POWERS
GIVE DANTE A REST
March 13, 1927. Now we get the winter, just when we are supposed to be in sight of spring. Big storms closing off the roads, schools shut down. And some old fellow they say went for a walk out the tracks and is likely frozen. Today I went in my snowshoes right down the middle of the street and there was not a mark but mine on the snow. And by the time I got back from the store my tracks were entirely filled in. This is because of the lake not being frozen as usual and the wind out of the west picking up loads of moisture and dumping down on us as snow. I went to get coffee and one or two other necessities. Who should I see in the store but Tessa Netterby whom I hadn’t seen for maybe a year. I felt badly I’d never got out to see her, because I used to try to keep up a sort of friendship after she dropped out of school. I think I was the only one that did. She was all wrapped up in a big shawl and she looked like something out of a storybook. Top-heavy, actually, because she has that broad face with its black curly mop and her broad shoulders, though she can’t be much over five feet tall. She just smiled, the same old Tessa. And I asked how she was— you always do that when you see her, seriously, because of her long siege of whatever it was that took her out of school when she was around fourteen. But also you ask that because there isn’t much else to think of to say, she is not in the world that the rest of us are in. She is not in any clubs and can’t take part in any sports and she does not have any normal social life. She does have a sort of life involving people and there is nothing wrong with it, but I wouldn’t know how to talk about it and maybe neither would she.
Mr. McWilliams was there helping Mrs. McWilliams out in the store because the clerks had not been able to get in. He is a dreadful tease and he started teasing Tessa, asking her if she didn’t get word of this storm coming and why she couldn’t have let the rest of us know about it, etc. and Mrs. McWilliams told him to stop it. Tessa just looked as if she never heard and asked for a can of sardines. It made me feel suddenly awful, to think of her sitting down for supper to a can of sardines. Which is hardly likely, I don’t know any reason she can’t cook a meal like anybody else.
The big news I heard at the store was that the roof of the Knights of Pythias Hall has caved in. There goes our stage for The Gondoliers, which was supposed to go on at the end of March. The Town Hall stage is not big enough and the old Opera House is now being used to store coffins from Hay’s Furniture. So tonight we are supposed to have a rehearsal but I don’t know who will get there or what will be the outcome.
Mar. 16. Decision to shelve The Gondoliers for this year, only six of us out to rehearsal in the Sunday School Hall so we gave up and went over to Wilf’s house for coffee. Wilf also announced that he had meant this to be his last performance because his practice was getting too busy, and we would have to find another tenor. That will be a blow because he is the best.
I still feel funny calling a doctor by his first name even if he is only around thirty. His house used to be Dr. Coggan’s and a lot of people still call it that. It was built specially to be a doctor’s house with the office wing out to one side. But Wilf has had it all done over, some partitions knocked down altogether so that it is very roomy and bright and Sid Ralston was kidding him about getting it all ready for a wife. That was rather a touchy subject with Ginny right there but probably Sid did not know. (Ginny has had three proposals. First one from Wilf Rubstone, then Tommy Shuttles, then Euan McKay. A doctor, then an optometrist, then a minister. She is eight months older than I am but I don’t suppose I have a hope of catching up. I think she does lead them on a bit, though she always says she can’t understand it and that every time they asked her to marry them it came like a bolt out of the blue. What I think is that there are ways you can turn everything into a joke and let them know you wouldn’t welcome a proposal, before you let them go and make a fool of themselves.)
If ever I am seriously ill I hope I am able to destroy this diary or go through and stroke out any mean things in it, in case I die.
We all got talking in a rather serious way, I don’t know why, and the conversation got on to the things we learned at school and how much we had already forgotten. Somebody mentioned the Debating Club that used to be in town and how that all got scrapped after the War when everybody got cars to run around in and the movies to go to and started playing golf. What serious subjects they used to talk about. “Is Science or Literature more important in forming Human Character?” Can anybody imagine getting people out nowadays to listen to that? We’d feel silly even sitting around in an unorganized way and talking about it. Then Ginny said we should at least form a Reading Club and that got us on to the important books we always meant to read but never got down to it. The Harvard Classics that just sit there on the shelf behind glass doors in the living room year after year. Why not War and Peace, I said, but Ginny claimed she had already read it. So it came down to a vote between Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy and the Divine Comedy won out. All we know about it is that it is not much of a comedy and written in Italian, though we will naturally be reading it in English. Sid thought it was in Latin and said he had read enough of that in Miss Hurt’s class to last him all his life and we all roared at him, then he pretended he knew all along. Anyway now that The Gondoliers is on hold we should be able to find some time and will meet every couple of weeks to encourage each other.
Wilf showed us all over the house. The dining room is on one side of the hall and living room on the other and the kitchen has built-in cabinets and a double sink and the latest electric stove. There is a new washroom off the back hall and a streamlined bathroom and the closets are big enough to walk into and fixed up with full-length mirrors in the door. Golden oak floors everywhere. When I got home this place looked so poky and the wainscoting so dark and old-fashioned. I got on to Father at breakfast about how we could build a sunroom off the dining room to at least have one room bright and modern. (I forgot to mention that Wilf has a sunroom built out from the opposite side of the house to his office and it makes a good balance.) Father said what do we need that for when we have two verandahs to get the sun in the morning and the evening? So I see it’s not likely I’m going to get anywhere with my home improvement scheme.
Apr. 1. First thing when I waked up I fooled Father. I ran out into the hall screaming that a bat had come down the chimney into my room and he came tearing out of the bathroom with his braces down and lather all over his face and told me to stop hollering and being hysterical and go and get the broom. So I got it, and then I hid on the back stairs pretending I was terrified while he went thumping around without his glasses on trying to find the bat. Eventually I took pity on him and yelled out, “April Fool!”
So the next thing was Ginny phoned up and said, “Nancy, what am I going to do? My hair is falling out, it’s all over the pillow, big clumps of my beautiful hair all over the pillow and now I’m half bald, I can never leave this house again, will you run over here and see if we can make a wig out of it?”
So I said quite coolly, “Just mix up some flour and water and paste it back on. And isn’t it funny it happened the morning of April Fool’s?”
Now comes the part I am not so anxious to record.
I walked over to Wilf’s house without even waiting for my breakfast because I know he goes to the Hospital early. He opened the front door himself in his vest and shirtsleeves. I hadn’t bothered with the office figuring it would still be shut. That old woman he has keeping house—I don’t even know her name—was banging around in the kitchen. I suppose she should have opened the door, but he was right there in the hall just getting ready to go. “Why Nancy,” he said.
I never said a word, just made a suffering face and clutched at my throat.
“What’s the matter with you, Nancy?”
More clutching and a miserable croaking and shaking my head to indicate I couldn’t tell him. Oh, pitiful.
