PASSION
Not too long ago, Grace went looking for the Traverses’ summer house in the Ottawa Valley. She had not been in that part of the country for many years, and of course there had been changes. Highway 7 now avoided towns that it used to go right through, and it went straight in places where, as she remembered, there used to be curves. And this part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which the usual sort of map has no room to identify. Even when she had located Little Sabot Lake, or thought she had, there seemed to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she had chosen one of those roads, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she did not recall. In fact there had not been any street names when she had been here over forty years ago. And there was no pavement. There was just the one dirt road running towards the lake, then the one dirt road running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.
Now there was a village. Or a suburb, perhaps you could call it, because she did not see any Post Office or even the most unpromising convenience store. The settlement lay four or five streets deep along the lake, with small houses strung close together on small lots. Some of them were undoubtedly summer places—the windows already boarded up, as was always done for the winter season. But many others showed all the signs of year-round habitation—habitation, in many cases, by people who filled the yards with plastic gym sets and outdoor grills and training bikes and motorcycles and picnic tables, where some of them sat having lunch or beer on this September day which was still warm. And by other people, not so visible— they were students maybe, or old hippies living alone—who put up flags or sheets of tinfoil for curtains. Small, mostly decent, cheap houses, some fixed to withstand the winter, and some not.
Grace would have decided to turn back if she had not seen the octagonal house, with the fretwork along the roof, and the doors in every other wall. The Woodses’ house. She had always remembered it as having eight doors, but it seemed there were only four. She had never been inside to see how, or if, the space was divided into rooms. She didn’t think any of the Travers family had ever been inside, either. The house was surrounded by great hedges, in the old days, and by the sparkling poplar trees that were always rustled by a wind along the shore. Mr. and Mrs. Woods were old—as Grace was now—and had not seemed to be visited by any friends or children. Their quaint original house had now a forlorn, a mistaken, look. Neighbors with their ghetto blasters and their sometimes dismembered vehicles, their toys and washing, were bunched up against either side of it.
It was the same with the Travers house when she found it, a quarter of a mile or so along this road. The road went past it now, instead of ending there, and the houses on either side were only a few feet away from the wraparound deep verandah.
It had been the first house that Grace had ever seen built in this way—one story high, the main roof continuing without a break out over that verandah, on all sides. Later she had seen many like it, in Australia. A style that made you think of hot summers.
You used to be able to run from the verandah across the dusty end of the driveway, across a sandy trampled patch of weeds and wild strawberries, also the Traverses’ property, and then jump—no, actually, wade—into the lake. Now you would hardly be able to see the lake, because of the substantial house— one of the few regular suburban houses here, with a two-car garage—that had been built across that very route.
What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm of Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seemed to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody has come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?
Mr. Travers had built the house—that is, he had it built, as a surprise wedding present for Mrs. Travers. When Grace first saw it, it would have been perhaps thirty years old. Mrs. Travers’ children were widely spaced—Gretchen around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, already married and a mother herself, and Maury twenty-one, going into his last year at college. And then there was Neil, in his midthirties. But Neil was not a Travers. He was Neil Borrow. Mrs. Travers had been married before, to a man who had died. She had earned her living, and supported her child, as a teacher of Business English at a secretarial school. Mr. Travers, when he referred to this time in her life before he met her, spoke of it as a time of hardship almost like penal servitude, something hardly to be made up for by a whole lifetime of comfort, which he would happily provide.
Mrs. Travers herself didn’t speak of it this way at all. She had lived with Neil in a big old house broken up into apartments, not far from the railway tracks in the town of Pembroke, and many of the stories she told at the dinner table were about events there, about her fellow tenants, and the French-Canadian land-lord, whose harsh French and tangled English she imitated. The stories might have had titles, like the stories of Thurber’s that Grace had read in The Anthology of American Humor, found unaccountably on the library shelf at the back of her Grade Ten classroom. (Also on that shelf was The Last of the Barons, and Two Years Before the Mast. )
“The Night Old Mrs. Cromarty Got Out on the Roof.” “How the Postman Courted Miss Flowers.” “The Dog Who Ate Sardines.”
Mr. Travers never told stories and had little to say at dinner, but if he came upon you looking, say, at the fieldstone fireplace, he might say, “Are you interested in rocks?” and tell you where each of them had come from, and how he had searched and searched for the particular pink granite, because Mrs. Travers had once exclaimed over a rock like that, glimpsed in a road cut. Or he might show you such not really unusual features as he himself had added to the house design—the corner cupboard shelves swinging outwards in the kitchen, the storage space under the window seats. He was a tall stooped man with a soft voice and thin hair slicked over his scalp. He wore bathing shoes when he went into the water, and though he did not look fat in his usual clothes, he displayed then a pancake fold of white flesh slopping over the top of his bathing trunks.
Grace worked that summer at the hotel at Bailey’s Falls, north of Little Sabot Lake. Early in the season the Travers family had come to dinner there. She had not noticed them—they were not at one of her tables and it was a busy night. She was setting up a table for a new party when she realized that someone was waiting to speak to her.
It was Maury. He said, “I was wondering if you would like to go out with me sometime?”
Grace barely looked up from shooting out the silverware. She said, “Is this a dare?” Because his voice was high and nervous and he stood there stiffly, as if forcing himself. And it was known that sometimes a party of young men from the cottages would dare one another to ask a waitress out. It wasn’t entirely a joke—they really would show up, if accepted, though sometimes they only meant to park, without taking you to a movie or even for coffee. So it was considered rather shameful, rather hard up, for a girl to agree.
“What?” he said painfully, and then Grace did stop and look at him. It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined.
“Okay,” she said quickly. She might have meant, okay, calm down, I know it’s not a dare, I know you wouldn’t do that. Or, okay, I’ll go out with you. She herself hardly knew which. But he took it as agreement, and at once arranged—without lowering his voice, or noticing the looks he was getting from diners around them—that he would pick her up after work on the following night.
