to the light socket.

“That was pretty interesting. In fact it was excruciating. But I can’t describe it. That is the weird part. I can remember it but not describe it.”

Because of those events in the hospital, he said, he was rather short of memories. Short of details. He liked to have Lorna tell him hers.

She told him about her life before she married Brendan. About the two houses exactly alike, standing side by side in the town where she grew up. In front of them was a deep ditch called Dye Creek because it used to run water colored by the dye from the knitting factory. Behind them was a wild meadow where girls were not supposed to go. One house was where she lived with her father-in the other lived her grandmother and her Aunt Beatrice and her cousin Polly.

Polly had no father. That was what they said and what Lorna had once truly believed. Polly had no father, in the way that a Manx cat had no tail.

In the grandmother’s front room was a map of the Holy Land, worked in many shades of wool, showing Biblical locations. It was left in her will to the United Church Sunday School. Aunt Beatrice had had no social life involving a man, since the time of her blotted-out disgrace, and she was so finicky, so desperate about the conduct of life that it really was easy to think of Polly’s conception as immaculate. The only thing that Lorna had ever learned from Aunt Beatrice was that you must always press a seam from the side, not wide open, so that the mark of the iron would not show, and that no sheer blouse should be worn without its slip to hide your brassiere straps.

“Oh, yes. Yes,” said Lionel. He stretched out his legs as if appreciation had reached his very toes. “Now Polly. Out of this benighted household, what is Polly like?”

Polly was fine, Lorna said. Full of energy and sociability, kind-hearted, confident.

“Oh,” said Lionel. “Tell me again about the kitchen.”

“Which kitchen?”

“The one without the canary.”

“Ours.” She described how she rubbed the kitchen range with waxed bread-wrappers to make it shine, the blackened shelves behind it that held the frying pans, the sink and the small mirror above it, with the triangular piece of glass gone from one corner, and the little tin trough beneath it-made by her father-in which there was always a comb, an old cup-handle, a tiny pot of dry rouge that must have once been her mother’s.

She told him her only memory of her mother. She was downtown, with her mother, on a winter day. There was snow between the sidewalk and the street. She had just learned how to tell time, and she looked up at the Post Office clock and saw that the moment had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to every day on the radio. She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening. It was more than concern she felt, it was horror, to think of the way things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance.

And even in that memory, her mother was only a hip and a shoulder, in a heavy coat.

Lionel said that he could hardly get more of a sense of his father than that, though his father was still alive. A swish of a surplice? Lionel and his mother used to make bets on how long his father could go without speaking to them. He had asked his mother once what made his father so mad, and she had answered that she really didn’t know.

“I think perhaps he doesn’t like his job,” she said.

Lionel said, “Why doesn’t he get another job?”

“Perhaps he can’t think of one he’d like.”

Lionel had then remembered that when she had taken him to the museum he had been frightened of the mummies, and that she had told him they were not really dead, but could get out of their cases when everybody went home. So he said, “Couldn’t he be a mummy?” His mother confused mummy with mommy, and later repeated this story as a joke, and he had been too discouraged, really, to correct her. Too discouraged, at his early age, about the whole mighty problem of communication.

This was one of the few memories that had stayed with him.

Brendan laughed-he laughed at this story more than Lorna or Lionel did. Brendan would sit down with them for a while, saying, “What are you two gabbling about?” and then with some relief, as if he had paid his dues for the time being, he would get up, saying that he had some work to deal with, and go into the house. As if he was happy about their friendship, had in a way foreseen it and brought it about-but their conversation made him restless.

“It’s good for him to come up here and be normal for a while instead of sitting in his room,” he said to Lorna. “Of course he lusts after you. Poor bugger.”

He liked to say that men lusted after Lorna. Particularly when they’d been to a department party, and she had been the youngest wife there. She would have been embarrassed to have anybody hear him say that, lest they think it a wishful and foolish exaggeration. But sometimes, especially if she was a little drunk, it roused her as well as Brendan, to think that she might be so universally appealing. In Lionel’s case, though, she was pretty sure that it was not true, and she hoped very much that Brendan would never hint at such a thing in front of him. She remembered the look that he had given her over his mother’s head. A disavowal there, a mild warning.

She did not tell Brendan about the poems. Once a week or so a poem arrived quite properly sealed and posted, in the mail. These were not anonymous-Lionel signed them. His signature was just a squiggle, quite difficult to make out-but then so was every word of every poem. Fortunately, there were never many words-sometimes only a dozen or two in all-and they made a curious path across the page, like uncertain bird tracks. At first glance Lorna could never make out anything at all. She found that it was best not to try too hard, just to hold the page in front of her and look at it long and steadily as if she had gone into a trance. Then, usually, words would appear. Not all of them-there were two or three in every poem that she never figured out-but that did not matter much. There was no punctuation but dashes. The words were mostly nouns. Lorna was not a person unfamiliar with poetry, or a person who gave up easily on whatever she did not quickly understand. But she felt about these poems of Lionel’s more or less as she did about, say, the Buddhist religion-that they were a resource she might be able to comprehend, to tap into, in the future, but that she couldn’t do that just now.