“In here,” says Wilf, and leads me through the side hall through the house door to the office. I saw that old woman having a peek but I didn’t let on I saw her, just kept up my charade.
“Now then,” he says, pushing me down on the patient’s chair and turning on the lights. The blinds were still down on the windows and the place stank of antiseptic or something. He got out one of the sticks that flattens your tongue and the instrument he has for looking down and lighting up your throat.
“Now, open as wide as you can.”
So I do, but just as he is about to press the stick down on my tongue I shout, “April Fool!”
There was not a flicker of a smile on his face. He whipped the stick out of the way and snapped off the light on the instrument and never said a word till he yanked open the outside door of the office. Then he said, “I happen to have sick people to see to, Nancy. Why don’t you learn to act your age?”
So I just scurried out of there with my tail between my legs. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him why couldn’t he take a joke. No doubt that nosey female in his kitchen will spread it all over town how mad he was and how I had to slink off humiliated. I have felt terrible all day. And the worst stupid coincidence is that I have even felt sick, feverish and with a slightly sore throat, so I just sat in the front room with a blanket over my legs reading old Dante. Tomorrow night is the meeting of the Reading Club so I should be way ahead of all the rest of them. The trouble is none of it stuck in my head, because all the time I was reading I was also thinking, what a silly stupid thing I did, and I could hear him telling me in such a cutting voice to act my age. But then I would find myself arguing in my head with him that it is not such an awful thing to have a little fun in your life. I believe his father was a minister, does that account for him? Ministers’ families move so much that he would never have time to get in with a gang that grows up together to understand and fool around with each other.
I can see him right now holding the door open in his vest and his starchy shirt. Tall and thin as a knife. His neat parted hair and strict moustache. What a disaster.
I wonder about writing him a note to explain that a joke is not a major offense in my opinion? Or should I just write a dignified sort of apology?
I can’t consult with Ginny because he proposed to her and that means he thinks of her as a worthier person than I am. And I am in such a mood that I would wonder if she was secretly holding that over me. (Even if she turned him down.)
Apr. 4. Wilf did not show up at the Reading Club because some old fellow had a stroke. So I wrote him a note. Tried to make it apologetic but not too humble. This nags at me like anything. Not the note but what I did.
Apr. 12. I got the surprise of my stupid young life answering the door at noon today. Father had just got home and had sat down to dinner and there was Wilf. He never answered the note I wrote him and I had resigned myself that he intended to be disgusted with me forever and all I could do in future was snoot him because I had no choice.
He asked if he had interrupted my dinner.
He could not have done that because I have decided to give up eating dinner until I lose five pounds. While Father and Mrs. Box eat theirs I just shut myself up and have a go at Dante.
I said, no.
He said, well then, how about coming for a drive with him? We could see the ice go out on the river, he said. He went on and explained that he had been up most of the night and had to open the office at one o’clock, which didn’t give him time for a snooze, and the fresh air would revive him better. He didn’t say why he had been up during the night so I figured it was a baby being born and he thought that might embarrass me if he told me.
I said I was just getting started on my day’s stint of reading.
“Give Dante a rest for a while,” he said.
So I got my coat and told Father and we went out and got in his car. We drove out to the North Bridge where several people, mostly men and boys on their lunch hour, had collected to look at the ice. Not such big chunks of it this year with the winter being so late getting started. Still it was knocking up against the bridge supports and grinding away and making a racket the way it usually does with the little streams of water running in between. There was nothing to do but stand and look at this as if you were mesmerized, and my feet got cold. The ice may be breaking but the winter does not seem to have given up yet and spring seems pretty far away. I wondered how on earth some people could stand there and find this entertaining enough to watch for hours.
It didn’t take Wilf long to get tired of it either. We got back in the car and were stumped for conversation, till I took the bull by the horns and asked, did he get my note?
He said yes he had.
I said I really felt like a fool for what I had done (that was true but perhaps more contrite-sounding than I had meant).
He said, “Oh, never mind that.”
He backed the car and we headed into town and he said, “I was hoping to ask you to marry me. Only I wasn’t going to do it like this. I was going to lead up to it more. In a more suitable sort of situation.”
I said, “Do you mean you were hoping to but now you’re not? Or do you mean that you actually are?”
I swear that when I said that I was not egging him on. I really just wanted it clarified.
“I mean I am,” he said.
“Yes” was out of my mouth before I even got over my shock. I don’t know how to explain it. I said yes in a nice polite way but not too eagerly. More like yes, I’d like a cup of tea. I didn’t even act surprised. It seemed as if I had to get us quickly through this moment and then we could just be relaxed and normal. Though the fact was that I had never been exactly relaxed and normal with Wilf. At one time I was rather mystified by him and thought he was both intimidating and comical, and then since my unlucky April Fool’s I have been just stricken with embarrassment. I hope I am not saying that I said yes I’d marry him to get over the embarrassment. I do remember thinking I should take yes back and say I needed time to think it over, but I could hardly do that without landing us both in a worse muddle of embarrassment than ever. And I don’t know what there is for me to think over.
I am engaged to Wilf. I can’t believe it. Is this the way it happens to everybody?
Apr. 14. Wilf came and talked to Father and I went over and talked to Ginny. I came right out and confessed that I felt awkward telling her, then said I hoped she would not feel awkward being my maid of honour. She said of course she wouldn’t and we both got rather emotional and put our arms around each other and had a bit of a sniffle.
“What are fellows compared to friends?” she said.
And I got in one of my devil-may-care moods and told her it was all her fault anyway.
I said I couldn’t stand for the poor man to have had two girls turn him down.
May 30. I have not written in here for so long because I am in a whirlwind of things that have to be done. The wedding is scheduled for July 10. I am getting my dress made by Miss Cornish who drives me crazy standing in my underclothes all stuck together with pins and her barking at me to stay still. It is white marquisette and I am not having a train because I am afraid I would somehow find a way to trip over it. Then a trousseau with half a dozen summer nightgowns and a watered-silk lily-patterned Japanese kimono and three pairs of winter pyjamas, all bought at Simpson’s in Toronto. Apparently pyjamas are not the ideal for your trousseau but nightgowns are no good to keep you warm and I hate them anyway, because they always end up getting tangled around your middle. A bunch of silk slips and other stuff, all peach or “nude.” Ginny says I should stock up while I have the chance, because if there is a War coming in China a lot of silk things will get scarce. She is as usual all up on the news. Her maid of honour’s dress is powder blue.
Yesterday Mrs. Box made the cake. It is supposed to have six weeks to ripen so we are just getting in under the wire. I had to stir it for good luck and the dough was so heavy with fruit I thought my arm would drop off. Ollie was here so he took over and stirred a bit for me when Mrs. B. wasn’t looking. What kind of luck that will bring I do not know.