He did take her to the movies. They saw Father of the Bride. Grace hated it. She hated girls like Elizabeth Taylor in that movie, she hated spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked but that they wheedle and demand. Maury said that it was only supposed to be a comedy, but she said that was not the point. She could not make clear what the point was. Anybody would think that it was because she worked as a waitress and was too poor to go to college, and that if she wanted anything like that kind of wedding she would have to spend years saving up to pay for it herself. (Maury did think this, and was stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.)
She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn’t altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn’t shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men— people, everybody—thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she’d be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.
She was fuming about this while sitting beside a boy who had fallen in love with her because he had believed—instantly—in the integrity and uniqueness of her mind and soul, and had seen her poverty as a romantic gloss on that. (He would have known she was poor not just because of the job she was working at but because of her strong Ottawa Valley accent, of which she was as yet unaware.)
He honored her feelings about the movie. Indeed, now that he had listened to her angry struggles to explain, he struggled to tell her something in turn. He said that he saw now that it was not anything so simple, so feminine, as jealousy. He saw that. It was that she would not stand for frivolity, was not content to be like most girls. She was special.
Grace always remembered what she was wearing on that night. A dark-blue ballerina skirt, a white blouse, through whose eyelet frills you could see the tops of her breasts, a wide rose-colored elasticized belt. There was a discrepancy, no doubt, between the way she presented herself and the way she wanted to be judged. But nothing about her was dainty or pert or polished in the style of the time. A bit ragged round the edges, in fact, giving herself gypsy airs, with the very cheapest silver-painted bangles, and the long, wild-looking curly dark hair that she had to put into a snood when she waited on tables.
Special.
He had told his mother about her and his mother had said, “You must bring this Grace of yours to dinner.”
It was all new to her, all immediately delightful. In fact she fell in love with Mrs. Travers, rather as Maury had fallen in love with her. It was not in her nature, of course, to be so openly dumbfounded, so worshipful, as he was.
Grace had been brought up by her aunt and uncle, really her great-aunt and great-uncle. Her mother had died when she was three years old, and her father had moved to Saskatchewan, where he had another family. Her stand-in parents were kind, even proud of her, though bewildered, but they were not given to conversation. The uncle made his living caning chairs, and he had taught Grace how to cane, so that she could help him, and eventually take over as his eyesight failed. But then she had got the job at Bailey’s Falls for the summer, and though it was hard for him—for her aunt as well—to let her go, they believed she needed a taste of life before she settled down.
She was twenty years old, and had just finished high school. She should have finished a year ago, but she had made an odd choice. In the very small town where she lived—it was not far from Mrs. Travers’ Pembroke—there was nevertheless a high school, which offered five grades, to prepare you for the government exams and what was then called senior matriculation. It was never necessary to study all the subjects offered, and at the end of her first year—what should have been her final year, Grade Thirteen—Grace tried examinations in History and Botany and Zoology and English and Latin and French, receiving unnecessarily high marks. But there she was in September, back again, proposing to study Physics and Chemistry, Trigonometry, Geometry, and Algebra, though these subjects were considered particularly hard for girls. When she had finished that year, she would have covered all Grade Thirteen subjects except Greek and Italian and Spanish and German, which were not taught by any teacher in her school. She did creditably well in all three branches of mathematics and in the sciences, though her results were nothing like so spectacular as the year before. She had even thought, then, of teaching herself Greek and Spanish and Italian and German so that she could try those exams the next year. But the principal of the school had a talk with her, telling her this was getting her nowhere since she was not going to be able to go to college, and anyway no college course required such a full plate. Why was she doing it? Did she have any plans?
No, said Grace, she just wanted to learn everything you could learn for free. Before she started her career of caning.
It was the principal who knew the manager of the inn, and said he would put in a word for her if she wanted to try for a summer waitressing job. He too mentioned getting a taste of life.
So even the man in charge of all learning in that place did not believe that learning had to do with life. And anybody Grace told about what she had done—she told it to explain why she was late leaving high school—had said something like you must have been crazy.
Except for Mrs. Travers, who had been sent to business college instead of a real college because she was told she had to be useful, and who now wished like anything—she said—that she had crammed her mind instead, or first, with what was useless.
“Though you do have to earn a living,” she said. “Caning chairs seems like a useful sort of thing to do anyway. We’ll have to see.”
See what? Grace didn’t want to think ahead at all. She wanted life to continue just as it was now. By trading shifts with another girl, she had managed to get Sundays off, from breakfast on. This meant that she always worked late on Saturdays. In effect, it meant that she had traded time with Maury for time with Maury’s family. She and Maury could never see a movie now, never have a real date. But he would pick her up when her work was finished, around eleven o’clock, and they would go for a drive, stop for ice cream or a hamburger—Maury was scrupulous about not taking her into a bar, because she was not yet twenty-one—then end up parking somewhere.
Grace’s memories of these parking sessions—which might last till one or two in the morning—proved to be much hazier than her memories of sitting at the Traverses’ round dining table or—when everybody finally got up and moved, with coffee or fresh drinks—sitting on the tawny leather sofa, the rockers, the cushioned wicker chairs, at the other end of the room. (There was no fuss about doing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen—a woman Mrs. Travers called “my friend the able Mrs. Abel” would come in the morning.)
Maury always dragged cushions onto the rug and sat there. Gretchen, who never dressed for dinner in anything but jeans or army pants, usually sat cross-legged in a wide chair. Both she and Maury were big and broad-shouldered, with something of their mother’s good looks—her wavy caramel-colored hair, and warm hazel eyes. Even, in Maury’s case, a dimple. Cute, the other waitresses called Maury. They whistled softly. Hubba hubba. Mrs. Travers, however, was barely five feet tall, and under her bright muumuus she seemed not fat but sturdily plump, like a child who hasn’t stretched up yet. And the shine, the intentness, of her eyes, the gaiety always ready to break out, had not or could not be imitated or inherited. No more than the rough red, almost a rash, on her cheeks. That was probably the result of going out in any weather without taking thought of her complexion, and like her figure, like her muumuus, it showed her independence.
