The Love Of A Good Woman

Before The Change

Dear R. My father and I watched Kennedy debate Nixon. He’s got a television since you were here. A small screen and rabbit ears. It sits out in front of the sideboard in the dining room so that there’s no easy way now to get at the good silver or the table linen even if anybody wanted to. Why in the dining room where there’s not one really comfortable chair? Because it’s a while since they’ve remembered they have a living room. Or because Mrs. Barrie wants to watch it at suppertime.

Do you remember this room? Nothing new in it but the television. Heavy side curtains with wine-colored leaves on a beige ground and the net curtains in between. Picture of Sir Galahad leading his horse and picture of Glencoe, red deer instead of the massacre. The old filing cabinet moved in years ago from my father’s office but still no place found for it so it just sits there not even pushed back against the wall. And my mother’s closed sewing machine (the only time he ever mentions her, when he says “your mother’s sewing machine”) with the same array of plants, or what looks like the same, in clay pots or tin cans, not flourishing and not dying.

So I’m home now. Nobody has broached the question as to how long for. I just stuffed the Mini with all my books and papers and clothes and drove here from Ottawa in one day. I had told my father on the phone that I was finished with my thesis (I’ve actually given it up but I didn’t bother telling him that) and that I thought I needed a break.

“Break?” he said, as if he’d never heard of such a thing. “Well. As long as it isn’t a nervous break.”

I said, What?

“Nervous breakdown,” he said with a warning cackle. That’s the way he still refers to panic attacks and acute anxiety and depression and personal collapse. He probably tells his patients to buck up.

Unfair. He probably sends them away with some numbing pills and a few dry kind words. He can tolerate other people’s shortcomings more easily than mine.

There wasn’t any big welcome when I got here, but no consternation either. He walked around the Mini and grunted at what he saw and nudged the tires.

“Surprised you made it,” he said.

I’d thought of kissing him-more bravado than an upsurge of affection, more this-is-the-way-I-do-things-now. But by the time my shoes hit gravel I knew I couldn’t. There was Mrs. B. standing halfway between the drive and the kitchen door. So I went and threw my arms around her instead and nuzzled the bizarre black hair cut in a Chinese sort of bob around her small withered face. I could smell her stuffy cardigan and bleach on her apron and feel her old toothpick bones. She hardly comes up to my collarbone.

Flustered, I said, “It’s a beautiful day, it’s been the most beautiful drive.” So it was. So it had been. The trees not turned yet, just rusting at the edges and the stubble fields like gold. So why does this benevolence of landscape fade, in my father’s presence and in his territory (and don’t forget it’s in Mrs. Barrie’s presence and in her territory)? Why does my mentioning it-or the fact that I mentioned it in a heartfelt not perfunctory way-seem almost in a class with my embracing Mrs. B.? One thing seems to be a piece of insolence and the other pretentious gush.

When the debate was over my father got up and turned off the television. He won’t watch a commercial unless Mrs. B. is there and speaks up in favor, saying she wants to see the cute kid with his front teeth out or the chicken chasing the thingamajig (she won’t try to say “ostrich,” or she can’t remember). Then whatever she enjoys is permitted, even dancing cornflakes, and he may say, “Well, in its own way it’s clever.” This I think is a kind of warning to me.

What did he think about Kennedy and Nixon? “Aw, they’re just a couple of Americans.” I tried to open the conversation up a bit. “How do you mean?”

When you ask him to go into subjects that he thinks don’t need to be talked about, or take up an argument that doesn’t need proving, he has a way of lifting his upper lip at one side, showing a pair of big tobacco-stained teeth.

“Just a couple of Americans,” he said, as if the words might have got by me the first time.

So we sit there not talking but not in silence because as you may recall he is a noisy breather. His breath gets dragged down stony alleys and through creaky gates. Then takes off into a bit of tweeting and gurgling as if there was some inhuman apparatus shut up in his chest. Plastic pipes and colored bubbles. You’re not supposed to take any notice, and I’ll soon be used to it. But it takes up a lot of space in a room. As he would anyway with his high hard stomach and long legs and his expression. What is that expression? It’s as if he’s got a list of offenses both remembered and anticipated and he’s letting it be known how his patience can be tried by what you know you do wrong but also by what you don’t even suspect. I think a lot of fathers and grandfathers strive for that look-even some who unlike him don’t have any authority outside of their own houses-but he’s the one who’s got it exactly permanently right.

R. Lots for me to do here and no time to-as they say-mope. The waiting-room walls are scuffed all round where generations of patients have leaned their chairs back against them. The Reader’s Digests, are in rags on the table. The patients’ files are in cardboard boxes under the examining table, and the wastebaskets-they’re wicker-are mangled all around the top as if eaten by rats. And in the house it’s no better. Cracks like brown hairs in the downstairs washbasin and a disconcerting spot of rust in the toilet. Well you must have noticed. It’s silly but the most disturbing thing I think is all the coupons and advertising flyers. They’re in drawers and stuck under saucers or lying around loose and the sales or discounts they’re advertising are weeks or months or years past.

It isn’t that they’ve abdicated or aren’t trying. But everything is complicated. They send out the laundry, which is sensible, rather than having Mrs. B. still do it, but then my father can’t remember which day it’s due back and there’s this unholy fuss about will there be enough smocks etc. And Mrs. B. actually believes the laundry is cheating her and taking the time to rip off the name tapes and sew them onto inferior articles. So she argues with the deliveryman and says he comes here last on purpose and he probably does.

Then the eaves need to be cleaned and Mrs. B.’s nephew is supposed to come and clean them, but he has put his back out so his son is coming. But his son has had to take over so many jobs that he’s behind etc., etc.

My father calls this nephew’s son by the nephew’s name. He does this with everybody. He refers to stores and businesses in town by the name of the previous owner or even the owner before that. This is more than a simple lapse of memory; it’s something like arrogance. Putting himself beyond the need to keep such things straight. The need to notice changes. Or individuals.

I asked what color of paint he’d like on the waiting-room walls. Light green, I said, or light yellow? He said, Who’s going to paint them?

“I am.”

“I never knew you were a painter.”

“I’ve painted places I’ve lived in.”

“Maybe so. But I haven’t seen them. What are you going to do about my patients while you’re painting?”

“I’ll do it on a Sunday.”

“Some of them wouldn’t care for that when they heard about it.”

“Are you kidding? In this day and age?”

“It may not be quite the same day and age you think it is. Not around here.”

Then I said I could do it at night, but he said the smell the next day would upset too many stomachs. All I was allowed to do in the end was throw out the Reader’s Digests and put out some copies of Maclean’s and Chatelaine and Time and Saturday Night. And then he mentioned there’d been complaints. People missed looking up the jokes they remembered in the Reader’s Digests. And some of them didn’t like modern writers. Like Pierre Berton.