Ollie is Wilf’s cousin and is visiting here for a couple of months. As Wilf has no brother he—Ollie, that is—is going to be best man. He is seven months older than I am, so it seems as if he and I are still kids in a way Wilf isn’t (I can’t imagine he ever was). He—Ollie—has been in a T. B. Sanatorium for three years but is now better. They collapsed one of his lungs when he was in there. I had heard about this and believed you had to function then with one lung but apparently not. They just collapse it so it can be out of use while they treat it with medication and encyst (not insist) the infection so that it is dormant. (See how I am getting to be quite the medical authority now, being engaged to marry a doctor!) While Wilf explained this Ollie put his hands over his ears. He says he prefers not to think about what was done and pretends to himself he is hollow like a celluloid doll. He is a very opposite person to Wilf but they seem to get along just fine.
We are going to have the cake professionally iced at the bakery, thank God. I don’t think Mrs. Box could stand the strain otherwise.
June 11. Less than a month to go. I should not even be writing here, I should get going on the wedding present lists. I can’t believe all this stuff is going to be mine. Wilf is after me to pick out the wallpaper. I thought the rooms were all plastered and painted white because that was the way he liked them, but it seems he just left them so his wife could pick out the paper. I am afraid I just looked dumbfounded at the job but then I pulled myself together and told him I thought that was very considerate of him but I really could not imagine what I wanted until I was living there. (He must have hoped for it to be all done when we got back from the honeymoon.) So that way I got it put off.
I am still going to the Mill my two days a week. I sort of expected that would continue even after I was married but Father says of course not. He went on as if it wouldn’t be quite legal hiring a married woman unless she was a widow or in bad straits, but I pointed out it was not hiring since he didn’t pay me anyway. Then he said what he had been embarrassed to say at first, that when I was married there would be interruptions.
“Times when you won’t be going out in public,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said, and blushed like an idiot.
So he has got it into his head (Father has) that it would be nice if Ollie would take over what I am doing and he really hopes (Father) that Ollie could work himself into the business and eventually be able to take it all over. Maybe he wished I would marry somebody who could do that—though he thinks Wilf is just dandy. And Ollie being at loose ends and smart and educated (I don’t know exactly where or how much education but obviously knowing more than practically anybody around here), he might seem like an A-one choice. And for this reason I had to take him to the office yesterday and show him the books etc., and Father took him and introduced him to the men and anybody who happened to be around and it looked as if all went well. Ollie was very attentive and put on a serious business air in the office and then he was cheerful and jokey (but not too jokey) with the men, he even changed his way of talking just the right amount, and Father was so pleased and buoyed up. When I said good night to him he said, “I take it as a real stroke of luck that young fellow showing up here. He’s a fellow who is looking for a future and a place to make himself at home.”
And I didn’t contradict but I believe that there is as much chance of Ollie settling down here and running a chopping-mill as there is of me getting into the Ziegfeld Follies.
He just can’t help putting on a nice act.
I was thinking at one time that Ginny would take him off my hands. She is well-read and smokes and though she goes to church her opinions are the kind some people might take for atheistic. And she told me she didn’t think Ollie was bad-looking though he is on the short side (I would say five-eight or nine). He has the blue eyes she likes and the butterscotchcoloured hair with a wave drooping over his forehead, which seems so intentionally charming. He was very nice to her of course when they met and led her on to talk a lot, and after she had gone home he said, “Your little friend is quite the intellectual, isn’t she?”
“Little.” Ginny is at least as tall as he is and I certainly felt like telling him that. But it is pretty mean to point out something concerning height to a man who is a bit lacking in that respect so I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t know what to say about the “intellectual” part of it. In my opinion Ginny is an intellectual (for instance has Ollie read War and Peace?), but I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he meant she was or she wasn’t. All I could tell was that if she was, it wasn’t something he cared for, and if she wasn’t, then she was acting as if she was and he did not care for that either. I should have said something cool and disagreeable, such as, “You’re too deep for me,” but of course did not think of anything till later. And the worst thing was that as soon as he had said that, I had secretly, in my heart, got an inkling of something about Ginny, and while I was defending her (in my thoughts) I was also in some sly way agreeing with him. I don’t know if she will ever seem as smart to me in the future.
Wilf was right there and must have heard the whole exchange but said nothing. I could have asked him if he didn’t feel like sticking up for the girl he had once proposed to, but I have never fully let on to him what I know about that. He often just listens to Ollie and me talk, with his head bent forward (the way he has to do with most people, he is so tall) and a little smile on his face. I’m not even sure it’s a smile or just the way his mouth is. In the evenings they both come over and it often ends up with Father and Wilf playing cribbage and Ollie and me just fooling around talking. Or Wilf and Ollie and me playing three-handed Bridge. (Father has never taken to Bridge because he somehow thinks it’s too High-Hat.) Sometimes Wilf gets a call from the Hospital or Elsie Bainton (his housekeeper whose name I can’t remember—I just had to yell and ask Mrs. Box) and he has to go out. Or sometimes when the crib game is finished he goes and sits at the piano and plays by ear. In the dark, maybe. Father wanders out onto the verandah and sits with Ollie and me and we all rock and listen. It seems then that Wilf is just playing the piano for himself and he isn’t doing a performance for us. It doesn’t bother him if we listen or not or if we start to chat. And sometimes we do that, because it can get to be a bit too classical for Father whose favourite piece is “My Old Kentucky Home.” You can see him getting restless, that kind of music makes him feel that the world is going woozy on him, and for his sake we will start up some conversation. Then he—Father—is the one who will make a point of telling Wilf how we all enjoyed his playing and Wilf says thank-you in a polite absent-minded way. Ollie and I know not to say anything because we know that in this case he does not care about our opinions one way or the other.
One time I caught Ollie singing along very faintly with Wilf’s playing.
“Morning is dawning and Peer Gynt is yawning—”
I whispered, “What?”
“Nothing,” Ollie said. “That’s what he’s playing.”
I made him spell it. P-e-e-r G-y-n-t.
I should learn more about music, it would be something for Wilf and me to have in common.
The weather has suddenly got hot. The peonies are full out as big as babies’ bottoms and the flowers on the spirea bushes are dropping like snow. Mrs. Box goes around saying that if this lasts everything will be dried up by the time of the wedding.
While writing this I have had three cups of coffee and have not even fixed my hair. Mrs. Box says, “You’re going to have to change your ways pretty soon.”
She meant because Elsie Thingamabob has told Wilf she’s going to retire so I can be in charge of the house.
So now I am changing my ways and Good-bye Diary at least for the present. I used to have a feeling something really unusual would occur in my life, and it would be important to have recorded everything. Was that just a feeling?