There were sometimes guests, besides family, on these Sunday evenings. A couple, maybe a single person as well, usually close to Mr. and Mrs. Travers’ age, and usually resembling them in the way the women would be eager and witty and the men quieter, slower, tolerant. People told amusing stories, in which the joke was often on themselves. (Grace has been an engaging talker for so long now that she sometimes gets sick of herself, and it’s hard for her to remember how novel these dinner conversations once seemed to her. Where she came from, most of the lively conversation took the form of dirty jokes, which of course her aunt and uncle did not go in for. On the rare occasions when they had company, there was praise of and apology for the food, discussion of the weather, and a fervent wish for the meal to be finished as soon as possible.)
After dinner at the Traverses’, if the evening was cool enough, Mr. Travers lit a fire. They played what Mrs. Travers called “idiotic word games,” at which, in fact, people had to be fairly clever, even if they thought up silly definitions. And here was where somebody who had been rather quiet at dinner might begin to shine. Mock arguments could be built up around claims of great absurdity. Gretchen’s husband Wat did this, and so after a bit did Grace, to Mrs. Travers’ and Maury’s delight (Maury calling out, to everyone’s amusement but Grace’s own, “See? I told you. She’s smart”). And it was Mrs. Travers herself who led the way in this making up of words with outrageous defenses, insuring that the play should not become too serious or any player too anxious.
The only time there was a problem of anyone’s being unhappy with a game was when Mavis, who was married to Mrs. Travers’ son Neil, came to dinner. Mavis and her two children were staying not far away, at her parents’ place down the lake. That night there was only family, and Grace, as Mavis and Neil had been expected to bring their small children. But Mavis came by herself—Neil was a doctor, and it turned out that he was busy in Ottawa that weekend. Mrs. Travers was disappointed but she rallied, calling out in cheerful dismay, “But the children aren’t in Ottawa, surely?”
“Unfortunately not,” said Mavis. “But they’re not being particularly charming. I’m sure they’d shriek all through dinner. The baby’s got prickly heat and God knows what’s the matter with Mikey.”
She was a slim suntanned woman in a purple dress, with a matching wide purple band holding back her dark hair. Handsome, but with little pouches of boredom or disapproval hiding the corners of her mouth. She left most of her dinner untouched on her plate, explaining that she had an allergy to curry.
“Oh, Mavis. What a shame,” said Mrs. Travers. “Is this new?”
“Oh no. I’ve had it for ages but I used to be polite about it. Then I got sick of throwing up half the night.”
“If you’d only told me— What can we get you?”
“Don’t worry about it, I’m fine. I don’t have any appetite anyway, what with the heat and the joys of motherhood.”
She lit a cigarette.
Afterwards, in the game, she got into an argument with Wat over a definition he used, and when the dictionary proved it acceptable she said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just outclassed by you people.” And when it came time for everybody to hand in their own word on a slip of paper for the next round, she smiled and shook her head.
“I don’t have one.”
“Oh, Mavis,” said Mrs. Travers. And Mr. Travers said, “Come on, Mavis. Any old word will do.”
“But I don’t have any old word. I’m so sorry. I just feel stupid tonight. The rest of you just play around me.”
Which they did, everybody pretending nothing was wrong, while Mavis smoked and continued to smile her determined sweetly hurt unhappy smile. In a little while she got up and said she was awfully tired, and she couldn’t leave her children on their grandparents’ hands any longer, she’d had a lovely and instructive visit, and she must now go home.
“I have to give you an Oxford dictionary next Christmas,” she said to nobody in particular as she went out with a bitter tinkle of a laugh.
The Traverses’ dictionary that Wat had used was an American one.
When she was gone none of them looked at each other. Mrs. Travers said, “Gretchen, do you have the strength to make us all a pot of coffee?” And Gretchen went off to the kitchen, muttering, “What fun. Jesus wept.”
“Well. Her life is trying,” said Mrs. Travers. “With the two little ones.”
During the week Grace got a break, for one day, between clearing breakfast and setting up dinner, and when Mrs. Travers found out about this she started driving up to Bailey’s Falls to bring her down to the lake for those free hours. Maury would be at work then—he was working for the summer with the road gang repairing Highway 7—and Wat would be in his office in Ottawa and Gretchen would be swimming with the children or rowing with them on the lake. Usually Mrs. Travers herself would announce that she had shopping to do, or preparations to make for supper, or letters to write, and she would leave Grace on her own in the big, cool, shaded living-dining room, with its permanently dented leather sofa and crowded bookshelves.
“Read anything that takes your fancy,” Mrs. Travers said. “Or curl up and go to sleep if that’s what you’d like. It’s a hard job, you must be tired. I’ll make sure you’re back on time.”
Grace never slept. She read. She barely moved, and below her shorts her bare legs became sweaty and stuck to the leather. Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading. Quite often she saw nothing of Mrs. Travers until it was time for her to be driven back to work.
Mrs. Travers would not start any sort of conversation until enough time had passed for Grace’s thoughts to have got loose from whatever book she had been in. Then she might mention having read it herself, and say what she had thought of it—but always in a way that was both thoughtful and lighthearted. For instance she said, about Anna Karenina, “I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but I know that first I identified with Kitty, and then it was Anna—oh, it was awful, with Anna, and now, you know, the last time I found myself sympathizing all the time with Dolly. Dolly when she goes to the country, you know, with all those children, and she has to figure out how to do the washing, there’s the problem about the washtubs—I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs. Don’t pay any attention to me, anyway. You don’t, do you?”
“I don’t know if I pay much attention to anybody.” Grace was surprised at herself and wondered if she sounded conceited or juvenile. “But I like listening to you talk.”
Mrs. Travers laughed. “I like listening to myself.”
Somehow, around this time, Maury had begun to talk about their being married. This would not happen for quite a while— not until after he was qualified and working as an engineer—but he spoke of it as of something that she as well as he must be taking for granted. When we are married, he would say, and instead of questioning or contradicting him, Grace would listen curiously.