“Too bad,” I said, and I couldn’t believe that my voice was shaking.

Then I tackled the filing cabinet in the dining room. I thought it was probably full of the files of patients who were long dead and if I could clear those files out I could fill it up with the files from the cardboard boxes, and move the whole thing back to the office where it belonged.

Mrs. B. saw what I was doing and went and got my father. Not a word to me.

He said, “Who told you you could go poking around in there? I didn’t.”

R. The days you were here Mrs. B. was off for Christmas with her family. (She has a husband who has been sick with emphysema it seems for half his life, and no children, but a horde of nieces and nephews and connections.) I don’t think you saw her at all. But she saw you. She said to me yesterday, “Where’s that Mr. So-and-so you were supposed to be engaged to?” She’d seen of course that I wasn’t wearing my ring. “I imagine in Toronto,” I said.

“I was up at my niece’s last Christmas and we seen you and him walking up by the standpipe and my niece said, ‘I wonder where them two are off to?’ ” This is exactly how she talks and it already sounds quite normal to me except when I write it down. I guess the implication is that we were going somewhere to carry on, but there was a deep freeze on, if you remember, and we were just walking to get away from the house. No. We were getting outside so we could continue our fight, which could only be bottled up for so long.

Mrs. B. started to work for my father about the same time I went away to school. Before that we had some young women I liked, but they left to get married, or to work in war plants. When I was nine or ten and had been to some of my school friends’ houses, I said to my father, “Why does our maid have to eat with us? Other people’s maids don’t eat with them.”

My father said, “You call Mrs. Barrie Mrs. Barrie. And if you don’t like to eat with her you can go and eat in the woodshed.”

Then I took to hanging around and getting her to talk. Often she wouldn’t. But when she did, it could be rewarding. I had a fine time imitating her at school.

(Me) Your hair is really black, Mrs. Barrie.

(Mrs. B.) Everyone in my family is got black hair. They all got black hair and it never ever gets gray. That’s on my mother’s side. It stays black in their coffin. When my grandpa died they kept him in the place in the cemetery all winter while the ground was froze and come spring they was going to put him in the ground and one or other us says, “Let’s take a look see how he made it through the winter.” So we got the fellow to lift the lid and there he was looking fine with his face not dark or caved in or anything and his hair was black. Black.

I could even do the little laughs she does, little laughs or barks, not to indicate that anything is funny but as a kind of punctuation.

By the time I met you I’d got sick of myself doing this.

After Mrs. B. told me all that about her hair I met her one day coming out of the upstairs bathroom. She was hurrying to answer the phone, which I wasn’t allowed to answer. Her hair was bundled up in a towel and a dark trickle was running down the side of her face. A dark purplish trickle, and my thought was that she was bleeding.

As if her blood could be eccentric and dark with malevolence as her nature sometimes seemed to be.

“Your head’s bleeding,” I said, and she said, “Oh, get out of my road,” and scrambled past to get the phone. I went on into the bathroom and saw purple streaks in the basin and the hair dye on the shelf. Not a word was said about this, and she continued to talk about how everybody on her mother’s side of the family had black hair in their coffins and she would, too.

My father had an odd way of noticing me in those years. He might be passing through a room where I was, and he’d say as if he hadn’t seen me there,

“The chief defect of Henry King,

Was chewing little bits of string-”

And sometimes he’d speak to me in a theatrically growly voice. “Hello little girl. Would you like a piece of candy?” I had learned to answer in a wheedling baby-girl voice. “Oh yes sir.”

“Wahl.” Some fancy drawing out of the a, “Wahl. You cahn’t have one.” And:

“ ‘Solomon Grundy, born on Monday-’ ” He’d jab a finger at me to take it up.

“ ‘Christened on Tuesday-’ ” “ ‘Married on Wednesday-’ ” “ ‘Sick on Thursday-’ ” “ ‘Worse on Friday-’ ” “ ‘Died on Saturday-’ ” “ ‘Buried on Sunday-’ ”

Then both together, thunderously. “ ‘And that was the end of Solomon Grundy!’ ”

Never any introduction, no comment when these passages were over. For a joke I tried calling him Solomon Grundy. The fourth or fifth time he said, “That’s enough. That’s not my name. I’m your father.”

After that we probably didn’t do the rhyme anymore.

The first time I met you on the campus, and you were alone and I was alone, you looked as if you remembered me but weren’t sure about acknowledging it. You had just taught that one class, filling in when our regular man was sick and you had to do the lecture on logical positivism. You joked about its being a funny thing to bring somebody over from the Theological College to do.

You seemed to hesitate about saying hello, so I said, “The former King of France is bald.”

That was the example you’d given us, of a statement that makes no sense because the subject doesn’t exist. But you gave me a truly startled and cornered look that you then covered up with a professional smile. What did you think of me?

A smart aleck.

R. My stomach is still a little puffy. There are no marks on it, but I can bunch it up in my hands. Otherwise I’m okay, my weight is back to normal or a little below. I think I look older, though. I think I look older than twenty-four. My hair is still long and unfashionable, in fact a mess. Is this a memorial to you because you never liked me to cut it? I wouldn’t know.

Anyway I’ve started going on long walks around town, for exercise. I used to go off in the summers, anywhere I liked. I hadn’t any sense of what rules there might be, or different grades of people. That could have been because of never going to school in town or because of our house being out of town here where it is, down the long lane. Not properly belonging. I went to the horse barns by the racetrack where the men were horse owners or paid horse trainers and the other kids were boys. I didn’t know any names, but they all knew mine. They had to put up with me, in other words, because of whose daughter 1 was. We were allowed to put down feed and muck out behind the horses. It seemed adventurous. I wore an old golf hat of my father’s and a pair of baggy shorts. We’d get up on the roof and they’d grapple and try to push each other off but me they left alone. The men would periodically tell us to get lost. They’d say to me, “Does your dad know you’re here?” Then the boys started teasing each other and the one teased would make a puking noise and I knew it was about me. So I quit going. I gave up the idea of being a Girl of the Golden West. I went down to the dock and looked at the lake boats, but I don’t think I went so far as dreaming of being taken on as a deckhand. Also I didn’t fool them into thinking I was anything but a girl. A man leaned over and yelled down to me: “Hey. You got any hair on it yet?”

I almost said, “Pardon?” I wasn’t frightened or humiliated so much as mystified. That a grown-up man with responsible work should be interested in the patchy itchy sprouting in between my legs. Should bother to be disgusted by it, as his voice surely indicated that he was.