GIRL IN A MIDDY
“Don’t think you can loll around here,” said Nancy. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Ollie said, “You’re full of surprises.”
This was on a Sunday, and Ollie had rather hoped he could loll around. A thing he didn’t always appreciate, in Nancy, was her energy.
He supposed she’d be needing it soon, for the household that Wilf—in his stolid, ordinary way—was counting on.
After church Wilf had gone straight to the Hospital and Ollie had come back to eat dinner with Nancy and her father. They ate a cold meal on Sundays—Mrs. Box went to her own church on that day and spent the afternoon having a long rest in her own little house. Ollie had helped Nancy tidy up the kitchen. There were some thoroughgoing snores from the dining room.
“Your father,” Ollie said, after glancing in. “He’s asleep in his rocker with the Saturday Evening Post on his knee.”
“He never admits he’s going to sleep Sunday afternoons,” Nancy said, “he always thinks he’s going to read.”
Nancy was wearing an apron that tied around her waist—not the sort of apron worn for serious kitchen work. She took it off and hung it over the doorknob and fluffed up her hair in front of a small mirror by the kitchen door.
“I’m a mess,” she said, in a plaintive, not displeased voice.
“It’s true. I can’t figure out what Wilf sees in you.”
“Look out or I’ll bat you one.”
She led him out the door and around the currant bushes and under the maple tree where—she had already told him two or three times—she used to have her swing. Then along the back lane to the end of the block. Nobody was cutting the grass, this being Sunday. In fact there was nobody out in the backyards at all and the houses had a closed-up, proud, and sheltering look, as if inside every one of them there were dignified people like Nancy’s father, temporarily dead to the world as they took their Well Earned Rest.
This did not mean that the town was entirely quiet. Sunday afternoon was the time that the country people and people from the country villages descended on the beach, which was about a quarter of a mile away at the bottom of a bluff. There was a mixture of shrieks from the water slide and the cries of children ducking and splashing, and car horns and toots of the ice-cream truck and the hollers of young men in a frenzy of showing off and the mothers in a frenzy of anxiety. All of this thrown together in one addled shout.
At the end of the lane, across a poorer, unpaved street, was an empty building that Nancy said was the old icehouse, and beyond that was a vacant lot and a plank bridge over a dry ditch, and then they were on a road just wide enough for one car—or preferably for one horse and buggy. On either side of this road was a wall of thorny bushes with bright little green leaves and a scattering of dry pink flowers. They didn’t let any breeze in and they didn’t provide any shade, and the branches tried to catch his shirtsleeves.
“Wild roses,” Nancy said, when he asked what in tarnation these were.
“I suppose that’s the surprise?”
“You’ll see.”
He was sweltering in this tunnel, and he wished that she would slow down. He was often surprised at the time he spent hanging around this girl, who was not outstanding in any way, except perhaps in being spoiled, saucy, and egotistical. Maybe he liked to disturb her. She was just enough smarter than the general run of girls so that he could do that.
What he could see, at a distance, was the roof of a house, with some proper trees shading it, and since there was no hope of getting any more information out of Nancy he contented himself with hoping they could sit down when they got there, in some place cool.
“Company,” said Nancy. “Might have known.”
A dingy Model T was sitting in the turnaround space at the end of the road.
“Anyway it’s only one,” she said. “And let’s hope they’re nearly through.”
But when they reached the car nobody had come out from the decent one-and-a-half-story house—built of brick that was called “white” in this part of the country and “yellow” where Ollie came from. (It was actually a grimy sort of tan.) There was no hedge—just a dragging wire fence around the yard in which the grass had not been cut. And there was no cement walk leading from the gate up to the door, only a dirt path. Not that this was unusual outside of a town—not many farmers put in a sidewalk, or owned a lawnmower.
Perhaps there had once been flower beds—at least there were white and gold flowers standing up here and there in the long grass. These were daisies, he was pretty sure, but he could not be bothered asking Nancy and possibly listening to her derisive corrections.
Nancy led him through to a genuine relic of more genteel or leisurely days—an unpainted but complete wooden swing, with two facing benches. The grass wasn’t trodden down anywhere near it—apparently it was not much used. It stood in the shade of a couple of the heavy-leaved trees. As soon as Nancy had sat down she sprang up again, and bracing herself between the two benches she began to move this creaky contraption to and fro.
“This’ll let her know we’re here,” she said.
“Let who?”
“Tessa.”
“Is she a friend of yours?”
“Of course.”
“An old-lady friend?” said Ollie, without enthusiasm. He had had plenty of chances to see how prodigal Nancy was with what might have been called—in some girls’ book she might have read and taken to heart, it probably was called—the sunshine of her personality. Her innocent teasing of the old fellows at the mill came to mind.
“We went to school together, Tessa and me. Tessa and I.”
That brought up another thought—the way she had tried to set him up with Ginny.
“And what’s so interesting about her?”
“You’ll see. Oh!”
She jumped off in midswing and ran to a hand pump close to the house. A lot of vigorous pumping started. She had to pump long and hard before any water came. And even then she didn’t seem tired, she kept on pumping for a while before she filled the tin mug that had been waiting on its hook, and carried it, spilling over, to the swing. He thought from the eager look she had that she would offer it at once to him, but in fact she raised it to her own lips and gulped happily.
“It’s not town water,” she said, handing it to him. “It’s well water. It’s delicious.”
She was a girl who would drink untreated water from any old tin mug hanging over a well. (The calamities that had taken place in his own body had made him more aware of such risks than another young man might have been.) She was something of a show-off, of course. But she was truly, naturally reckless and full of some pure conviction that she led a charmed life.
He wouldn’t have said that of himself. Yet he had an idea— he couldn’t have mentioned this without making a joke of it— that he was meant for something unusual, that his life would have some meaning to it. Maybe that was what drew them together. But the difference was that he would go on, he would not settle for less. As she would have to do—as she had already done—being a girl. The thought of choices wider than anything girls ever knew put him suddenly at ease, made him feel compassionate towards her, and playful. There were times when he did not need to ask why he was with her, when teasing her, being teased by her, made the time flow by with sparkling ease.
The water was delicious, and marvellously cold.
“People come to see Tessa,” she said, sitting down across from him. “You never know when there’ll be somebody here.”
“Do they?” he said. The wild idea occurred to him that she might be perverse enough, independent enough, to be friends with a girl who was a semi-pro, a casual rural prostitute. To have remained friends, anyway, with a girl who had turned bad.
She read his thoughts—she was sometimes smart.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything like that. Oh, that is absolutely the worst idea I ever heard. Tessa is the last girl in the world— That’s disgusting. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. She is the last girl— Oh, you’ll see.” Her face had gone quite red.