After the first poem she agonized about what she should say. Something appreciative, but not stupid. All she managed was, “Thank you for the poem”-when Brendan was well out of earshot. She kept herself from saying, “I enjoyed it.” Lionel gave a jerky nod, and made a sound that sealed off the conversation. Poems continued to arrive, and were not mentioned again. She began to think that she could regard them as offerings, not as messages. But not love-offerings-as Brendan, for instance, would assume. There was nothing in them about Lionel’s feelings for her, nothing personal at all. They reminded her of those faint impressions you can sometimes make out on the sidewalks in spring-shadows, left by wet leaves plastered there the year before.

There was something else, more urgent, that she did not speak about to Brendan. Or to Lionel. She did not say that Polly was coming to visit. Polly, her cousin, was coming from home.

Polly was five years older than Lorna and had worked, ever since she graduated from high school, in the local bank. She had saved up almost enough money for this trip once before, but decided to spend it on a sump pump instead. Now, however, she was on her way across the country by bus. To her it seemed the most natural and appropriate thing to do-to visit her cousin and her cousin’s husband and her cousin’s family. To Brendan it would seem almost certainly an intrusion, something nobody had any business doing unless invited. He was not averse to visitors-look at Lionel-but he wanted to do the choosing himself. Every day Lorna thought of how she must tell him. Every day she put it off.

And this was not a thing she could talk about to Lionel. You could not speak to him about anything seen seriously as a problem. To speak of problems meant to search for, to hope for, solutions. And that was not interesting, it did not indicate an interesting attitude towards life. Rather, a shallow and tiresome hopefulness. Ordinary anxieties, uncomplicated emotions, were not what he enjoyed hearing about. He preferred things to be utterly bewildering and past bearing, yet ironically, even merrily, borne.

One thing she had told him that might have been chancy. She told him how she had cried on her wedding day and during the actual wedding ceremony. But she was able to make a joke of that, because she could tell how she tried to pull her hand out of Brendan’s grip to get her handkerchief, but he would not let go, so she had to keep on snuffling. And in fact she had not cried because she didn’t want to be married, or didn’t love Brendan. She had cried because everything at home seemed suddenly so precious to her-though she had always planned to leave-and the people there seemed closer to her than anyone else could ever be, though she had hidden all her private thoughts from them. She cried because she and Polly had laughed as they cleaned the kitchen shelves and scrubbed the linoleum the day before, and she had pretended she was in a sentimental play and said good-bye, old linoleum, good-bye, crack in the teapot, good-bye, the place where I used to stick my gum under the table, good-bye.

Why don’t you just tell him forget it, Polly had said. But of course she didn’t mean that, she was proud, and Lorna herself was proud, eighteen years old and never had a real boyfriend, and here she was, marrying a good-looking thirty-year-old man, a professor.

Nevertheless, she cried, and cried again when she got letters from home in the early days of her marriage. Brendan had caught her at it, and said, “You love your family, don’t you?”

She thought he sounded sympathetic. She said, “Yes.”

He sighed. “I think you love them more than you love me.”

She said that was not true, it was only that she felt sorry for her family sometimes. They had a hard time, her grandmother teaching Grade Four year after year though her eyes were so bad that she could hardly see to write on the board, and Aunt Beatrice with too many nervous complaints to ever have a job, and her father-Lorna’s father-working in the hardware store that wasn’t even his own.

“A hard time?” said Brendan. “They’ve been in a concentration camp, have they?”

Then he said that people needed gumption in this world. And Lorna lay down on the marriage bed and gave way to one of those angry weeping fits that she was now ashamed to remember. Brendan came and consoled her, after a while, but still believed that she cried as women always did when they could not win the argument any other way.

Some things about Polly’s looks Lorna had forgotten. How tall she was and what a long neck and narrow waist she had, and an almost perfectly flat chest. A bumpy little chin and a wry mouth. Pale skin, light-brown hair cut short, fine as feathers. She looked both frail and hardy, like a daisy on a long stalk. She wore a ruffled denim skirt with embroidery on it.

For forty-eight hours Brendan had known she was coming. She had phoned, collect, from Calgary, and he had answered the phone. He had three questions to ask afterwards. His tone was distant, but calm.

How long is she staying?

Why didn’t you tell me?

Why did she phone collect?

“I don’t know,” said Lorna.

Now from the kitchen where she was preparing dinner, Lorna strained to hear what they would say to each other. Brendan had just come home. His greeting she could not hear, but Polly’s voice was loud and full of a risky jollity.

“So I really started out on the wrong foot, Brendan, wait till you hear what I said. Lorna and I are walking down the street from the bus stop and I’m saying, Oh, shoot, this is a pretty classy neighborhood you live in, Lorna-and then I say, But look at that place, what’s it doing here? I said, It looks like a barn.”