The horse barns have been torn down. The road down to the harbor is not so steep. There is a new grain elevator. And new suburbs that could be suburbs anywhere, which is what everybody likes about them. Nobody walks now; everybody drives. The suburbs don’t have sidewalks, and the sidewalks along the old backstreets are unused and cracked and uptilted by frost and disappearing under earth and grass. The long dirt path under the pine trees along our lane is lost now under drifts of pine needles and rogue saplings and wild raspberry canes. People have walked up that path for decades to see the doctor. Out from town on a special short extension of sidewalk along the highway (the only other extension was to the cemetery) and then between the double row of pines on that side of the lane. Because there’s been a doctor living in this house since the end of the last century.

All sorts of noisy grubby patients, children and mothers and old people, all afternoon, and quieter patients coming singly in the evenings. I used to sit out where there was a pear tree trapped in a clump of lilac bushes, and I’d spy on them, because young girls like to spy. That whole clump is gone now, cleaned out to make things easier for Mrs. B.’s nephew’s son on the power mower. I used to spy on ladies who got dressed up, at that time, for a visit to the doctor. I remember the clothes from soon after the war. Long full skirts and cinch belts and puffed-up blouses and sometimes short white gloves, for gloves were worn then in summer and not just to church. Hats not just to church either. Pastel straw hats that framed the face. A dress with light summer flounces, a riffle on the shoulders like a little cape, a sash like a ribbon round the waist. The cape-ruffle could lift in the breeze, and the lady would raise her hand in a crocheted glove to brush it away from her face. This gesture was like a symbol to me of unattainable feminine loveliness. The wisp of cobweb cloth against the perfect velvet mouth. Not having a mother may have had something to do with how I felt. But I didn’t know anybody who had a mother that looked the way they did. I’d crouch under the bushes eating the spotty yellow pears and worshipping.

One of our teachers had got us reading old ballads like “Patrick Spens” and “The Twa Corbies,” and there’d been a rash of ballad making at school.

I’m going down the corridor

My good friend for to see

I’m going to the lav-a-to-ry

To have myself a pee-

Ballads really tumbled you along into rhymes before you had a chance to think what anything meant. So with my mouth full of mushy pear I made them up.

A lady walks on a long long path

She’s left the town behind.

She’s left her home and her father’s wrath

Her destiny for to find-

When the wasps started bothering me too much I went into the house. Mrs. Barrie would be in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio, until my father called her. She stayed till the last patient had left and the place had been tidied up. If there was a yelp from the office she might give her own little yelping laugh and say, “Go ahead and holler.” I never bothered describing to her the clothes or the looks of the women I’d seen because I knew she’d never admire anybody for being beautiful or well dressed. Any more than she’d admire them for knowing something nobody needed to know, like a foreign language. Good card players she admired, and fast knitters-that was about all. Many people she had no use for. My father said that too. He had no use. That made me want to ask, If they did have a use, what would the use be? But I knew neither one would tell me. Instead they’d tell me not to be so smart.

His Uncle came on Frederick Hyde

Carousing in the Dirt.

He shook him Hard from Side to Side

And Hit him where it Hurt-

If I decided to send all this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It’s too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don’t know where, is worse.

Dear R., Dear Robin, How do you think I didn’t know? It was right in front of my eyes all the time. If I had gone to school here, I’d surely have known. If I’d had friends. There’s no way one of the high-school girls, one of the older girls, wouldn’t have made sure I knew.

Even so, I had plenty of time in the holidays. If I hadn’t been so bound up in myself, mooching around town and making up ballads, I could have figured it out. Now that I think of it, I knew that some of those evening patients, those ladies, came on the train. I associated them and their beautiful clothes with the evening train. And there was a late-night train they must have left on. Of course there could just as easily have been a car that dropped them off at the end of the lane.

And I was told-by Mrs. B., I think, not by him-that they came to my father for vitamin shots. I know that, because I would think, Now she’s getting her shot, whenever we heard a woman make a noise, and I would be a little surprised that women so sophisticated and self-controlled were not more stoical about needles.

Even now, it has taken me weeks. Through all this time of getting used to the ways of the house, to the point where I would never dream of picking up a paintbrush and would hesitate to straighten a drawer or throw out an old grocery receipt without consulting Mrs. B. (who can never make up her mind about it anyway). To the point where I’ve given up trying to get them even to accept perked coffee. (They prefer instant because it always tastes the same.)

My father laid a check beside my plate. At lunch today, Sunday. Mrs. Barrie is never here on Sundays. We have a cold lunch which I fix, of sliced meat and bread and tomatoes and pickles and cheese, when my father gets back from church. He never asks me to go to church with him-probably thinking that would just give me a chance to air some views he doesn’t care to hear.

The check was for five thousand dollars.

“That’s for you,” he said. “So you’ll have something. You can put it in the bank or invest it how you like. See how the rates are. I don’t keep up. Of course you’ll get the house too. All in the fullness of time, as they say.”

A bribe? I thought. Money to start a little business with, go on a trip with? Money for the down payment on a little house of my own, or to go back to university to get some more of what he has called my unnegotiable degrees.

Five thousand dollars to get rid of me.

I thanked him, and more or less for conversation’s sake I asked him what he did with his money. He said that was neither here nor there.

“Ask Billy Snyder if you’re looking for advice.” Then he remembered that Billy Snyder was no longer in the accounting business; he had retired.

“There’s some new fellow there with a queer name,” he said. “It’s like Ypsilanti, but it’s not Ypsilanti.”

“Ypsilanti is a town in Michigan,” I said.

“It’s a town in Michigan, but it was a man’s name before it was a town in Michigan,” my father said. It seems it was the name of a Greek leader who fought against the Turks early in the 1800s.

I said, “Oh. In Byron’s war.”

“Byron’s war?” said my father. “What makes you call it that? Byron didn’t fight in any war. He died of typhus. Then he’s dead, he’s the big hero, he died for the Greeks and so on.” He said this contentiously, as if I had been one of those responsible for this mistake, this big fuss over Byron. But then he calmed down and recounted for me or recalled for himself the progress of the war against the Ottoman Empire. He spoke of the Porte and I wanted to say that I’ve never been sure if that was an actual gate, or was it Constantinople, or the Sultan’s court? But it’s always best not to interrupt. When he starts to talk like this there’s the sense of a truce, or a breathing spell, in an undeclared underground war. I was sitting facing the window, and I could see through the net curtains the heaps of yellow-brown leaves on the ground in the rich generous sunlight (maybe the last of those days we’ll get for a long while by the sound of the wind tonight) and it brought to mind my relief as a child, my secret pleasure, whenever I could get him going, by a question or by accident, on a spiel like this.