The door opened, and without any of the usual prolonged good-byes—or any audible good-byes at all—a man and woman, middle-aged, worn but not worn-out, like their car, came along the path, looked towards the swing and saw Nancy and Ollie but didn’t say anything. Oddly enough Nancy didn’t say anything either, didn’t call out any lively greeting. The couple went to opposite sides of the vehicle and got in and drove away.
Then a figure moved out of the doorway’s shadow and Nancy did call out.
“Hey. Tessa.”
The woman was built like a sturdy child. A large head covered with dark curly hair, broad shoulders, stumpy legs. Her legs were bare and she was wearing an odd costume—a middy blouse and skirt. At least it was odd for a hot day, and considering the fact that she was no longer a schoolgirl. Very likely it was an outfit she had once worn at school, and being the saving type she was wearing it out around home. Such clothes never wear out, and in Ollie’s opinion they never flattered a girl’s figure either. She looked clumsy in it, no more and no less than most schoolgirls.
Nancy brought him up and introduced him, and he said to Tessa—in the insinuating way that was usually acceptable to girls—that he had been hearing lots about her.
“He has not,” said Nancy. “Don’t believe a word he says. I just brought him along out here because I didn’t know what to do with him, frankly.”
Tessa’s eyes were heavy-lidded, and not very large, but their color was a surprising deep, soft blue. When she lifted them to look at Ollie they shone out at him without any particular friendliness or animosity, or even curiosity. They were just very deep and sure and they made it impossible for him to go on saying any silly polite things.
“You better come in,” she said, and led the way. “I hope you don’t mind if I finish my churning. I was churning when my last company came and I did stop it, but if I don’t get at it again the butter might go bad on me.”
“Churning on Sunday, what a naughty girl,” said Nancy. “See, Ollie. This is how you make butter. I bet you just thought it came out of a cow ready-made and wrapped up to go in the store. You go ahead,” she said to Tessa. “If you get tired you can let me try it for a while. I just came out to ask you to my wedding, actually.”
“I heard something about that,” Tessa said.
“I’d send you an invitation, but I don’t know if you’d pay any attention to it. I thought I’d better come out here and wring your neck till you said you’d come.”
They had gone straight into the kitchen. The window blinds were down to the sills, a fan stirring the air high overhead. The room smelled of cooking, of saucers of fly poison, of coal oil, of dishcloths. All these smells might have been in the walls and floorboards for decades. But somebody—no doubt the heavy-breathing, almost grunting girl at the churn—had gone to the trouble of painting the cupboards and doors robin’s-egg blue.
Newspapers were spread around the churn to save the floor, which was worn into hollows on the regular traffic routes around the table and stove. Ollie would have been gallant enough with most farm girls to ask if he could have a go at the churning, but in this case he didn’t feel quite sure of himself. She didn’t seem a sullen girl, this Tessa, just old for her years, dishearteningly straightforward and self-contained. Even Nancy quieted down, after a while, in her presence.
The butter came. Nancy jumped up to take a look at it, and called on him to do the same. He was surprised at the pale color of it, hardly yellow at all, but he didn’t say anything, supposing Nancy would chide him for ignorance. Then the two girls set the sticky pale lump on a cloth on the table and beat it down with wooden paddles and wrapped the cloth all around it. Tessa lifted a door in the floor and the two of them carried it down some cellar steps he wouldn’t have known were there. Nancy gave a shriek as she almost lost her footing. He had an idea that Tessa could have managed better by herself but that she did not mind giving Nancy some privileges, such as you would give to a pesky, charming child. She let Nancy tidy up the papers on the floor while she herself opened the bottles of lemonade she brought up from the cellar. She got a chunk of ice from a corner icebox, washed some sawdust off it and bashed it up with a hammer, in the sink, so that she could drop some into their glasses. There again he didn’t try to help.
“Now Tessa,” said Nancy, after a gulp of lemonade. “Now it’s time. Do me a favor. Please do.”
Tessa drank her lemonade.
“Tell Ollie,” Nancy said. “Tell him what he’s got in his pockets. Start with the right one.”
Tessa said, without looking up, “Well, I expect he’s got his wallet.”
“Oh, go on,” said Nancy.
“Well, she’s right,” said Ollie. “I’ve got my wallet. Now does she have to guess what’s in it? Because there isn’t much.”
“Never mind that,” said Nancy. “Tell him what else, Tessa. In his right pocket.”
“What is this, anyway?” said Ollie.
“Tessa,” said Nancy sweetly. “Come on, Tessa, you know me. Remember we’re old friends, we’re friends since the first room of school. Just do it for me.”
“Is this some game?” said Ollie. “Is this some game you thought up between the two of you?”
Nancy laughed at him.
“What’s the matter,” she said. “What have you got that you’re ashamed of? Have you a smelly old sock?”
“A pencil,” said Tessa, very quietly. “Some money. Coins. I can’t tell what value. A piece of paper with some writing on it? Some printing?”
“Clean it out, Ollie,” cried Nancy. “Clean it out.”
“Oh, and a stick of gum,” said Tessa. “I think a stick of gum. That’s all.”
The gum was unwrapped and covered with lint.
“I’d forgotten that was there,” said Ollie, though he hadn’t. Out came the stub of a pencil, some nickels and coppers, a folded-up, worn clipping from a newspaper.
“Somebody gave me that,” he said, as Nancy snatched it up and unfolded it.
“We are in the market for original manuscripts of superior quality, both poetry and prose,” she read aloud. “Serious consideration will be given—”
Ollie had grabbed it out of her hand.
“Somebody gave me that. They wanted my opinion, whether I thought it was a valid outfit.”
“Oh, Ollie.”
“I didn’t even know it was still there. Same with the gum.”
“Aren’t you surprised?”
“Of course I am. I’d forgotten.”
“Aren’t you surprised at Tessa? What she knew?”
Ollie managed a smile for Tessa, though he was hotly disturbed. It was not her fault.
“It’s what a lot of fellows would have in their pockets,” he said. “Coins? Naturally. Pencil—”
“Gum?” said Nancy.
“Possible.”
“And the paper with the printing. She said printing.”
“She said a piece of paper. She didn’t know what was on it. You didn’t, did you?” he said to Tessa.
She shook her head. She looked towards the door, listening.
“I think there’s a car in the lane.”
She was right. They all heard it now. Nancy went to peek through the curtain and at that moment Tessa gave Ollie an unexpected smile. It was not a smile of complicity or apology or the usual coquetry. It might have been a smile of welcome, but without any explicit invitation. It was just the offering of some warmth, some easy spirit in her. And at the same time there was a movement of her wide shoulders, a peaceable settling there, as if the smile was spreading through her whole self.