When they were married they would have a place on Little Sabot Lake. Not too close to his parents, not too far away. It would be just a summer place, of course. The rest of the time they would live wherever his work as an engineer should take them. That might be anywhere—Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories. Grace was delighted by the idea of such travels— rather more than she was delighted by the idea of what he spoke of, with a severe pride, as our own home. None of this seemed at all real to her, but then, the idea of helping her uncle, of taking on the life of a chair caner, in the town and the very house where she had grown up, had never seemed real either.
Maury kept asking her what she had told her aunt and uncle about him, when she was going to take him home to meet them. Even his easy use of that word—home—seemed slightly off kilter to her, though surely it was one she herself had used. It seemed more fitting to say my aunt and uncle’s house.
In fact she had said nothing in her brief weekly letters, except to mention that she was “going out with a boy who works around here for the summer.” She might have given the impression that he worked at the hotel.
It wasn’t as if she had never thought of getting married. That possibility—half a certainty—had been in her thoughts, along with the life of caning chairs. In spite of the fact that nobody had ever courted her, she had thought that it would happen, someday, and in exactly this way, with the man making up his mind immediately. He would see her—perhaps he would have brought a chair to be fixed—and seeing her, he would fall in love. He would be handsome, like Maury. Passionate, like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.
This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt it his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold. A deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not understand how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew about, in solitude and imagining, and she felt it was up to Maury to take over. Which he would not do.
These sieges left them both disturbed and slightly angry or ashamed, so that they could not stop kissing, clinging, using fond words, to make it up to each other as they said good night. It was a relief to Grace to be alone, to get into bed in the dormitory and blot the last couple of hours out of her mind. And she thought it must be a relief to Maury to be driving down the highway by himself, rearranging his impressions of his Grace so that he could stay wholeheartedly in love with her.
Most of the waitresses left after Labour Day to go back to school or college. But the hotel was staying open till Thanksgiving with a reduced staff—Grace among them. There was talk, this year, about opening again in early December for a winter season, or at least a Christmas season, but nobody amongst the kitchen or dining-room staff seemed to know if this would really happen. Grace wrote to her aunt and uncle as if the Christmas season was a certainty. In fact she did not mention any closing at all, unless possibly after New Year’s. So they should not expect her.
Why did she do this? It was not as if she had any other plans. She had told Maury that she thought she should spend this one year helping her uncle, maybe trying to find somebody else to learn caning, while he, Maury, was taking his final year at college. She had even promised to have him visit at Christmas so that he could meet her family. And he had said that Christmas would be a good time to make their engagement formal. He was saving from his summer wages to buy her a diamond ring.
She too had been saving her wages. So she would be able to take the bus to Kingston, to visit him during his school term.
She spoke of this, promised it, so easily. But did she believe, or even wish, that it would happen?
“Maury is a sterling character,” said Mrs. Travers. “Well, you can see that for yourself. He will be a dear uncomplicated man, like his father. Not like his brother. His brother Neil is very bright. I don’t mean that Maury isn’t, you certainly don’t get to be an engineer without a brain or two in your head, but Neil is—he’s deep.” She laughed at herself. “Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear—what am I talking about? A long time Neil and I didn’t have anybody but each other. So I think he’s special. I don’t mean he can’t be fun. But sometimes people who are the most fun can be melancholy, can’t they? You wonder about them. But what’s the use of worrying about your grown-up children? With Neil I worry a bit, with Maury only a tiny little bit. And Gretchen I don’t worry about at all. Because women always have got something, haven’t they, to keep them going? That men haven’t got.”
The house on the lake was never closed up till Thanksgiving. Gretchen and the children had to go back to Ottawa, of course, because of school. And Maury, whose job was finished, had to go to Kingston. Mr. Travers would come out only on weekends. But usually, Mrs. Travers had told Grace, she stayed on, sometimes with guests, sometimes by herself.
Then her plans were changed. She went back to Ottawa with Mr. Travers in September. This happened unexpectedly—the weekend dinner was cancelled.
Maury said that she got into trouble, now and then, with her nerves. “She has to have a rest,” he said. “She has to go into the hospital for a couple of weeks or so and they get her stabilized. She always comes out fine.”
Grace said that his mother was the last person she would have expected to have such troubles.
“What brings it on?”
“I don’t think they know,” Maury said.
But after a moment he said, “Well. It could be her husband. I mean, her first husband. Neil’s father. What happened with him, et cetera.”
What had happened was that Neil’s father had killed himself.
“He was unstable, I guess.
“But it maybe isn’t that,” he continued. “It could be other stuff. Problems women have around her age. It’s okay though— they can get her straightened around easy now, with drugs. They’ve got terrific drugs. Not to worry about it.”
By Thanksgiving, as Maury had predicted, Mrs. Travers was out of the hospital and feeling well. Thanksgiving dinner was taking place at the lake as usual. And it was being held on Sunday—that was also as usual, to allow for packing up and closing the house on Monday. And it was fortunate for Grace, because Sunday had remained her day off.
The whole family would be there. No guests—unless you counted Grace. Neil and Mavis and their children would be staying at Mavis’ parents’ place, and having dinner there on Monday, but they would be spending Sunday at the Traverses’.
By the time Maury brought Grace down to the lake on Sunday morning, the turkey was already in the oven. Because of the children, dinner would be early, around five o’clock. The pies were on the kitchen counter—pumpkin, apple, wild blueberry. Gretchen was in charge of the kitchen—as coordinated a cook as she was an athlete. Mrs. Travers sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and working at a jigsaw puzzle with Gretchen’s younger daughter, Dana.
“Ah, Grace,” she said, jumping up for an embrace—the first time she had ever done this—and with a clumsy motion of her hand scattering the jigsaw pieces.
Dana wailed, “Grandma,” and her older sister, Janey, who had been watching critically, scooped up the pieces.
“We can put them back together,” she said. “Grandma didn’t mean to.”
“Where do you keep the cranberry sauce?” said Gretchen.
“In the cupboard,” said Mrs. Travers, still squeezing Grace’s arms and ignoring the destroyed puzzle.
“Where in the cupboard?”