She couldn’t have started out worse. Brendan was very proud of their house. It was a contemporary house, built in the West Coast style called Post and Beam. Post and Beam houses were not painted; the idea was to fit in with the original forests. So the effect was plain and functional from the outside, with the roof flat and protruding beyond the walls. Inside, the beams were exposed and none of the wood was covered up. The fireplace in this house was set in a stone chimney that went up to the ceiling, and the windows were long and narrow and uncurtained. The architecture is always preeminent, the builder had told them, and Brendan repeated this, as well as the word “contemporary,” when introducing anybody to the house for the first time.

He did not bother to say this to Polly, or to get out the magazine in which there was an article about the style, with photographs-though not of this particular house.

Polly had brought from home the habit of starting off her sentences with the name of the person specifically addressed. “Lorna-” she would say, or “Brendan-” Lorna had forgotten about this way of talking-it seemed to her now rather peremptory and rude. Most of Polly’s sentences at the dinner table began with “Lorna-” and were about people known only to her and Polly. Lorna knew that Polly did not intend to be rude, that she was making a strident but brave effort to seem at ease. And she had at first tried to include Brendan. Both she and Lorna had done so, they had launched into explanations of whoever it was they were talking about-but it did not work. Brendan spoke only to call Lorna’s attention to something needed on the table, or to point out that Daniel had spilled his mashed food on the floor around his high chair.

Polly went on talking while she and Lorna cleared the table, and then as they washed the dishes. Lorna usually bathed the children and put them to bed before she started on the dishes, but tonight she was too rattled-she sensed that Polly was near tears-to attend to things in their proper order. She let Daniel crawl around on the floor while Elizabeth, with her interest in social occasions and new personalities, hung about listening to the conversation. This lasted until Daniel knocked the high chair over-fortunately not on himself, but he howled with fright-and Brendan came from the living room.

“Bedtime seems to have been postponed,” he said, as he removed his son from Lorna’s arms. “Elizabeth. Go and get ready for your bath.”

Polly had moved on from talking about people in town to describing how things were going at home. Not well. The owner of the hardware store-a man whom Lorna’s father had always spoken of as more of a friend than an employer-had sold the business without a word of what he was intending until the deed was done. The new man was expanding the store at the same time business was being lost to Canadian Tire, and there was not a day that he did not stir up some kind of a row with Lorna’s father. Lorna’s father came home from the shop so discouraged that all he wanted to do was lie on the couch. He was not interested in the paper or the news. He drank bicarbonate of soda but wouldn’t discuss the pains in his stomach.

Lorna mentioned a letter from her father in which he made light of these troubles.

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” said Polly. “To you.”

The upkeep of both houses, Polly said, was a continual nightmare. They should all move into one house and sell the other, but now that their grandmother had retired she picked on Polly’s mother all the time, and Lorna’s father could not stand the idea of living with the two of them. Polly often wanted to walk out and never come back, but what would they do without her?

“You should live your own life,” said Lorna. It felt strange to her, to be giving advice to Polly.

“Oh, sure, sure,” said Polly. “I should’ve got out while the going was good, that’s what I guess I should have done. But when was that? I don’t ever remember the going being so particularly good. I was stuck with having to see you through school first, for one thing.”

Lorna had spoken in a regretful, helpful voice, but she refused to stop in her work, to give Polly’s news its due. She accepted it as if it concerned some people she knew and liked, but was not responsible for. She thought of her father lying on the couch in the evenings, dosing himself for pains he wouldn’t admit to, and Aunt Beatrice next door, worried about what people were saying about her, afraid they were laughing behind her back, writing things about her on walls. Crying because she’d gone to church with her slip showing. To think of home caused Lorna pain, but she could not help feeling that Polly was hammering at her, trying to bring her to some capitulation, wrap her up in some intimate misery. And she was bound that she would not give in.

Just look at you. Look at your life. Your stainless-steel sink. Your house where the architecture is preeminent.

“If I ever went away now I think I’d just feel too guilty,” Polly said. “I couldn’t stand it. I’d feel too guilty leaving them.”

Of course some people never feel guilty. Some people never feel at all.

“Quite a tale of woe you got,” said Brendan, when they were lying side by side in the dark.

“It’s on her mind,” Lorna said.

“Just remember. We are not millionaires.”

Lorna was startled. “She doesn’t want money.”

“Doesn’t she?”

“That’s not what she’s telling me for.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

She lay rigid, not answering. Then she thought of something that might put him in a better mood.

“She’s only here for two weeks.”

His turn not to answer.

“Don’t you think she’s nice-looking?”

“No.”

She was about to say that Polly had made her wedding dress. She had planned to be married in her navy suit, and Polly had said, a few days before the wedding, “This isn’t going to do.” So she got out her own high-school formal (Polly had always been more popular than Lorna, she had gone to dances) and she put in gussets of white lace and sewed on white lace sleeves. Because, she said, a bride can’t do without sleeves.

But what could he have cared about that?