Earthquakes, for instance. They happen in the volcanic ridges but one of the biggest was right in the middle of the continent, in New Madrid (pronounced “New Mad-rid,” mind you) in Missouri, in 1811. I know that from him. Rift valleys. Instability that there is no sign of on the surface. Caverns formed in limestone, water under the earth, mountains that given enough time wear away to rubble.

Also numbers. I asked him about numbers once and he said, Well, they’re called the arabic numerals, aren’t they, any fool knows that. But the Greeks could have managed a good system, he went on to say, the Greeks could have done it, only they didn’t have the concept of zero.

Concept of zero. I put that away in my mind like a package on a shelf, to open someday.

If Mrs. B. was with us there was of course no hope of getting anything like this out of him.

Never mind, he would say, eat your meal.

As if any question I asked had an ulterior motive, and I suppose it did. I was angling to direct the conversation. And it wasn’t polite to leave Mrs. B. out. So it was her attitude to what caused earthquakes, or the history of numbers (an attitude not just of indifference but of contempt) that had to be deferred to, had to reign supreme.

So we come round to Mrs. B. again. In the present, Mrs. B.

I came in last night at about ten o’clock. I’d been out at a meeting of the Historical Society, or at least at a meeting to try and organize one. Five people showed up and two of them walked with canes. When I opened the kitchen door I saw Mrs. B. framed in the doorway to the back hall-the hall that leads from the office to the washroom and the front part of the house. She had a covered basin in her hands. She was on her way to the washroom and she could have gone on, passing the kitchen as I came in. I would hardly have noticed her. But she stopped in her tracks and stood there, partly turned towards me; she made a grimace of dismay.

Oh-oh. Caught out.

Then she scurried away towards the toilet.

This was an act. The surprise, the dismay, the hurrying away. Even the way she held the basin out so that I had to notice it. That was all deliberate.

I could hear the rumble of my father’s voice in the office, talking to a patient. I had seen the office lights on anyway, I had seen the patient’s car parked outside. Nobody has to walk anymore.

I took off my coat and went on upstairs. All I seemed to be concerned about was not letting Mrs. B. have it her way. No questions, no shocked realization. No What is that you have in the basin, Mrs. B., oh what have you and my daddy been up to? (Not that I ever called him my daddy.) I got busy at once rooting around in one of the boxes of books I still hadn’t unpacked. I was looking for the journals of Anna Jameson. I had promised them to the other person under seventy who had been at the meeting. A man who is a photographer and knows something about the history of Upper Canada. He would like to have been a history teacher but has a stammer which prevented him. He told me this in the half hour we stood out on the sidewalk talking instead of taking the more decisive step of going for coffee. As we said good night he told me that he’d like to have asked me for coffee, but he had to get home and spell his wife because the baby had colic.

I unpacked the whole box of books before I was through. It was like looking at relics from a bygone age. I looked through them till the patient was gone and my father had taken Mrs. B. home and had come upstairs and used the bathroom and gone to bed. I read here and there till I was so groggy I almost fell asleep on the floor.

At lunch today, then, my father finally said, “Who cares about the Turks anyway? Ancient history.”

And I had to say, “I think I know what’s going on here.”

His head reared up and he snorted. He really did, like an old horse.

“You do, do you? You think you know what?” I said, “I’m not accusing you. I don’t disapprove.” “Is that so?”

“I believe in abortion,” I said. “I believe it should be legal.” “I don’t want you to use that word again in this house,” my father said. “Why not?”

“Because I am the one who says what words are used in this house.”

“You don’t understand what I’m saying.”

“I understand that you’ve got too loose a tongue. You’ve got too loose a tongue and not enough sense. Too much education and not enough ordinary brains.”

I still did not shut up. I said, “People must know.”

“Must they? There’s a difference between knowing and yapping. Get that through your head once and for all.”

We have not spoken for the rest of the day. I cooked the usual roast for dinner and we ate it and did not speak. I don’t think he finds this difficult at all. Neither do I so far because everything seems so stupid and outrageous and I’m angry, but I won’t stay in this mood forever and I could find myself apologizing. (You may not be surprised to hear that.) It’s so obviously time that I got out of here.

The young man last night told me that when he felt relaxed his stammer practically disappeared. Like when I’m talking to you, he said. I could probably make him fall in love with me, to a certain extent. I could do that just for recreation. That is the sort of life I could get into here.

Dear R. I haven’t gone, the Mini wasn’t fit for it. I took it in to be overhauled. Also the weather has changed, the wind has got into an autumn rampage scooping up the lake and battering the beach. It caught Mrs. Barrie on her own front steps-the wind did-and knocked her sideways and shattered her elbow. It’s her left elbow and she said she could work with her right arm, but my father told her it was a complicated fracture and he wanted her to rest for a month. He asked me if I would mind postponing my departure. Those were his words-“postponing my departure.” He hasn’t asked where I’m planning to go; he just knows about the car.

I don’t know where I’m planning to go, either.

I said all right, I’d stay while I could be useful. So we’re on decent speaking terms; in fact it’s fairly comfortable. I try to do just about what Mrs. B. would do, in the house. No tries now at reorganization, no discussion of repairs. (The eaves have been done-when the Mrs. B. relation came I was astonished and grateful.) I hold the oven door shut the way Mrs. B. did with a couple of heavy medical textbooks set on a stool pushed up against it. I cook the meat and the vegetables in her way and never think about bringing home an avocado or bottle of artichoke hearts or a garlic bulb, though I see all those things are now for sale in the supermarket. I make the coffee from the powder in the jar. I tried drinking that myself to see if I could get used to it and of course I could. I clean up the office at the end of every day and look after the laundry. The laundryman likes me because I don’t accuse him of anything.

I’m allowed to answer the phone, but if it’s a woman asking for my father and not volunteering details I’m supposed to take the number and say that the doctor will phone back. So I do, and sometimes the woman just hangs up. When I tell my father this he says, “She’ll likely call again.”

There aren’t many of those patients-the ones he calls the specials. I don’t know-maybe one a month. Mostly he’s dealing with sore throats and cramped colons and bealing ears and so on. Jumpy hearts, kidney stones, sour digestions.

R. Tonight he knocked on my door. He knocked though it wasn’t all the way closed. I was reading. He asked-not in a supplicating way of course, but I would say with a reasonable respect-if I could give him a hand in the office. The first special since Mrs. B. has been away.

I asked what he wanted me to do.

“Just more or less to keep her steady,” he said. “She’s young and she’s not used to it yet. Give your hands a good scrub too, use the soap in the bottle in the toilet downstairs.”