“Oh. Cranberry sauce,” Mrs. Travers said. “Well—I make it. First I put the cranberries in a little water. Then I keep it on low heat—no, I think I soak them first—”
“Well, I haven’t got time for all that,” Gretchen said. “You mean you don’t have any canned?”
“I guess not. I must not have, because I make it.”
“I’ll have to send somebody to get some.”
“Maybe you could ask Mrs. Woods?”
“No. I’ve hardly even spoken to her. I haven’t got the nerve. Somebody’ll have to go to the store.”
“Dear—it’s Thanksgiving,” said Mrs. Travers gently. “Nowhere will be open.”
“That place down the highway, it’s always open.” Gretchen raised her voice. “Where’s Wat?”
“He’s out in the rowboat,” called Mavis from the back bedroom. She made it sound like a warning, because she was trying to get her baby to sleep. “He took Mikey out in the boat.”
Mavis had driven over in her own car with Mikey and the baby. Neil was coming later—he had some phone calls to make.
And Mr. Travers had gone golfing.
“It’s just that I need somebody to go to the store,” Gretchen said. She waited, but no offer came from the bedroom. She raised her eyebrows at Grace.
“You can’t drive, can you?”
Grace said no.
Mrs. Travers looked around to see where her chair was, and sat down, with a grateful sigh.
“Well,” said Gretchen. “Maury can drive. Where’s Maury?”
Maury was in the front bedroom looking for his swimming trunks, though everybody had told him that the water would be too cold for swimming. He said the store would not be open.
“It will be,” said Gretchen. “They sell gas. And if it isn’t there’s that one just coming into Perth, you know, with the ice-cream cones—”
Maury wanted Grace to come with him, but the two little girls, Janey and Dana, were pulling her to come with them to see the swing their grandfather had put up under the Norway maple at the side of the house.
Going down the steps, she felt the strap of one of her sandals break. She took both shoes off and walked without difficulty on the sandy soil, the flat-pressed plantain, and the many curled leaves that had already fallen.
First she pushed the children in the swing, then they pushed her. It was when she jumped off, barefoot, that one leg crumpled and she let out a yelp of pain, not knowing what had happened.
It was her foot, not her leg. The pain had shot up from the sole of her left foot, which had been cut by the sharp edge of a clamshell.
“Dana brought those shells,” Janey said. “She was going to make a house for her snail.”
“He got away,” said Dana.
Gretchen and Mrs. Travers and even Mavis had come hurrying out of the house, thinking the cry came from one of the children.
“She’s got a bloody foot,” said Dana. “There’s blood all over the ground.”
Janey said, “She cut it on a shell. Dana left those shells here, she was going to build a house for Ivan. Ivan her snail.”
Then there was a basin brought out, water to wash the cut, a towel, and everyone was asking how much it hurt.
“Not too bad,” said Grace, limping to the steps, with both little girls competing to hold her up and generally getting in her way.
“Oh, that’s nasty,” Gretchen said. “But why weren’t you wearing your shoes?”
“Broke her strap,” said Dana and Janey together, as a wine-colored convertible, making very little sound, swerved neatly round in the parking space.
“Now, that is what I call opportune,” said Mrs. Travers. “Here ’s the very man we need. The doctor.”
This was Neil, the first time Grace had ever seen him. He was tall, spare, quick-moving.
“Your bag,” cried Mrs. Travers gaily. “We’ve already got a case for you.”
“Nice piece of junk you’ve got there,” said Gretchen. “New?”
Neil said, “Piece of folly.”
“Now the baby’s wakened.” Mavis gave a sigh of unspecific accusation and she went back into the house.
Janey said severely, “You can’t do anything without that baby waking up.”
“You better be quiet,” said Gretchen.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t got it with you,” said Mrs. Travers. But Neil swung a doctor’s bag out of the backseat, and she said, “Oh, yes you have, that’s good, you never know.”
“You the patient?” Neil said to Dana. “What’s the matter? Swallow a toad?”
“It’s her,” said Dana with dignity. “It’s Grace.”
“I see. She swallowed the toad.”
“She cut her foot. It’s bleeding and bleeding.”
“On a clamshell,” said Janey.
Now Neil said “Move over” to his nieces, and sat on the step below Grace, and carefully lifted the foot and said, “Give me that cloth or whatever,” then carefully blotted away the blood to get a look at the cut. Now that he was so close to her, Grace noticed a smell she had learned to identify this summer working at the inn—the smell of liquor edged with mint.
“It sure is,” he said. “It’s bleeding and bleeding. That’s a good thing, clean it out. Hurts?”
Grace said, “Some.”
He looked searchingly, though briefly, into her face. Perhaps wondering if she had caught the smell, and what she thought about it.
“I bet. See that flap? We have to get under there and make sure it’s clean, then I’ll put a stitch or two in it. I’ve got some stuff I can rub on so that won’t hurt as bad as you might think.” He looked up at Gretchen. “Hey. Let’s get the audience out of the way here.”
He had not spoken a word, as yet, to his mother, who now repeated that it was such a good thing that he had come along just when he did.
“Boy Scout,” he said. “Always at the ready.”
His hands didn’t feel drunk, and his eyes didn’t look it. Neither did he look like the jolly uncle he had impersonated when he talked to the children, or the purveyor of reassuring patter he had chosen to be with Grace. He had a high pale forehead, a crest of tight curly gray-black hair, bright gray eyes, a wide thin-lipped mouth that seemed to curl in on some vigorous impatience, or appetite, or pain.
When the cut had been bandaged, out on the steps— Gretchen having gone back to the kitchen and made the children come with her, but Mrs. Travers remaining, watching intently, with her lips pressed together as if promising that she would not make any interruptions—Neil said that he thought it would be a good idea to run Grace into town, to the hospital.
“For an anti-tetanus shot.”
“It doesn’t feel too bad,” said Grace.
Neil said, “That’s not the point.”
“I agree,” said Mrs. Travers. “Tetanus—that’s terrible.”