Lionel had gone away for a few days. His father had retired, and Lionel was helping him with the move from the town in the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver Island. On the day after Polly’s arrival, Lorna had a letter from him. Not a poem-a real letter, though it was very short.

I dreamt that I was giving you a ride on my bicycle. We were going quite fast. You did not seem to be afraid, though perhaps you should have been. We must not feel called upon to interpret this.

Brendan had gone off early. He was teaching summer school, he said he would eat breakfast at the cafeteria. Polly came out of her room as soon as he was gone. She wore slacks instead of the flounced skirt, and she smiled all the time, as if at a joke of her own. She kept ducking her head slightly to avoid Lorna’s eyes.

“I better get off and see something of Vancouver,” she said, “seeing it isn’t likely I’ll ever get here again.”

Lorna marked some things on a map, and gave her directions, and said she was sorry she couldn’t go along, but it would be more trouble than it was worth, with the children.

“Oh. Oh, no. I wouldn’t expect you to. I didn’t come out here to be on your hands all the time.”

Elizabeth sensed the strain in the atmosphere. She said, “Why are we trouble?”

Lorna gave Daniel an early nap, and when he woke up she got him into the stroller and told Elizabeth they were going to a playground. The playground she had chosen was not the one in a nearby park-it was down the hill, close to the street Lionel lived on. Lorna knew his address, though she had never seen the house. She knew that it was a house, not an apartment building. He lived in one room, upstairs.

It did not take her long to get there-though no doubt it would take her longer to get back, pushing the stroller uphill. But she had already passed into the older part of North Vancouver, where the houses were smaller, perched on narrow lots. The house where Lionel lived had his name beside one bell, and the name B. Hutchison beside the other. She knew that Mrs. Hutchison was the landlady. She pressed that bell.

“I know Lionel’s away and I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I lent him a book, it’s a library book and now it’s overdue, and I just wondered if I could run up to his apartment and see if I could find it.”

The landlady said, “Oh.” She was an old woman with a bandanna round her head and large dark spots on her face.

“My husband and I are friends of Lionel’s. My husband was his professor at college.”

The word “professor” was always useful. Lorna was given the key. She parked the stroller in the shade of the house and told Elizabeth to stay and watch Daniel.

“This isn’t a playground,” Elizabeth said.

“I just have to run upstairs and back. Just for a minute, okay?”

Lionel’s room had an alcove at the end of it for a two-burner gas stove and a cupboard. No refrigerator and no sink, except for the one in the toilet. A Venetian blind stuck halfway down the window, and a square of linoleum whose pattern was covered by brown paint. There was a faint smell of the gas stove, mixed with a smell of unaired heavy clothing, perspiration, and some pine-scented decongestant, which she accepted-hardly thinking of it and not at all disliking it-as the intimate smell of Lionel himself.

Other than that, the place gave out hardly any clues. She had come here not for any library book, of course, but to be for a moment inside the space where he lived, breathe his air, look out of his window. The view was of other houses, probably like this one chopped up into small apartments on the wooded slope of Grouse Mountain. The bareness, the anonymity of the room were severely challenging. Bed, bureau, table, chair. Just the furniture that had to be provided so that the room could be advertised as furnished. Even the tan chenille bedspread must have been there when he moved in. No pictures-not even a calendar-and most surprisingly, no books.

Things must be hidden somewhere. In the bureau drawers? She couldn’t look. Not only because there was no time-she could hear Elizabeth calling her from the yard-but the very absence of whatever might be personal made the sense of Lionel stronger. Not just the sense of his austerity and his secrets, but of a watchfulness-almost as if he had set a trap and was waiting to see what she would do.

What she really wanted to do was not to investigate anymore but to sit down on the floor, in the middle of the square of linoleum. To sit for hours not so much looking at this room as sinking into it. To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle.

On Saturday morning, Lorna and Brendan and the children were to drive to Penticton. A graduate student had invited them to his wedding. They would stay Saturday night and all day Sunday and Sunday night as well, and leave for home on Monday morning.

“Have you told her?” Brendan said.

“It’s all right. She isn’t expecting to come.”

“But have you told her?”

Thursday was spent at Ambleside Beach. Lorna and Polly and the children rode there on buses, changing twice, encumbered with towels, beach toys, diapers, lunch, and Elizabeth’s blow-up dolphin. The physical predicaments they found themselves in, and the irritation and dismay that the sight of their party roused in other passengers, brought on a peculiarly feminine reaction-a mood of near hilarity. Getting away from the house where Lorna was installed as wife was helpful too. They reached the beach in triumph and ragtag disarray and set up their encampment, from which they took turns going into the water, minding the children, fetching soft drinks, Popsicles, french fries.

Lorna was lightly tanned, Polly not at all. She stretched a leg out beside Lorna’s and said, “Look at that. Raw dough.”

With all the work she had to do in the two houses, and with her job in the bank, she said, there was not a quarter hour when she was free to sit in the sun. But she spoke now matter-of-factly, without her undertone of virtue and complaint. Some sour atmosphere that had surrounded her-like old dishrags-was falling away. She had found her way around Vancouver by herself-the first time she had ever done that in a city. She had talked to strangers at bus stops and asked what sights she should see and on somebody’s advice had taken the chairlift to the top of Grouse Mountain.