The patient was lying flat on the examining table with a sheet over her from the waist down. The top part of her was fully dressed in a dark-blue buttoned-up cardigan and a white blouse with a lace-trimmed collar. These clothes lay loosely over her sharp collarbone and nearly flat chest. Her hair was black, pulled tightly back from her face and braided and pinned on top of her head. This prim and severe style made her neck look long and emphasized the regal bone structure of her white face, so that from a distance she could be taken for a woman of forty-five. Close up you could see that she was quite young, probably around twenty. Her pleated skirt was hung up on the back of the door. The rim of white panties showed, that she had thoughtfully hung underneath it.

She was shivering hard though the office wasn’t cold.

“Now Madeleine,” my father said. “The first thing is we’ve got to get your knees up.”

I wondered if he knew her. Or did he just ask for a name and use whatever the woman gave him?

“Easy,” he said. “Easy. Easy.” He got the stirrups in place and her feet into them. Her legs were bare and looked as if they’d never known a suntan. She was still wearing her loafers.

Her knees shook so much in this new position that they clapped together.

“You’ll have to hold steadier than that,” my father said. “You know, now, I can’t do my job unless you do yours. Do you want a blanket over you?”

He said to me, “Get her a blanket. Off the bottom shelf there.”

I arranged the blanket to cover the top part of Madeleine’s body. She didn’t look at me. Her teeth rattled against one another. She clenched her mouth shut.

“Now just slide down this way a bit,” my father said. And to me. “Hold her knees. Get them apart. Just hold her easy.”

I put my hands on the knobs of the girl’s knees and moved them apart as gently as I could. My father’s breathing filled the room with its busy unintelligible comments. I had to hold Madeleine’s knees quite firmly to keep them from jerking together.

“Where’s that old woman?” she said.

I said, “She’s at home. She had a fall. I’m here instead.”

So she had been here before.

“She’s rough,” she said.

Her voice was matter-of-fact, almost a growl, not so nervous as I would have expected from the agitation of her body. “I hope I’m not that rough,” I said.

She didn’t answer. My father had picked up a thin rod like a knitting needle.

“Now. This is the hard part,” he said. He spoke in a conversational tone, milder I think than any I have ever heard from him. “And the more you tighten up the harder it will be. So just-easy. There. Easy. Good girl. Good girl.”

I was trying to think of something to say that would ease her or distract her. I could see now what my father was doing. Laid out on a white cloth on the table beside him, he had a series of rods, all of the same length but of a graduated thickness. These were what he would use, one after the other, to open and stretch the cervix. From my station behind the sheeted barrier beyond the girl’s knees, I could not see the actual, intimate progress of these instruments. But I could feel it, from the arriving waves of pain in her body that beat down the spasms of apprehension and actually made her quieter.

Where are you from? Where did you go to school? Do you have a job? (I had noticed a wedding ring, but quite possibly they all wore wedding rings.) Do you like your job? Do you have any brothers or sisters?

Why should she want to answer any of that, even if she wasn’t in pain?

She sucked her breath back through her teeth and widened her eyes at the ceiling.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“Getting there,” my father said. “You’re a good girl. Good quiet girl. Won’t be long now.”

I said, “I was going to paint this room, but I never got around to it. If you were going to paint it, what color would you choose?”

“Hoh,” said Madeleine. “Hoh.” A sudden startled expulsion of breath. “Hoh. Hoh.”

“Yellow,” I said. “I thought a light yellow. Or a light green?”

By the time we got to the thickest rod Madeleine had thrust her head back into the flat cushion, stretching out her long neck and stretching her mouth too, lips wide and tight over her teeth.

“Think of your favorite movie. What is your favorite movie?”

A nurse said that to me, just as I reached the unbelievable interminable plateau of pain and was convinced that relief would not come, not this time. How could movies exist anymore in the world? Now I’d said the same thing to Madeleine, and Madeleine’s eyes flicked over me with the coldly distracted expression of someone who sees that a human being can be about as much use as a stopped clock.

I risked taking one hand off her knee and touched her hand. I was surprised at how quickly and fiercely she grabbed it and mashed the fingers together. Some use after all.

“Say some-” she hissed through her teeth. “Reese. Right.”

“Now then,” my father said. “Now we’re someplace.”

Recite.

What was I supposed to recite? Hickory dickery dock?

What came into my head was what you used to say, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”

“ ‘I went into a hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head-’ ”

I didn’t remember how it went on from there. I couldn’t think. Then what should come into my head but the whole last verse.

“Though I am old from wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where you have gone,

And kiss your face and take your hands-”

Imagine me saying a poem in front of my father.

What she thought of it I didn’t know. She had closed her eyes.

I thought I was going to be afraid of dying because of my mother’s dying that way, in childbirth. But once I got onto that plateau I found that dying and living were both irrelevant notions, like favorite movies. I was stretched to the limit and convinced that I couldn’t do a thing to move what felt like a giant egg or a flaming planet not like a baby at all. It was stuck and I was stuck, in a space and time that could just go on forever-there was no reason why I should ever get out, and all my protests had already been annihilated.

“Now I need you,” my father said. “I need you round here. Get the basin.”

I held in place the same basin that I had seen Mrs. Barrie holding. I held it while he scraped out the girl’s womb with a clever sort of kitchen instrument. (I don’t mean that it was a kitchen instrument but that it had a slightly homely look to me.)

The lower parts of even a thin young girl can look large and meaty in this raw state. In the days after labor, in the maternity ward, women lay carelessly, even defiantly, with their fiery cuts or tears exposed, their black-stitch wounds and sorry flaps and big helpless haunches. It was a sight to see.

Out of the womb now came plops of wine jelly, and blood, and somewhere in there the fetus. Like the bauble in the cereal box or the prize in the popcorn. A tiny plastic doll as negligible as a fingernail. I didn’t look for it. I held my head up, away from the smell of warm blood.

“Bathroom,” my father said. “There’s a cover.” He meant the folded cloth that lay beside the soiled rods. I did not like to say, “Down the toilet?” and took it for granted that that was what he meant. I carried the basin along the hall to the downstairs toilet, dumped the contents, flushed twice, rinsed the basin, and brought it back. My father by this time was bandaging the girl and giving her some instructions. He’s good at this-he does it well. But his face looked heavy, weary enough to drop off the bones. It occurred to me that he had wanted me here, all through the procedure, in case he should collapse. Mrs. B., at least in the old days, apparently waited in the kitchen until the last moments. Maybe she stays with him all the way through now.

If he had collapsed I don’t know what I’d have done.

He patted Madeleine’s legs and told her she should lie flat.