“We shouldn’t be long,” he said. “Here. Grace? Grace, I’ll get you to the car.” He held her under one arm. She had strapped on the one sandal, and managed to get her toes into the other so that she could drag it along. The bandage was very neat and tight.
“I’ll just run in,” he said, when she was sitting in the car. “Make my apologies.”
To Gretchen? To Mavis.
Mrs. Travers came down from the verandah, wearing the look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her, and indeed irrepressible, on this day. She put her hand on the car door.
“This is good,” she said. “This is very good. Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”
Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence, a weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.
The hospital was in Carleton Place, three miles away. There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression that at its crest the car had lifted off the pavement, they were flying. There was hardly any traffic about, she was not frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.
Neil knew the nurse who was on duty in Emergency, and after he had filled out a form and let her take a passing look at Grace’s foot (“Nice job,” she said without interest), he was able to go ahead and give the tetanus shot himself. (“It won’t hurt now, but it could later.”) Just as he finished, the nurse came back into the cubicle and said, “There’s a guy in the waiting room to take her home.”
She said to Grace, “He says he’s your fiancé.”
“Tell him she’s not ready yet,” Neil said. “No. Tell him we’ve already gone.”
“I said you were in here.”
“But when you came back,” said Neil, “we were gone.”
“He said you were his brother. Won’t he see your car in the lot?”
“I parked out back. I parked in the doctors’ lot.”
“Pret-ty tric-ky,” said the nurse, over her shoulder.
And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
“No,” said Grace, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she was having her eyes tested.
Once more she was helped to the car, sandal flopping from the toe strap, and settled on the creamy upholstery. They took a back street out of the lot, an unfamiliar way out of the town. She knew they wouldn’t see Maury. She did not have to think of him. Still less of Mavis.
Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang— acquiescence simply rippled through her, the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.
Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelt on.
And even in some of those details she must have been wrong. First they drove west on Highway 7. In Grace’s recollection, there is not another car on the highway, and their speed approaches the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home that Sunday morning, on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. On their way to church or coming home from church. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages or the edges of towns, and for the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, wind taking charge of her hair. That gave her the illusion of constant speed, perfect flight—not frantic but miraculous, serene.
And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family were wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message.
You’ll know how to do it.
Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself would figure more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.
They stopped, finally, at Kaladar, and went into the hotel— the old hotel which is still there. Taking her hand, kneading his fingers between hers, slowing his pace to match her uneven steps. Neil led her into the bar. She recognized it as a bar, though she had never been in one before. (Bailey’s Falls Inn did not yet have a license—drinking was done in people’s rooms, or in a rather ramshackle so-called nightclub across the road.) This was just as she would have expected—an airless darkened big room, with the chairs and tables put back in a careless way after a hasty cleanup, a smell of Lysol not erasing the smell of beer, whisky, cigars, pipes, men.
There was nobody there—perhaps it wasn’t open till afternoon. But might it not now be afternoon? Her idea of time seemed faulty.
Now a man came in from another room, and spoke to Neil. He said, “Hello there, Doc,” and went behind the bar.
Grace believed that it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.
“You know it’s Sunday,” the man said in a raised, stern, almost shouting voice, as if he wanted to be heard out in the parking lot. “I can’t sell you anything in here on a Sunday. And I can’t sell anything to her, ever. She shouldn’t even be in here. You understand that?”
“Oh yes, sir. Yes indeed, sir,” said Neil. “I heartily agree, sir.”
While both men were talking, the man behind the bar had taken a bottle of whisky from a hidden shelf and poured some into a glass and shoved it to Neil across the counter.
“You thirsty?” he said to Grace. He was already opening a Coke. He gave it to her without a glass.
Neil put a bill on the counter and the man shoved it away.
“I told you,” he said. “Can’t sell.”
“What about the Coke?” said Neil.
“Can’t sell.”
The man put the bottle away, Neil drank what was in the glass very quickly. “You’re a good man,” he said. “Spirit of the law.”
“Take the Coke along with you. Sooner she’s out of here the happier I’ll be.”
“You bet,” Neil said. “She’s a good girl. My sister-in-law. Future sister-in-law. So I understand.”
“Is that the truth?”
They didn’t go back to Highway 7. Instead they took the road north, which was not paved, but wide enough and decently graded. The drink seemed to have had the opposite effect to what drinks were supposed to have on Neil’s driving. He had slowed down to the seemly, even cautious, rate this road required.
“You don’t mind?” he said.
Grace said, “Mind what?”
“Being dragged into any old place.”
“No.”
“I need your company. How’s your foot?”
“It’s fine.”
“It must hurt some.”
“Not really. It’s okay.”
He picked up the hand that was not holding the Coke bottle, pressed the palm of it to his mouth, gave it a lick, and let it drop.
“Did you think I was abducting you for fell purposes?”
“No,” lied Grace, thinking how like his mother that word was. Fell.
“There was a time when you would have been right,” he said, just as if she had answered yes. “But not today. I don’t think so. You’re safe as a church today.”
The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words, but not the sense, of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”
“True. True.”
“And I’m not your sister-in-law.”
“Future. Didn’t I say future?”
“I’m not that either.”
“Oh. Well. I guess I’m not surprised. No. Not surprised.”
Then his voice changed again, became businesslike.
“I’m looking for a turnoff up here, to the right. There’s a road I ought to recognize. Do you know this country at all?”
“Not around here, no.”
“Don’t know Flower Station? Oompah, Poland? Snow Road?”
She had not heard of them.
“There’s somebody I want to see.”
A turn was made, to the right, with some dubious mutterings on his part. There were no signs. This road was narrower and rougher, with a one-lane plank-floored bridge. The trees of the hardwood forest laced their branches overhead. The leaves were late to turn this year because of the strangely warm weather, so these branches were still green, except for the odd one here and there that flashed out like a banner. There was a feeling of sanctuary. For miles Neil and Grace were quiet, and there was still no break in the trees, no end to the forest. But then Neil broke the peace.
He said, “Can you drive?” and when Grace said no, he said, “I think you should learn.”
He meant, right then. He stopped the car, got out and came around to her side, and she had to move behind the wheel.