As they lay on the sand Lorna offered an explanation.

“This is a bad time of year for Brendan. Teaching summer school is really nerve-racking, you have to do so much so fast.”

Polly said, “Yeah? It’s not just me, then?”

“Don’t be stupid. Of course it isn’t you.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I thought he kind of hated my guts.”

She then spoke of a man at home who wanted to take her out.

“He’s too serious. He’s looking for a wife. I guess Brendan was too, but I guess you were in love with him.”

“Was and am,” said Lorna.

“Well, I don’t think I am.” Polly spoke with her face pressed into her elbow. “I guess it might work though if you liked somebody okay and you went out with them and made up your mind to see the good points.”

“So what are the good points?” Lorna was sitting up so that she could watch Elizabeth ride the dolphin.

“Give me a while to think,” said Polly, giggling. “No. There’s lots. I’m just being mean.”

As they were rounding up toys and towels she said, “I really wouldn’t mind doing all this over again tomorrow.”

“Me neither,” said Lorna, “but I have to get ready to go to the Okanagan. We’re invited to this wedding.” She made it sound like a chore-something she hadn’t bothered speaking about till now because it was too disagreeable and boring.

Polly said, “Oh. Well, I might come by myself then.”

“Sure. You should.”

“Where is the Okanagan?”

The next evening, after putting the children to bed, Lorna went into the room where Polly slept. She went to get a suitcase out of the closet, expecting the room to be empty-Polly, as she thought, still in the bathroom, soaking the day’s sunburn in lukewarm water and soda.

But Polly was in bed, with the sheet pulled up around her like a shroud.

“You’re out of the bath,” said Lorna, as if she found all this quite normal. “How does your burn feel now?”

“I’m okay,” said Polly in a muffled voice. Lorna knew at once that she had been and probably still was weeping. She stood at the foot of the bed, not able to leave the room. A disappointment had come over her that was like sickness, a wave of disgust. Polly didn’t really mean to keep hiding, she rolled over and looked out, with her face all creased and helpless, red from the sun, and her weeping. Fresh tears came welling up in her eyes. She was a mound of misery, one solid accusation.

“What is it?” Lorna said. She feigned surprise, she feigned compassion.

“You don’t want me.”

Her eyes were on Lorna all the time, brimming not just with her tears, her bitterness and accusation of betrayal, but with her outrageous demand, to be folded in, rocked, comforted.

Lorna would sooner have hit her. What gives you the right, she wanted to say. What are you leeching onto me for? What gives you the right?

Family. Family gives Polly the right. She has saved her money and planned her escape, with the idea that Lorna should take her in. Is that true-has she dreamed of staying here and never having to go back? Becoming part of Lorna’s good fortune, Lorna’s transformed world?

“What do you think I can do?” said Lorna quite viciously and to her own surprise. “Do you think I have any power? He never even gives me more than a twenty-dollar bill at a time.”

She dragged the suitcase out of the room.

It was all so false and disgusting-setting her own lamentations up in that way, to match Polly’s. What did the twenty dollars at a time have to do with anything? She had a charge account, he never refused her when she asked.

She couldn’t go to sleep, berating Polly in her mind.

The heat of the Okanagan made summer seem more authentic than the summer on the coast. The hills with their pale grass, the sparse shade of the drylands pine trees, seemed a natural setting for so festive a wedding with its endless supplies of champagne, its dancing and flirtation and overflow of instant friendship and goodwill. Lorna got rapidly drunk and was amazed at how easy it was, with alcohol, to get loose from the bondage of her spirits. Forlorn vapors lifted. She went to bed still drunk, and lecherous, to Brendan’s benefit. Even her hangover the next day seemed mild, cleansing rather than punishing. Feeling frail, but not at all displeased with herself, she lay by the shores of the lake and watched Brendan help Elizabeth build a sand castle.

“Did you know that your daddy and I met at a wedding?” she asked.

“Not much like this one, though,” said Brendan. He meant that the wedding he had attended, when a friend of his married the McQuaig girl (the McQuaigs being a top family in Lorna’s hometown) had been officially dry. The reception had been in the United Church Hall-Lorna was one of the girls recruited to pass sandwiches-and the drinking had been done in a hurry, in the parking lot. Lorna was not used to smelling whisky on men and thought that Brendan must have put on too much of some unfamiliar hairdressing. Nevertheless, she admired his thick shoulders, his bull’s neck, his laughing and commanding golden-brown eyes. When she learned that he was a teacher of mathematics she fell in love with what was inside his head also. She was excited by whatever knowledge a man might have that was utterly strange to her. A knowledge of auto mechanics would have worked as well.