“Don’t try to get up for a few minutes,” he said. “Have you got your ride arranged for? “

“He’s supposed to’ve been out there all the time,” she said, in a weak but spiteful voice. “He wasn’t supposed to’ve gone anyplace.”

My father took off his smock and walked to the window of the waiting room.

“You bet,” he said. “Right there.” He let out a complicated groan, said, “Where’s the laundry basket?” remembered that it was back in the bright room where he’d been working, came back and deposited the smock and said to me, “I’d be very obliged if you could tidy this up.” Tidy up meaning doing the sterilizing and mopping up in general. I said I would.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll say good night now. My daughter will see you out when you’re ready to go.” I was somewhat surprised to hear him say “my daughter” instead of my name. Of course I’d heard him say that before. If he had to introduce me, for instance. Still, I was surprised.

Madeleine swung her legs off the table the minute he was out of the room. Then she staggered and I went to help her. She said, “Okay, okay, just got off of the table too quick. Where’d I put my skirt? I don’t want to stand around looking like this.”

I got her the skirt and panties off the back of the door and she put them on without help but very shakily.

I said, “You could rest a minute. Your husband will wait.”

“My husband’s working in the bush up near Kenora,” she said. “I’m going up there next week. He’s got a place I can stay.

“Now. I laid my coat down somewheres,” she said.

My favorite movie-as you ought to know and if I could have thought of it when the nurse asked me-is Wild Strawberries. I remember the moldy little theater where we used to see all those Swedish and Japanese and Indian and Italian movies and I remember that it had recently switched over from showing Carry On movies, and Martin and Lewis, but the name of it I can’t remember. Since you were teaching philosophy to future ministers, your favorite movie should have been The Seventh Seal, but was it? I think it was Japanese and I forget what it was about. Anyway we used to walk home from the theater, it was a couple of miles, and we used to have fervent conversations about human love and selfishness and God and faith and desperation. When we got to my rooming house we had to shut up. We had to go so softly up the stairs to my room.

Ahhh, you would say gratefully and wonderingly as you got in.

I would have been very nervous about bringing you here last Christmas if we hadn’t already been deep into our fight. I would have felt too protective of you to expose you to my father.

“Robin? Is that a man’s name?”

You said, Well yes, it was your name.

He pretended he’d never heard it before.

But in fact you got along pretty well together. You had a discussion about some great conflict between different orders of monks in the seventh century, wasn’t that it? The row those monks had was about how they should shave their heads.

A curly-headed beanpole was what he called you. Coming from him that was almost complimentary.

When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said, “Oh-oh. Do you think you’ll ever manage to get another one?” If I’d objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.

Mrs. Barrie is back. She’s back in less than three weeks though it was supposed to be a month. But she has to work shorter days than she did before. It takes her so long to get dressed and to do her own housework that she seldom gets here (delivered by her nephew or her nephew’s wife) until around ten o’clock in the morning.

“Your father looks poorly” was the first thing she said to me. I think she’s right.

“Maybe he should take a rest,” I said.

“Too many people bothering him,” she said.

The Mini is out of the garage and the money is in my bank account. What I should do is take off. But I think stupid things. I think, What if we get another special? How can Mrs. B. help him? She can’t use her left hand yet to hold any weight, and she could never hold on to the basin with just her right hand.

R. This day. This day was after the first big snowfall. It all happened overnight and in the morning the sky was clear, blue; there was no wind and the brightness was preposterous. I went for an early walk, under the pine trees. Snow was sifting through them, straight down, bright as the stuff on Christmas trees, or diamonds. The highway had already been plowed and so had our lane, so that my father could drive out to the hospital. Or I could drive out whenever I wanted to.

Some cars went by, in and out of town, as on any other morning.

Before I went back into the house I just wanted to see if the Mini would start, and it did. On the passenger seat I saw a package. It was a two-pound box of chocolates, the kind you buy at the drugstore. I couldn’t think how it had got there-I wondered if it could possibly be a present from the young man at the Historical Society. That was a stupid thought. But who else?

I stomped my boots free of snow outside the back door and reminded myself that I must put a broom out. The kitchen had filled up with the day’s blast of light.

I thought I knew what my father would say.

“Out contemplating nature?”

He was sitting at the table with his hat and coat on. Usually by this time he had left to see his patients in the hospital.

He said, “Have they got the road plowed yet? What about the lane?”

I said that both were plowed and clear. He could have seen that the lane was plowed by looking out the window. I put the kettle on and asked if he would like another cup of coffee before he went out.

“All right,” he said. “Just so long as it’s plowed so I can get out.”

“What a day,” I said.

“All right if you don’t have to shovel yourself out of it.”

I made the two cups of instant coffee and set them on the table. I sat down, facing the window and the incoming light. He sat at the end of the table, and had shifted his chair so that the light was at his back. I couldn’t see what the expression on his face was, but his breathing kept me company as usual.

I started to tell my father about myself. I hadn’t intended to do this at all. I had meant to say something about my going away. I opened my mouth and things began to come out of it that I heard with equal amounts of dismay and satisfaction, the way you hear the things you say when you are drunk.

“You never knew I had a baby,” I said. “I had it on the seventeenth of July. In Ottawa. I’ve been thinking how ironic that was.”

I told him that the baby had been adopted right away and that I didn’t know whether it had been a boy or a girl. That I had asked not to be told. And I had asked not to have to see it.

“I stayed with Josie,” I said. “You remember me speaking about my friend Josie. She’s in England now but she was all alone then in her parents’ house. Her parents had been posted to South Africa. That was a godsend.”

I told him who the father of the baby was. I said it was you, in case he wondered. And that since you and I were already engaged, even officially engaged, I had thought that all we had to do was get married.

But you thought differently. You said that we had to find a doctor. A doctor who would give me an abortion.

He did not remind me that I was never supposed to speak that word in his house.

I told him that you said we could not just go ahead and get married, because anybody who could count would know that I had been pregnant before the wedding. We could not get married until I was definitely not pregnant anymore.

Otherwise you might lose your job at the Theological College.

They could bring you up before a committee that might judge you were morally unfit. Morally unfit for the job of teaching young ministers. You could be judged to have a bad character. And even supposing this did not happen, that you did not lose your job but were only reprimanded, or were not even reprimanded, you would never be promoted; there would be a stain on your record. Even if nobody said anything to you, they would have something on you, and you could not stand that. The new students coming in would hear about you from the older ones; there’d be jokes passed on, about you. Your colleagues would have a chance to look down on you. Or be understanding, which was just as bad. You would be a man quietly or not so quietly despised, and a failure.

Surely not, I said.

Oh yes. Never underestimate the meanness there is in people’s souls. And for me too, it would be devastating. The wives controlled so much, the older professors’ wives. They’d never let me forget. Even when they were being kind-especially when they were being kind.