“No better place than this.”
“What if something comes?”
“Nothing will. We can manage if it does. That’s why I picked a straight stretch. And don’t worry, you do all the work with your right foot.”
They were at the beginning of a long tunnel under the trees, the ground splashed with sunlight. He did not bother explaining anything about how cars ran—he simply showed her where to put her foot, and made her practice shifting the gears, then said, “Now go, and do what I tell you.”
The first leap of the car terrified her. She ground the gears, and she thought he would put an end to the lesson immediately, but he laughed. He said, “Whoa, easy. Easy. Keep going,” and she did. He did not comment on her steering, or the way the steering made her forget about the accelerator, except to say, “Keep going, keep going, keep on the road, don’t let the engine die.”
“When can I stop?” she said.
“Not till I tell you how.”
He made her keep driving until they came out of the tunnel, and then instructed her about the brake. As soon as she had stopped she opened the door so that they could trade sides, but he said, “No. This is just a breather. Soon you’ll be getting to like it.” And when they started again she began to see that he might be right. Her momentary surge of confidence almost took them into the ditch. Still, he laughed when he had to grab the wheel, and the lesson continued.
He did not let her stop until they had driven for what seemed miles, and even gone—slowly—around several curves. Then he said they had better switch, because he could not get a feeling of direction unless he was driving.
He asked how she felt now, and though she was shaking all over, she said, “Okay.”
He rubbed her arm from shoulder to elbow and said, “What a liar.” But he did not touch her, beyond that, did not let any part of her feel his mouth again.
He must have got the feeling of direction back some miles on when they came to a crossroads, for he turned left, and the trees thinned out and they climbed a rough road up a long hill, and after a few miles they came to a village, or at least a roadside collection of buildings. A church and a store, neither of them open to serve their original purposes, but probably lived in, to judge by vehicles around them and the sorry-looking curtains in the windows. A couple of houses in the same state and behind one of them a barn that had fallen in on itself, with old dark hay bulging out between its cracked beams like swollen innards.
Neil exclaimed in celebration at the sight of this place, but did not stop there.
“What a relief,” he said. “What—a—relief. Now I know. Thank you.”
“Me?”
“For letting me teach you to drive. It calmed me down.”
“Calmed you down?” said Grace. “Really?”
“True as I live.” Neil was smiling, but did not look at her. He was busy looking from side to side across the fields that lay along the road after it had passed through the village. He was talking as if to himself.
“This is it. Got to be it. Now we know.”
And so on, till he turned onto a lane that didn’t go straight but wound around through a field, avoiding rocks and patches of juniper. At the end of the lane was a house in no better shape than the houses in the village.
“Now, this place,” he said, “this place I am not going to take you in. I won’t be five minutes.”
He was longer than that.
She sat in the car, in the house’s shade. The door to the house was open, just the screen door closed. The screen had mended patches in it, newer wire woven in with the old. Nobody came to look at her, not even a dog. And now that the car had stopped, the day filled up with an unnatural silence. Unnatural because you would expect such a hot afternoon to be full of the buzzing and humming and chirping of insects in the grass, in the juniper bushes. Even if you couldn’t see them anywhere, their noise would seem to rise out of everything growing on the earth, as far as the horizon. But it was too late in the year, maybe too late even to hear geese honking as they flew south. At any rate, she didn’t hear any.
It seemed they were up on top of the world here, or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides, the trees around being only partly visible because they grew on lower ground.
Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but there was no end to the strangeness Grace could encounter today. No end to it.
Once this had been a brick house, but someone had begun to take the brick walls down. Plain wooden walls had been bared, underneath, and the bricks that had covered them were roughly piled in the yard, maybe waiting to be sold. The bricks left on this wall of the house formed a diagonal line, stairsteps, and Grace, with nothing to do, leaned back, pushed her seat back, in order to count them. She did this both foolishly and seriously, the way you could pull petals off a flower, but not with any words so blatant as He loves me, he loves me not.
Lucky. Not. Lucky. Not. That was all she dared.
She found that it was hard to keep track of bricks arranged in this zigzag fashion, especially since the line flattened out above the door.
She knew. What else could this be? A bootlegger’s place. She thought of the bootlegger at home—a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious. He sat on his front step with a shotgun on Halloween night. And he painted numbers on the sticks of firewood stacked by his door so he’d know if any were stolen. She thought of him—or this one—dozing in the heat in his dirty but tidy room (she knew it would be that way by the mended patches in the screen). Getting up from his creaky cot or couch, with the stained quilt on it that some woman relative of his, some woman now dead, had made long ago.
Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable, and some that were not. She knew how things were.
How strange that she’d thought of marrying Maury. A kind of treachery it would be. A treachery to herself. But not a treachery to be riding with Neil, because he knew some of the same things she did. And she knew more and more, all the time, about him.
And now in the doorway it seemed that she could see her uncle, stooped and baffled, looking out at her, as if she had been away for years and years. As if she had promised to go home and then she had forgotten about it, and in all this time he should have died but he hadn’t.
She struggled to speak to him, but he was lost. She was waking up, moving. She was in the car with Neil, on the road again. She had been asleep with her mouth open and she was thirsty. He turned to her for a moment, and she noticed, even with the wind that they made blowing round them, a fresh smell of whisky.
It was true.
“You awake? You were fast asleep when I came out of there,” he said. “Sorry—I had to be sociable for a while. How’s your bladder?”
That was a problem she had been thinking about, in fact, when they were stopped at the house. She had seen a toilet back there, beyond the house, but had felt shy about getting out and walking to it.
He said, “This looks like a possible place,” and stopped the car. She got out and walked in amongst some blooming golden-rod and Queen Anne’s lace and wild aster, to squat down. He stood in such flowers on the other side of the road, with his back to her. When she got back into the car she saw the bottle on the floor beside her feet. More than a third of its contents seemed already to be gone.
He saw her looking.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I just poured some in here.” He held up a flask. “Easier when I’m driving.”
On the floor there was also another Coca-Cola. He told her to look in the glove compartment and find the bottle opener.