His answering attraction to her seemed to be in the nature of a miracle. She learned later that he had been on the lookout for a wife; he was old enough, it was time. He wanted a young girl. Not a colleague, or a student, perhaps not even the sort of girl whose parents could send her to college. Unspoiled. Intelligent, but unspoiled. A wildflower, he said in the heat of those early days, and sometimes even now.

On the drive back, they left this hot golden country behind, somewhere between Keremeos and Princeton. But the sun still shone, and Lorna had only a faint disturbance in her mind, like a hair in her vision that could be flicked away, or could float out of sight on its own.

But it did keep coming back. It grew more ominous and persistent, till at last it made a spring at her and she knew it for what it was.

She was afraid-she was half certain-that while they were away in the Okanagan Polly would have committed suicide in the kitchen of the house in North Vancouver.

In the kitchen. It was a definite picture Lorna had. She saw exactly the way in which Polly would have done it. She would have hanged herself just inside the back door. When they returned, when they came to the house from the garage, they would find the door locked. They would unlock it and try to push it open but be unable to because of the lump of Polly’s body against it. They would hurry around to the front door and come into the kitchen that way and be met by the full sight of Polly dead. She would be wearing the flounced denim skirt and the white drawstring blouse-the brave outfit in which she had first appeared to try their hospitality. Her long pale legs dangling down, her head twisted fatally on its delicate neck. In front of her body would be the kitchen chair she had climbed onto, and then stepped from, or jumped from, to see how misery could finish itself.

Alone in the house of people who did not want her, where the very walls and the windows and the cup she drank her coffee from must have seemed to despise her.

Lorna remembered a time when she had been left alone with Polly, left in Polly’s charge for a day, in their grandmother’s house. Perhaps her father was at the shop. But she had an idea that he too had gone away, that all three adults were out of town. It must have been an unusual occasion, since they never went on shopping trips, let alone trips for pleasure. A funeral-almost certainly a funeral. The day was a Saturday, there was no school. Lorna was too young to be in school anyway. Her hair had not grown long enough to be put into pigtails. It blew in wisps around her head, as Polly’s did now.

Polly was going through a stage then in which she loved to make candy or rich treats of any kind, from her grandmother’s cookbook. Chocolate date cake, macaroons, divinity fudge. She was in the middle of mixing something up, on that day, when she found out that an ingredient she needed was not in the cupboard. She had to ride uptown on her bicycle, to charge it at the store. The weather was windy and cold, the ground bare-the season must have been late fall or early spring. Before she left, Polly pushed in the damper on the wood stove. But she still thought of stories she had heard about children who perished in house fires when their mothers had run out on similar quick errands. So she directed Lorna to put on her coat, and took her outside, around to the corner between the kitchen and the main part of the house, where the wind was not so strong. The house next door must have been locked, or she could have taken her there. She told her to stay put, and rode off to the store. Stay there, don’t move, don’t worry, she said. Then she kissed Lorna’s ear. Lorna obeyed her to the letter. For ten minutes, maybe fifteen, she remained crouched behind the white lilac bush, learning the shapes of the stones, the dark and light ones, in the house’s foundation. Until Polly came tearing back and flung the bike down in the yard and came calling her name. Lorna, Lorna, throwing down the bag of brown sugar or walnuts and kissing her all around her head. For the thought had occurred to her that Lorna might have been spotted in her corner by lurking kidnappers-the bad men who were the reason that girls must not go down into the field behind the houses. She had prayed all her way back for this not to have happened. And it hadn’t. She bustled Lorna inside to warm her bare knees and hands.

Oh, the poor little handsies, she said. Oh, were you scared? Lorna loved the fussing and bent her head to have it stroked, as if she was a pony.

The pines gave way to the denser evergreen forest, the brown lumps of hills to the rising blue-green mountains. Daniel began to whimper and Lorna got out his juice bottle. Later she asked Brendan to stop so that she could lay the baby down on the front seat and change his diaper. Brendan walked at a distance while she did this, smoking a cigarette. Diaper ceremonies always affronted him a little.

Lorna also took the opportunity of getting out one of Elizabeth’s storybooks and when they were settled again she read to the children. It was a Dr. Seuss book. Elizabeth knew all the rhymes and even Daniel had some idea of where to chime in with his made-up words.

Polly was no longer that person who had rubbed Lorna’s small hands between her own, the person who knew all the things Lorna did not know and who could be trusted to take care of her in the world. Everything had been turned around, and it seemed that in the years since Lorna got married Polly had stayed still. Lorna had passed her by. And now Lorna had the children in the back seat to take care of and to love, and it was unseemly for a person of Polly’s age to come clawing for her share.

It was no use for Lorna to think this. No sooner had she put the argument in place than she felt the body knock against the door as they tried to push it open. The dead weight, the gray body. The body of Polly, who had been given nothing at all. No part in the family she had found, and no hope of the change she must have dreamed was coming in her life.

“Now read Madeleine,” said Elizabeth.

“I don’t think I brought Madeleine,” said Lorna. “No. I didn’t bring it. Never mind, you know it off by heart.”

She and Elizabeth started off together.