“Oh, shoot,” said Nancy. But she had to get control of her excitement and Ollie of his off-kilter attraction and surprise.
Tessa opened the door just as a man was getting out of the car. He waited by the gate for Nancy and Ollie to come down the path. He was probably in his sixties, thick-shouldered, serious-faced, wearing a pale summer suit and a Christie hat. His car was a new-model coupe. He nodded to Nancy and Ollie with the brief respect and deliberate lack of curiosity he might have shown if he was holding the door for them as they came out of a doctor’s office.
Tessa’s door was not long shut behind him when another car appeared at the far end of the lane.
“Lineup,” Nancy said. “Sunday afternoon is busy. In summer, anyway. People come from miles away to see her.”
“So she can tell them what they’ve got in their pockets?”
Nancy let that pass.
“Mostly asking her about things that are lost. Valuable things. Anyway, to them valuable.”
“Does she charge?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She must.”
“Why must she?”
“Isn’t she poor?”
“She’s not starving.”
“Maybe she doesn’t very often get it right.”
“Well, I think she must, or people wouldn’t keep coming to see her, would they?”
The tone of their conversation changed as they walked along between the rosebushes in the bright airless tunnel. They wiped sweat from their faces, and lost the energy to snipe at each other.
Ollie said, “I don’t understand it.”
Nancy said, “I don’t know if anybody does. It isn’t just things that people lose, either. She has located bodies.”
“Bodies?”
“There was a man who they thought walked out the railway track and was caught in a snowstorm and froze to death and they couldn’t find him, and she told them, look down by the lake at the bottom of the cliff. And sure enough. Not the railway track at all. And once a cow that had gone missing, she told them it was drowned.”
“So?” said Ollie. “If that’s true, why hasn’t anybody investigated? I mean, scientifically?”
“It’s perfectly true.”
“I don’t mean I don’t trust her. But I want to know how she does it. Didn’t you ever ask her?”
Nancy surprised him. “Wouldn’t that be rude?” she said.
Now she was the one who seemed to have had enough of the conversation.
“So,” he insisted, “was she seeing things when she was a kid at school?”
“No. I don’t know. Not that she ever let on.”
“Was she just like everybody else?”
“She wasn’t exactly like everybody else. But who is? I mean, I never thought I was. Or Ginny didn’t think she was. With Tessa it was just that she lived out where she did and she had to milk the cow before she came to school in the morning, which none of the rest of us did. I always tried to be friends with her.”
“I’m sure,” said Ollie mildly.
She went on as if she hadn’t heard.
“I think it started, though—I think it must have started when she was sick. Our second year in high school she got sick, she had seizures. She quit school and she never came back, and that’s when she sort of fell out of things.”
“Seizures,” said Ollie. “Epileptic fits?”
“I never heard that. Oh”—she turned away from him— “I’ve been really disgusting.”
Ollie stopped walking. He said, “Why?”
Nancy stopped too.
“I took you out there on purpose to show you we had something special here. Her. Tessa. I mean, to show you Tessa.”
“Yes. Well?”
“Because you don’t think we have anything here worth noticing. You think we’re only worth making fun of. All of us around here. So I was going to show her to you. Like a freak.”
“Freak is not a word I would use about her.”
“That was my intention, though. I should have my head kicked in.”
“Not quite.”
“I should go and beg her pardon.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
That evening Ollie helped Nancy set out a cold supper. Mrs. Box had left a cooked chicken and jellied salads in the fridge, and Nancy had made an angel food cake on Saturday, to be served with strawberries. They set everything out on the verandah that got the afternoon shade. Between the main course and the dessert Ollie carried the plates and salad dishes back to the kitchen.
Out of the blue he said, “I wonder if any of them think to bring her some treat or other? Like chicken or strawberries?”
Nancy was dipping the best-looking berries in fruit sugar. After a moment she said, “Sorry?”
“That girl. Tessa.”
“Oh,” said Nancy. “She’s got chickens, she could kill one if she wanted to. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got a berry patch too. They mostly do, in the country.”
Her burst of contrition on the way back had done her good, and now it was over.
“It’s not just that she isn’t a freak,” said Ollie. “It’s that she doesn’t think of herself as a freak.”
“Well of course not.”
“She’s content to be whatever she is. She has remarkable eyes.”
Nancy called to Wilf to ask if he wanted to play the piano while she was fussing around getting the dessert out.
“I have to whip the cream, and in this weather it will take forever.”
Wilf said they could wait, he was tired.
He did play, though, later when the dishes were done and it was getting dark. Nancy’s father did not go to the evening church service—he thought it was too much to ask—but he did not allow any sort of card game or board game on Sunday. He looked through the Post again, while Wilf played. Nancy sat on the verandah steps, out of his sight, and smoked a cigarette which she hoped her father would not smell.
“When I’m married—,” she said to Ollie, who was leaning against the railing, “when I am married I’ll smoke whenever I like.”
Ollie, of course, was not smoking, because of his lungs.
He laughed. He said, “Now now. Is that a good enough reason?”
Wilf was playing, by ear, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”
“He’s good,” said Ollie. “He’s got good hands. But the girls used to say they were cold.”
He was not thinking, however, of Wilf or Nancy or their sort of marriage. He was thinking of Tessa, of her oddity and composure. Wondering what she was doing on this long hot evening at the end of her wild-rose lane. Did she still have callers, was she still busy solving the problems of people’s lives? Or did she go out and sit on the swing, and creak back and forth, with no company but the rising moon?
He was to discover, in a little while, that she spent the evenings carrying pails of water from the pump to her tomato plants, and hilling up the beans and potatoes, and that if he wanted to get any chance of talking to her, this would have to be his occupation as well.
During that time Nancy would get more and more wrapped up in the wedding preparations, without a thought to spare for Tessa, and hardly any for him, except to remark once or twice that he never seemed to be around now, when she needed him.
April 29. Dear Ollie,
I have been thinking we would hear from you ever since we got back from Quebec City, and was surprised that we didn’t (not even at Christmas!), but then I guess I could say I found out why—I have started several times to write but had to delay till I got my feelings in order. I could say I suppose that the article or story or whatever you call it in Saturday Night was well-written and it is a feather in your cap I am sure to get into a magazine. Father does not like the reference to a “little” lake port and would like to remind you that this is the best and busiest harbour on this side of Lake Huron and I am not sure I like the word “prosaic.” I don’t know if this is any more a prosaic place than anywhere else and what do you expect it to be— poetic?