“It’s cold,” she said in surprise.
“Icebox. They cut ice off the lakes in the winter and store it in sawdust. He keeps it under the house.”
“I thought I saw my uncle in the doorway of that house,” she said. “But I was dreaming.”
“You could tell me about your uncle. Tell me about where you live. Your job. Anything. I just like to hear you talk.”
There was a new strength in his voice, and a change in his face, but it wasn’t any manic glow of drunkenness. It was just as if he’d been sick—not terribly sick, just down, under the weather—and was now wanting to assure you he was better. He capped the flask and laid it down and reached for her hand. He held it lightly, a comrade’s clasp.
“He’s quite old,” said Grace. “He’s really my great-uncle. He’s a caner—that means he canes chairs. I can’t explain that to you, but I could show you if we had a chair to cane—”
“I don’t see one.”
She laughed, and said, “It’s boring, really.”
“Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”
She said, “You do.”
“Oh. What interests you about me?” His hand slid away.
“What you’re doing now,” said Grace determinedly. “Why.”
“You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Because I know what you’d say.”
“What’s that? What would I say?”
“You’d say, what else is there to do? Or something like that.”
“That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”
“No,” said Grace. “No. I wouldn’t.”
When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him with these answers, trying to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope—genuine, reasonable, and everlasting.
Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”
In a while, he said, “You know—I’m sleepy. Soon as we find a good spot I’m going to pull over and go to sleep. Just for a little while. You don’t mind that?”
“No. I think you should.”
“You’ll watch over me?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The spot he found was in a little town called Fortune. There was a park on the outskirts, beside a river, and a gravelled space for cars. He settled the seat back, and at once fell asleep. Evening had come on as it did now, around suppertime, proving that this wasn’t a summer day after all. A short while ago people had been having a Thanksgiving picnic here—there was still some smoke rising from the outdoor fireplace, and a smell of hamburgers in the air. The smell did not make Grace hungry, exactly—it made her remember being hungry in other circumstances.
He went to sleep immediately, and she got out. Some dust had settled on her with all the stopping and starting of her driving lesson. She washed her arms and hands and her face as well as she could at an outdoor tap. Then, favoring her cut foot, she walked slowly to the edge of the river, saw how shallow it was, with reeds breaking the surface. A sign there warned that profanity, obscenity, or vulgar language was forbidden in this place and would be punished.
She tried the swings, which faced west. Pumping herself high, she looked into the clear sky—faint green, fading gold, a fierce pink rim at the horizon. Already the air was getting cold.
She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now.
What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was.
It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else.
She went back to the car and tried to wake him up. He stirred but wouldn’t waken. So she walked around again to keep warm, and to practice the easiest way with her foot—she understood now that she would be working again, serving breakfast, in the morning.
She tried once more, talking to him urgently. He answered with various promises and mutters, and once more he fell asleep. By the time it was really dark she had given up. Now with the cold of night settled in some other facts became clear to her. That they could not remain here, that they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.
With some difficulty she got him over into the passenger seat. If that did not wake him, it was clear nothing could. She took a while to figure out how the headlights went on, and then she began to move the car, jerkily, slowly, back onto the road.
She had no idea of directions, and there was not a soul on the street to ask. She just kept driving to the other side of the town, and there, most blessedly, there was a sign pointing the way to Bailey’s Falls, among other places. Only nine miles.
She drove along the two-lane highway at never more than thirty miles an hour. There was little traffic. Once or twice a car passed her, honking, and the few she met honked also. In one case it was probably because she was going so slowly, and in the other, because she did not know how to dim the lights. Never mind. She couldn’t stop to get her courage up again in the middle of the road. She could just keep going, as he had said. Keep going.
At first she did not recognize Bailey’s Falls, coming upon it in this unfamiliar way. When she did, she became more frightened than she had been in all the nine miles. It was one thing to drive in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.
He was awake when she got stopped in the parking lot. He didn’t show any surprise at where they were, or at what she had done. In fact, he told her, the honking had wakened him, miles back, but he had pretended to be still asleep, because the important thing was not to startle her. He hadn’t been worried, though. He knew she would make it.
She asked if he was awake enough to drive now.
“Wide-awake. Bright as a dollar.”
He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he felt and pressed it here and there before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized it was time to say good-bye.
As a matter of fact she does not know to this day if those words were spoken, or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continual, changing pressures that it seemed more than two arms were needed, that she was surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he was telling her she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.
Early in the morning, the manager knocked on the dormitory door, calling for Grace.
“Somebody on the phone,” he said. “Don’t bother, they just wanted to know if you were here. I said I’d go and check. Okay now.”
It would be Maury, she thought. One of them, anyway. But probably Maury. Now she’d have to deal with Maury.
When she went down to serve breakfast—wearing her canvas shoes—she heard about the accident. A car had gone into a bridge abutment halfway down the road to Little Sabot Lake. It had been rammed right in, it was totally smashed and burned up. There were no other cars involved, and apparently no passengers. The driver would have to be identified by dental records. Or probably had been, by this time.
“One hell of a way,” the manager said. “Better to go and cut your throat.”
“It could’ve been an accident,” said the cook, who had an optimistic nature. “Could’ve just fell asleep.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Her arm hurt now as if it had taken a wicked blow. She couldn’t balance her tray but had to carry it in front of her, using both hands.
She did not have to deal with Maury face-to-face. He wrote her a letter.
Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go.
She wrote back five words. I did want to go. She was going to add I’m sorry, but stopped herself.
Mr. Travers came to the inn to see her. He was polite and businesslike, firm, cool, not unkind. She saw him now in circumstances that let him come into his own. A man who could take charge, who could tidy things up. He said that it was very sad, they were all very sad, but that alcoholism was a terrible thing. When Mrs. Travers was a little better he was going to take her on a trip, a vacation, somewhere warm.
Then he said that he had to be going, many things to do. As he shook her hand good-bye he put an envelope into it.
“We both hope you’ll make good use of this,” he said.
The cheque was for one thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life.