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,

Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

In two straight lines they broke their bread

Brushed their teeth and went to bed-”

This is stupidity, this is melodrama, this is guilt. This will not have happened.

But such things do happen. Some people founder, they are not helped in time. They are not helped at all. Some people are pitched into darkness.

“In the middle of the night,

Miss Clave I turned on the light.

She said, ‘Something is not right-’ “

“Mommy,” said Elizabeth. “Why did you stop?” Lorna said, “I had to, for a minute. My mouth got dry.”

At Hope they had hamburgers and milkshakes. Then down the Fraser Valley, the children asleep in the back seat. Still some time left. Till they got to Chilliwack, till they got to Abbotsford, till they saw the hills of New Westminister ahead and the other hills crowned with houses, the beginnings of the city. Bridges still that they had to go over, turns they had to take, streets they had to drive along, corners they had to pass. All this in the time before. The next time she saw any of it would be in the time after.

When they entered Stanley Park it occurred to her to pray. This was shameless-the opportune praying of a nonbeliever. The gibberish of let-it-not-happen, let-it-not-happen. Let it not have happened.

The day was still cloudless. From the Lion’s Gate Bridge they looked out at the Strait of Georgia.

“Can you see Vancouver Island today?” said Brendan. “You look, I can’t.”

Lorna craned her neck to look past him.

“Far away,” she said. “Quite faint but it’s there.”

And with the sight of those blue, progressively dimmer, finally almost dissolving mounds that seemed to float upon the sea, she thought of one thing there was left to do. Make a bargain. Believe that it was still possible, up to the last minute it was possible to make a bargain.

It had to be serious, a most final and wrenching promise or offer. Take this. I promise this. If it can be made not true, if it can not have happened.

Not the children. She snatched that thought away as if she was grabbing them out of a fire. Not Brendan, for an opposite reason. She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain extent, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time. So it would be reprehensible-also useless-to offer him in any bargain.

Herself? Her looks? Her health?

It occurred to her that she might be on the wrong track. In a case like this, it might not be up to you to choose. Not up to you to set the terms. You would know them when you met them. You must promise to honor them, without knowing what they are going to be. Promise.

But nothing to do with the children.

Up Capilano Road, into their own part of the city and their own corner of the world, where their lives took on true weight and their actions took on consequences. There were the uncompromising wooden walls of their house, showing through the trees.

“The front door would be easier,” Lorna said. “Then we wouldn’t have any steps.”

Brendan said, “What’s the problem with a couple of steps?”

“I never got to see the bridge,” Elizabeth cried, suddenly wide awake and disappointed. “Why did you never wake me up to see the bridge?”

Nobody answered her.

“Daniel’s arm is all sunburnt,” she said, in a tone of incomplete satisfaction.

Lorna heard voices which she thought were coming from the yard of the house next door. She followed Brendan around the corner of the house. Daniel lay against her shoulder still heavy with sleep. She carried the diaper bag and the storybook bag and Brendan carried the suitcase.

She saw that the people whose voices she had heard were in her own back yard. Polly and Lionel. They had dragged two lawn chairs around so that they could sit in the shade. They had their backs to the view.

Lionel. She had forgotten all about him.

He jumped up and ran to open the back door.

“The expedition has returned with all members accounted for,” he said, in a voice which Lorna did not believe she had ever heard before. An unforced heartiness in it, an easy and appropriate confidence. The voice of the friend of the family. As he held the door open he looked straight into her face-something he had almost never done-and gave her a smile from which all subtlety, secrecy, ironic complicity, and mysterious devotion had been removed. All complications, all private messages had been removed.

She made her voice an echo of his.

“So-when did you get back?”

“Saturday,” he said. “I’d forgotten you were going away. I came laboring up here to say hello and you weren’t here, but Polly was here and of course she told me and then I remembered.”

“Polly told you what?” said Polly, coming up behind him. This was not really a question, but the half-teasing remark of a woman who knows that almost anything she says will be well received. Polly’s sunburn had turned to tan, or at least to a new flush, on her forehead and her neck.

“Here,” she said to Lorna, relieving her of both of the bags carried over her arm and the empty juice bottle in her hand. “I’ll take everything but the baby.”

Lionel’s floppy hair was now more brownish-black than black-of course she was seeing him for the first time in full sunlight-and his skin too was tanned, enough for his forehead to have lost its pale gleam. He wore the usual dark pants, but his shirt was unfamiliar to her. A yellow short-sleeved shirt of some much-ironed, shiny, cheap material, too big across the shoulders, maybe bought at the church thrift sale.

Lorna carried Daniel up to his room. She laid him in his crib and stood beside him making soft noises and stroking his back.

She thought that Lionel must be punishing her for her mistake in going to his room. The landlady would have told him. Lorna should have expected that, if she had stopped to think. She hadn’t stopped to think, probably, because she had the idea that it would not matter. She might even have thought that she would tell him herself.

I was going past on my way to the playground and I just thought I would go in and sit in the middle of your floor. I can’t explain it. It seemed like that would give me a moment’s peace, to be in your room and sit in the middle of the floor.