The main problem however is Tessa and what this will do to her life. I don’t imagine you thought of that. I have not been able to get her on the phone and I cannot get behind the wheel of a car too comfortably (reasons I will leave to your imagination) to go out and see her. Anyway from what I hear she is swamped with people coming and it is the worst possible time for cars to get in where she lives and the wreckers have been hauling people out of the ditch (for which they don’t get any thanks, just a lecture on our backward conditions). The road is an awful mess, getting chewed up past repair. The wild roses will certainly be a thing of the past. Already the township council is in an uproar as to how much this will end up costing and a lot of people are very mad because they think Tessa was behind all the publicity and is raking in the money. They don’t believe she is doing it all for nothing and if anybody made money out of this it is you. I am quoting Father when I say that—I know you are not a mercenary-minded person. For you it is all the glory of getting into print. Forgive me if that strikes you as sarcastic. It is fine to be ambitious but what about other people?
Well maybe you were expecting a letter of congratulations but I hope you will excuse me, I just had to get this off my chest.
Just one additional thing though. I want to ask you, were you thinking the whole time about writing that? Now I hear you were back and forth there to Tessa’s several times on your own. You never mentioned that to me or asked me to go with you. You never indicated that you were getting Material (I believe that is how you would refer to it), and as far as I can recall you tossed off the whole experience in quite a snippy way. And in your whole piece there is not one word about how I took you there or introduced you to Tessa. There is no recognition of that at all, any more than there has been any private recognition or thanks. And I wonder how honest you were to Tessa about your intentions or if you asked her permission to exercise— I am quoting you now—your Scientific Curiosity? Did you explain what you were doing to her? Or did you just come and go and make use of us Prosaic People here to embark on your Career as a Writer?
Well good luck Ollie, I don’t expect to hear from you again. (Not that we ever had the honour of hearing from you once.)
Your cousin-in-law, Nancy.
Dear Nancy,
Nancy I must say that I think you are getting your tail in a spin over nothing. Tessa was bound to be discovered and “written up” by somebody, and why should that somebody not be me? The idea of writing the piece took shape in my mind only gradually as I went to talk to her. And I was quite truly acting out of my Scientific Curiosity, which is one thing I would never apologize for in my nature. You seem to think that I should have asked your permission or kept you informed of all my plans and movements, at a time when you were running around in the most monumental flap about your wedding dress and your showers and how many silver platters you were receiving or God knows what.
As for Tessa, you are quite mistaken if you think that I have forgotten about her now that the article has appeared or have not considered what this will do to her life. And actually I have had a note from her which does not indicate that things are in such a turmoil as you have described. At any rate she will not have to put up with her life there for long. I am in touch with some people who read the article and are very interested. There is research of a legitimate nature being done into these matters, some here but mostly in the States. I think that there is more money available to spend on this sort of thing and more genuine interest over the border so I am investigating certain possibilities there—for Tessa as a research subject and for me as a scientific journalist along these lines—in Boston or in Baltimore or perhaps North Carolina.
I am sorry you should think so harshly of me. You don’t mention—except for one veiled (happy?) announcement— how married life is going for you. Not a word about Wilf, but I imagine you took him along to Quebec City with you and I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I hope he is flourishing as ever. Yours, Ollie.
Dear Tessa,
Apparently you have had your phone disconnected, which may have been necessary with all the celebrity you are enjoying. I don’t mean that to sound catty. Often things come out these days in a way I do not mean them to. I am expecting a baby—I don’t know if you have heard—and it seems to make me very touchy and jumpy.
I imagine you are having a very busy and confusing time, with all the people who are now coming to see you. It must be difficult to get on with your normal routine. If you get a chance it would be very nice to see you. So this is an invitation really to drop in and see me if you ever get to town (I heard in the store that you now get all your groceries delivered). You have never seen the inside of my new—I mean newly decorated and new to me—house. Or even my old house, now that I come to think of it—it was always me running out to see you. And not so often as I would have liked to, either. Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do? Remember us beating down the butter with the old wooden paddles? I enjoyed it. That was when I brought Ollie to see you and I hope you do not regret it.
Now Tessa I hope you don’t think I am meddling or sticking my nose in where I have no business, but Ollie has mentioned to me in a letter that he is in touch with some people who are doing research or something in the States. I suppose he has been in touch with you about this. I do not know what kind of research he means but I must say that when I read that part of his letter it made my blood run cold. I just feel in my heart it is not a good thing for you to leave here—if that is what you are thinking about—and go where nobody knows you or thinks of you as a friend or normal person. I just felt I had to tell you this.
Another thing I feel I have to tell you though I don’t know how to. It is this. Ollie is certainly not a bad person but he has an effect—and now I think of it, not just on women but on men too—and it is not that he does not know about this but that he does not exactly take responsibility for it. To put it frankly, I cannot think of any worse fate than falling in love with him. He seems to think of teaming up with you in some way to write about you or these experiments or whatever goes on and he will be very friendly and natural but you might mistake the way he acts for something more than it is. Please don’t be mad at me for saying this. Come to see me. xxx Nancy.
Dear Nancy,
Please do not worry about me. Ollie has kept in touch with me about everything. By the time you get this note we will be married and may already be in the States. I am sorry not to get to see the inside of your new house. Yours truly, Tessa.
A HOLE IN THE HEAD
The hills in central Michigan are covered with oak forests. Nancy’s one and only visit there took place in the fall of 1968, after the oak leaves had changed color, but while they still hung on the trees. She was used to hardwood bush lots, not forests, with a great many maples, whose autumn colors were red and gold. The darker colors, the rusts or wines, of the big oak leaves did not lift her spirits, even in the sunlight.
The hill where the private hospital was located was entirely bare of trees, and a distance away from any town or village or even any inhabited farm. It was the sort of building you used to see “made over” into a hospital in some small towns, after being the grand house of an important family who had all died off or couldn’t keep it up. Two sets of bay windows on either side of the front door, dormers all the way across on the third story. Old grimy brick, and a lack of any shrubs or hedges or apple orchard, just the shaved grass and a gravel parking lot.
No place for anybody to hide if they ever had a notion of running away.
Such a thought would not have occurred to her—or not so quickly—in the days before Wilf got sick.
She parked her car beside a few others, wondering if these belonged to the staff or visitors. How many visitors would come to such an isolated place?
You had to climb a number of steps to read the sign on the front door, which advised you to go around to the side door. Close up, she saw bars on some windows. Not on the bay windows—which were, however, without curtains—but on some windows above and some below, in what would be a partly aboveground cellar.
The door that she had been advised to go to opened on that low level. She rang the bell, then knocked, then tried the bell again. She thought she could hear it ringing, but she wasn’t sure because there was a great clatter inside. She tried the doorknob, and to her surprise—in view of the bars on the windows—it opened. There she was on the threshold of the kitchen, the big busy kitchen of an institution, where a lot of people were washing up and clearing away after lunch.