But we could just pick up and go somewhere else, I said. Somewhere where nobody would know.

They’d know. There’s always somebody who makes sure that people know.

Besides, that would mean you’d have to start at the bottom again. You’d have to start at a lower salary, a pitiful salary, and how could we manage with a baby, in that case?

I was astonished at these arguments which did not seem to be consistent with the ideas of the person I had loved. The books we had read, the movies we had seen, the things we had talked about-I asked if that meant nothing to you. You said yes, but this was life. I asked if you were somebody who could not stand the thought of someone laughing at him, who would cave in before a bunch of professors’ wives.

You said, That’s not it, that’s not it at all.

I threw my diamond ring away and it rolled under a parked car. As we argued we were walking along a street near my rooming house. It was winter, like now. January or February. But the battle dragged on after that. I was supposed to find out about an abortion from a friend who had a friend who was rumored to have had one. I gave in; I said I’d do it. You couldn’t even risk making inquiries. But then I lied, 1 said the doctor had moved away. Then I admitted lying. I can’t do it, I said.

But was that because of the baby? Never. It was because I believed I was right, in the argument.

I had contempt. I had contempt when I saw you scrambling to get under the parked car, and the tails of your overcoat were flapping around your buttocks. You were clawing in the snow to find the ring and you were so relieved when you found it. You were ready to hug me and laugh at me, thinking I’d be relieved too and we’d make up on the spot. I told you you would never do anything admirable in your whole life.

Hypocrite, I said. Sniveller. Philosophy teacher.

Not that that was the end. For we did make up. But we didn’t forgive each other. And we didn’t take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief. Yes, at that time I’m sure it was a relief for us both and a kind of victory.

“So isn’t that ironic?” I said to my father. “Considering?”

I could hear Mrs. Barrie outside stomping her boots, so I said this in a hurry. My father had sat all the time rigid with embarrassment as I thought, or with profound distaste.

Mrs. Barrie opened the door saying, “Ought to get a broom out there-” Then she cried out, “What are you doing sitting there? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the man’s dead?”

He wasn’t dead. He was in fact breathing as noisily as ever and perhaps more so. What she had seen and what I would have seen, even against the light, if I had not been avoiding looking at him whilst I told my tale, was that he had suffered a blinding and paralyzing stroke. He sat slightly tilted forward, the table pressing into the firm curve of his stomach. When we tried to move him from his chair, we managed only to jar him so that his head came down on the table, with a majestic reluctance. His hat stayed on. And his coffee cup stayed in place a couple of inches from his unseeing eye. It was still about half full.

I said we couldn’t do anything with him; he was too heavy. I went to the phone and called the hospital, to get one of the other doctors to drive out. There’s no ambulance yet in this town. Mrs. B. paid no attention to what I said and kept pulling at my father’s clothes, undoing buttons and yanking at the overcoat and grunting and whimpering with the exertion. I ran out to the lane, leaving the door open. I ran back, and got a broom, and set it outside by the door. I went and put a hand on Mrs. B.’s arm and said, “You can’t-” or something like that, and she gave me the look of a spitting cat.

A doctor came. He and I together were able to pull my father out to the car and get him into the backseat. I got in beside him to hold on to him and keep him from toppling over. The sound of his breathing was more peremptory than ever and seemed to be criticizing whatever we did. But, the fact was that you could take hold of him now, and shove him around, and manage his body as you had to, and this seemed very odd.

Mrs. B. had fallen back and quieted down as soon as she saw the other doctor. She didn’t even follow us out of the house to see my father loaded into the car.

This afternoon he died. At about five o’clock. I was told it was very lucky for all concerned.

I was full of other things to say, just when Mrs. Barrie came in. I was going to say to my father, What if the law should change? The law might change soon, I was going to say. Maybe not, but it might. He’d be out of business then. Or out of one part of his business. Would that make a great difference to him?

What could I expect him to answer?

Speaking of business, that is none of yours.

Or, I’d still make a living.

No, I would say. I didn’t mean the money. I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power.

Change the law, change what a person does, change what a person is?

Or would he find some other risk, some other knot to make in his life, some other underground and problematic act of mercy?

And if that law can change, other things can change. I’m thinking about you now, how it could happen that you wouldn’t be ashamed to marry a pregnant woman. There’d be no shame to it. Move ahead a few years, just a few years, and it could be a celebration. The pregnant bride is garlanded and led to the altar, even in the chapel of the Theological College.

If that happened, though, there’d likely be something else to be ashamed or afraid of, there’d be other errors to be avoided.

So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.

Change the person. We all say we hope it can be done.

Change the law, change the person. Yet we don’t want everything-not the whole story-to be dictated from outside. We don’t want what we are, all we are, to be concocted that way.

Who is this “we” I’m talking about?

R. My father’s lawyer says, “It’s very unusual.” I realize that for him this is quite a strong, and sufficient, word.

There is enough money in my father’s bank account to cover his funeral expenses. Enough to bury him, as they say. (Not the lawyer-he doesn’t talk like that.) But there isn’t much more. There are no stock certificates in his safety deposit box; there is no record of investments. Nothing. No bequest to the hospital, or to his church, or to the high school to establish a scholarship. Most shocking of all, there is no money left to Mrs. Barrie. The house and its contents are mine. And that’s all there is. I have my five thousand dollars.

The lawyer seems embarrassed, painfully embarrassed, and worried about this state of affairs. Perhaps he thinks I might suspect him of misconduct. Try to blacken his name. He wants to know if there’s a safe in my (my father’s) house, any hiding place at all for a large amount of cash. I say there isn’t. He tries to suggest to me-in such a discreet and roundabout way that I don’t know at first what he’s talking about-that there might be reasons for my father’s wanting to keep the amount of his earnings a secret. A large amount of cash holed away somewhere is therefore a possibility.

I tell him I’m not terribly concerned about the money.

What a thing to say. He can hardly look me in the eye.

“Perhaps you could go home and take a very good look,” he says. “Don’t neglect the obvious places. It could be in a cookie tin. Or in a box under the bed. Surprising the places people can pick. Even the most sensible and intelligent people.

“Or in a pillow slip,” he’s saying as I go out the door.

A woman on the phone wants to speak to the doctor. “I’m sorry. He’s dead.” “Dr. Strachan. Have I got the right doctor?” “Yes but I’m sorry, he’s dead.”

“Is there anyone-does he by any chance have a partner I could talk to? Is there anybody else there?” “No. No partner.”

“Could you give me any other number I could call? Isn’t there some other doctor that can-”

“No. I haven’t any number. There isn’t anybody that I know of.”