She had thought-after the letter?-that there was a bond between them, not to be made explicit but to be relied on. And she had been wrong, she had scared him. Presumed too much. He had turned around and there was Polly. Because of Lorna’s offense he had taken up with Polly.

Perhaps not, though. Perhaps he had simply changed. She thought of the extraordinary bareness of his room, the light on its walls. Out of that might come such altered versions of himself, created with no effort in the blink of an eye. That could be in response to something that had gone a little wrong, or to a realization that he could not carry something through. Or to nothing that definite-just the blink of an eye.

When Daniel had fallen into true sleep she went downstairs. In the bathroom she found that Polly had rinsed the diapers properly and put them in the pail, covered with the blue solution that would disinfect them. She picked up the suitcase that was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, carried it upstairs and laid it on the big bed, opening it to sort out which clothes had to be washed and which could be put away.

The window of this room looked out on the back yard. She heard voices-Elizabeth’s raised, almost shrieking with the excitement of homecoming and perhaps the effort of keeping the attention of an enlarged audience, Brendan’s authoritative but pleasant, giving an account of their trip.

She went to the window and looked down. She saw Brendan go over to the storage shed, unlock it, and start to drag out the children’s wading pool. The door was swinging shut on him and Polly hurried to hold it open.

Lionel got up and went to uncoil the hose. She would not have thought he knew even where the hose was.

Brendan said something to Polly. Thanking her? You would think they were on the best of terms.

How had that happened?

It could be that Polly was now fit to be taken account of, being Lionel’s choice. Lionel’s choice, and not Lorna’s imposition.

Or Brendan might simply be happier, because they had been away. He might have dropped for a while the burden of keeping his household in order. He might have seen, quite rightly, that this altered Polly was no threat.

A scene so ordinary and amazing, come about as if by magic. Everybody happy.

Brendan had begun to blow up the rim of the plastic pool. Elizabeth had stripped off to her underpants and was dancing around impatiently. Brendan hadn’t bothered to tell her to run and put on her bathing suit, that underpants were not suitable. Lionel had turned the water on, and until it was needed for the pool he stood watering the nasturtiums, like any householder. Polly spoke to Brendan and he pinched the hole shut that he had been blowing into, passing the half-inflated heap of plastic over to her.

Lorna recalled that Polly had been the one to blow up the dolphin at the beach. As she said herself, she had good wind. She blew steadily and with no appearance of effort. She stood there in her shorts, her bare legs firmly apart, skin gleaming like birch bark. And Lionel watched her. Exactly what I need, he might be thinking. Such a competent and sensible woman, pliant but solid. Someone not vain or dreamy or dissatisfied. That might well be the sort of person he would marry someday. A wife who could take over. Then he would change and change again, maybe fall in love with some other woman, in his way, but the wife would be too busy to take notice.

That might happen. Polly and Lionel. Or it might not. Polly might go home as planned, and if she did, there wouldn’t be any heartbreak. Or that was what Lorna thought. Polly would marry, or not marry, but whichever way it was, the things that happened with men would not be what broke her heart.

In a short time the rim of the wading pool was swollen and smooth. The pool was set on the grass, the hose placed inside it, and Elizabeth was splashing her feet in the water. She looked up at Lorna as if she had known she was there all the time.

“It’s cold,” she cried in a rapture. “Mommy-it’s cold.”

Now Brendan looked up at Lorna too.

“What are you doing up there?”

“Unpacking.”

“You don’t have to do that now. Come on outside.”

“I will. In a minute.”

Since she had entered the house-in fact since she had first understood that the voices she heard came from her own back yard and belonged to Polly and Lionel-Lorna had not thought of the vision she’d had, mile after mile, of Polly lashed to the back door. She was surprised by it now as you sometimes are surprised, long after waking, by the recollection of a dream. It had a dream’s potency and shamefulness. A dream’s uselessness, as well.

Not quite at the same time, but in a lagging way, came the memory of her bargain. Her weak and primitive neurotic notion of a bargain.

But what was it she had promised?

Nothing to do with the children.

Something to do with herself?

She had promised that she would do whatever she had to do, when she recognized what it was.

That was hedging, it was a bargain that was not a bargain, a promise that had no meaning at all.

But she tried out various possibilities. Almost as if she was shaping this story to be told to somebody-not Lionel now-but somebody, as an entertainment.

Give up reading books.

Take in foster children from bad homes and poor countries. Labor to cure them of wounds and neglect.

Go to church. Agree to believe in God.

Cut her hair short, stop putting on makeup, never again haul her breasts up into a wired brassiere.

She sat down on the bed, tired out by all this sport, this irrelevance.

What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.

It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.

So, nothing now but what she or anybody could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for. Nothing secret, or strange.

Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious.

Elizabeth called again, “Mommy. Come here.” And then the others-Brendan and Polly and Lionel, one after the other, were calling her, teasing her.

Mommy.

Mommy.

Come here.

It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.