“You must know what this is about. It’s very crucial. There are very special circumstances-”

“I’m sorry.”

“There isn’t any problem about money.” No.

“Please try to think of somebody. If you do think of somebody later on, could you give me a call? I’ll leave you my number.” “You shouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t care. I trust you. Anyway it’s not for myself. I know everybody must say that but really it’s not. It’s for my daughter who’s in a very bad condition. Mentally she’s in a very bad condition.” I m sorry.

“If you knew what I went through to get this number you would try to help me.” “Sorry.” “Please.” I m sorry.

Madeleine was the last one of his specials. I saw her at the funeral. She hadn’t got to Kenora. Or else she’d come back. I didn’t recognize her at first because she was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat with a horizontal feather. She must have borrowed it-she wasn’t used to the feather which came drooping down over her eye. She spoke to me in the lineup at the reception in the church hall. I said to her just the same thing I said to everybody.

“So good of you to come.”

Then I realized what an odd thing she’d said to me. “I was just counting on you to have a sweet tooth.”

“Perhaps he didn’t always charge,” I say to the lawyer. “Perhaps he worked for nothing sometimes. Some people do things out of charity.”

The lawyer is getting used to me now. He says, “Perhaps.” “Or possibly an actual charity,” I say. “A charity he supported without keeping any record of it.”

The lawyer holds my eyes for a moment. “A charity,” he says.

“Well I haven’t dug up the cellar floor yet,” I say, and he smiles wincingly at this levity.

Mrs. Barrie hasn’t given her notice. She just hasn’t shown up. There was nothing in particular for her to do, since the funeral was in the church and the reception was in the church hall. She didn’t come to the funeral. None of her family came. So many people were there that I would not have noticed that if someone hadn’t said to me, “I didn’t see any of the Barrie connection, did you?”

I phoned her several days afterwards and she said, “I never went to the church because I had too bad a cold.”

I said that that wasn’t why I’d called. I said I could manage quite well but wondered what she planned to do.

“Oh I don’t see no need for me to come back there now.”

I said that she should come and get something from the house, a keepsake. By this time I knew about the money and I wanted to tell her I felt bad about it. But I didn’t know how to say that.

She said, “I got some stuff I left there. I’ll be out when I can.”

She came out the next morning. The things she had to collect were mops and pails and scrub brushes and a clothes basket. It was hard to believe she would care about retrieving articles like these. And hard to believe she wanted them for sentimental reasons, but maybe she did. They were things she had used for years-during all her years in this house, where she had spent more waking hours than she had spent at home.

“Isn’t there anything else?” I said. “For a keepsake?”

She looked around the kitchen, chewing on her bottom lip. She might have been chewing back a smile.

“I don’t think there’s nothing here I’d have much use for,” she said.

I had a check ready for her. I just needed to write in the amount. I hadn’t been able to decide how much of the five thousand dollars to share with her. A thousand? I had been thinking. Now that seemed shameful. I thought I’d better double it.

I got out the checks that I had hidden in a drawer. I found a pen. I made it out for four thousand dollars.

“This is for you,” I said. “And thank you for everything.”

She took the check in her hand and glanced at it and stuffed it in her pocket. I thought maybe she hadn’t been able to read how much it was for. Then I saw the darkening flush, the tide of embarrassment, the difficulty of being grateful.

She managed to pick up all the things she was taking, using her one good arm. I opened the door for her. I was so anxious for her to say something more that I almost said, Sorry that’s all.

Instead I said, “Your elbow’s not better yet?”

“It’ll never be better,” she said. She ducked her head as if she was afraid of another of my kisses. She said, “Well-thanks-very-much-goodbye.”

I watched her making her way to the car. I had assumed her nephew’s wife had driven her out here.

But it was not the usual car that the nephew’s wife drove. The thought crossed my mind that she might have a new employer. Bad arm or not. A new and rich employer. That would account for her haste, her cranky embarrassment.

It was the nephew’s wife, after all, who got out to help with the load. I waved, but she was too busy stowing the mops and pails.

“Gorgeous car,” I called out, because I thought that was a compliment both women would appreciate. I didn’t know what make the car was, but it was shining new and large and glamorous. A silvery lilac color.

The nephew’s wife called out, “Oh yeah,” and Mrs. Barrie ducked her head in acknowledgment.

Shivering in my indoor clothes, but compelled by my feelings of apology and bewilderment, I stood there and waved the car out of sight.

I couldn’t settle down to do anything after that. I made myself coffee and sat in the kitchen. I got Madeleine’s chocolates out of the drawer and ate a couple, though I really did not have enough of a sweet tooth for their chemically colored orange and yellow centers. I wished I had thanked her. I didn’t see how I could now-I didn’t even know her last name.

I decided to go out skiing. There are gravel pits that I believe I told you about at the back of our property. I put on the old wooden skis that my father used to wear in the days when the back roads were not plowed out in winter, and he might have to go across the fields to deliver a baby or take out an appendix. There were only cross straps to hold your feet in place.

I skied back to the gravel pits whose slopes have been padded with grass over the years and are now additionally covered with snow. There were dog tracks, bird tracks, the faint circles that the skittering vole made, but no sign of humans. I went up and down, up and down, first choosing a cautious diagonal and then going on to steeper descents. I fell now and then, but easily on the fresh plentiful snow, and between one moment of falling and the next of getting to my feet I found out that I knew something.

I knew where the money had gone.

Perhaps a charity.

Gorgeous car.

And four thousand dollars out of five.

Since that moment I have been happy.

I’ve been given the feeling of seeing money thrown over a bridge or high up into the air. Money, hopes, love letters-all such things can be tossed off into the air and come down changed, come down all light and free of context.

The thing I can’t imagine is my father caving in to blackmail. Particularly not to people who wouldn’t be very credible or clever. Not when the whole town seems to be on his side, or at least on the side of silence.

What I can imagine, though, is a grand perverse gesture. To forestall demand, maybe, or just to show he didn’t care. Looking forward to the lawyer’s shock, and to my trying even harder to figure him out, now that he’s dead.

No. I don’t think he’d be thinking of that. I don’t think I’d have come into his thoughts so much. Never so much as I’d like to believe.

What I’ve been shying away from is that it could have been done for love.

For love, then. Never rule that out.

I climbed out of the gravel pit and as soon as I came out on the fields the wind hit me. Wind was blowing snow over the dog tracks and the fine chain traces of the vole and the trail that will likely be the last ever to be broken by my father’s skis.

Dear R., Robin-what should be the last thing I say to you?

Goodbye and good luck.

I send you my love.

(What if people really did that-sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkeys’ eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.)

Take care of yourself.

Remember-the present King of France is bald.