The kitchen windows were bare. The ceiling was high, amplifying the noise, and the walls and cupboards were all painted white. A number of lights were turned on, though the light of the clear fall day was at its height.
She was noticed at once, of course. But nobody seemed in a hurry to greet her and find out what she was doing there.
She recognized something else. Along with the hard pressure of the light and the noise, there was the same feeling she got now in her own house, and that other people coming into her house must be aware of even more strongly.
The feeling of something being out of kilter, in a way that could not be fixed or altered but only resisted, as well as you could. Some people entering such places give up immediately, they do not know how to resist, they are outraged or frightened, they have to flee.
A man in a white apron came pushing a cart with a garbage can in it. She could not tell whether he had come to greet her or was just crossing her path, but he was smiling, he seemed amiable, so she told him who she was and who she had come to see. He listened, nodded several times, smiled more broadly, began to wag his head and pat his fingers against his mouth—to show her that he could not speak or was forbidden to do so, as in some game, and continued on his way, bumping the cart down a ramp to a lower cellar.
He would be an inmate, not an employee. It must be the sort of place where people were put to work, if they could work. The idea being that it would be good for them, and maybe it was.
Finally came a responsible-looking person, a woman of about Nancy’s own age in a dark suit—not wearing the white apron that enfolded most of the rest of them—and Nancy told everything again. That she had received a letter, her name having been given by an inmate—by a resident, as they wanted you to say—as the person to be contacted.
She had been right in thinking that the people in the kitchen were not hired help.
“But they seem to like working here,” the Matron said. “They take a pride.” Smiling a warning left and right, she led Nancy into her office, which was a room off the kitchen. It became clear as they were talking that she had to deal with all sorts of interruptions, making decisions about kitchen work and settling complaints whenever somebody bundled into a white apron came peering around the door. She must also have to handle the files, the bills or notices that were stuck in a rather unbusinesslike way on hooks around the walls. As well as dealing with visitors like Nancy.
“We went through what old records we had and got out the names that were given as relatives—”
“I am not a relative,” said Nancy.
“Or whatever, and we wrote letters like the one you received, just to get some guidelines on the way they might want these cases handled. I must say we haven’t had many responses. It was good of you to drive all this way.”
Nancy asked what was meant by these cases.
The Matron said that people had been here for years who perhaps didn’t belong here.
“You must understand that I am new here,” she said, “but I will tell you what I know.”
According to her the place had been a catchall, literally, for those who were genuinely mentally ill, or senile, or those who would never develop normally, one way or another, or people whose families could not or would not cope with them. There had always been, and still was, a wide range. The serious problems were all in the north wing, under security.
Originally this had been a private hospital, owned and run by a doctor. After he died, the family—the doctor’s family—took it over, and it turned out that they had their own ways of doing things. It had been partly turned into a charity hospital and there were some unusual arrangements made to get subsidies for charity patients who were not proper charity cases at all. Some of those still on the books had actually passed away and some did not have the proper claim or records to be here. Many of those, of course, worked for their keep and this may have been—it was—usually good for their morale, but it was nevertheless all irregular and against the law.
And now, the thing was that there had been a thorough investigation and the whole place was being closed down. The building was antiquated anyway. Its capacity was too small, this was not the way things were done now. The serious cases were going to a big facility in Flint or Lansing—it wasn’t quite definite yet—and some could go into sheltered housing, group homes, as the new trend was, and then there were some who could manage if they were placed with relatives.
Tessa was considered to be one of these. It seemed that she had needed some electrical treatments when she came in, but for a long time now she had been on just the mildest medication.
“Shock treatments?” Nancy said.
“Perhaps shock therapy,” the Matron said, as if that made some special difference. “You say you are not a relative. That means you don’t intend to take her.”
“I have a husband—” said Nancy. “I have a husband who is—he would be in a place like this, I guess, but I am looking after him at home.”
“Oh. Really,” the Matron said, with a sigh that was not disbelieving, but not sympathetic either. “And a problem is that apparently she is not even a citizen. She herself does not think she is—so I suppose you are not interested now in seeing her?”
“Yes,” said Nancy. “Yes, I am. That’s what I came for.”
“Oh. Well. She is just around the corner, in the bakery. She’s been baking here for years. I think there was a baker hired at first, but when he left they never hired anybody else, they didn’t have to, with Tessa.”
As she stood up she said, “Now. You may want me to look in, after a while, and say there is something I’d like to speak to you about. Then you can make your getaway. Tessa is quite smart and she knows the way the wind is blowing and she could be upset to see you leave without her. So I’ll give you an opportunity just to slip away.”
Tessa wasn’t entirely gray. Her curls were held back in a tight net, showing her forehead unwrinkled, shining, even broader and higher and whiter than it used to be. Her figure had broadened, too. She had big breasts that looked as stiff as boulders, sheathed in her white baker’s garb, and in spite of this burden, in spite of her position at the moment—bent over a table, rolling out a great flap of dough—her shoulders were square and stately.
She was alone in the bakery, except for a tall, thin, finefeatured girl—no, a woman—whose pretty face was constantly twitching into bizarre grimaces.
“Oh, Nancy. It’s you,” said Tessa. She spoke quite naturally, though with the gallant catch of breath, the involuntary intimacy, of those who carry a noble load of flesh on their bones. “Stop that, Elinor. Don’t be silly. You go get my friend a chair.”
Seeing that Nancy meant to embrace her, as people did now, she was flustered. “Oh, I’m all over flour. And for another thing, Elinor might bite you. Elinor doesn’t like when people get too friendly with me.”
Elinor had returned in a hurry with a chair. Nancy made a point then of looking into her face and speaking nicely.
“Thank you very much, Elinor.”
“She doesn’t talk,” said Tessa. “She’s my good helper, though. I couldn’t manage without her, could I, Elinor?”
“Well,” said Nancy. “I am surprised you knew me. I’ve withered quite a bit since olden times.”
“Yes,” said Tessa. “I wondered if you would come.”
“I could even have been dead, I suppose. Do you remember Ginny Ross? She’s dead.”
“Yes.”
Piecrust, was what Tessa was making. She cut out a round of dough and slapped it into a tin pie plate, and held it aloft, expertly turning it on one hand and cutting it with a knife held in the other. She did this rapidly several times.
She said, “Wilf’s not dead?”
“No, he’s not. But he’s gone a bit round the bend, Tessa.” Too late, Nancy realized that this had not been a tactful thing to say, and she tried to insert a lighter note. “He’s taken up some strange ways, poor Wolfie.” Years ago she had tried calling Wilf Wolfie, thinking that the name suited his long jaw and thin moustache and bright stern eyes. But he did not like it, he suspected mockery, so she had stopped. Now he didn’t mind, and just to say the name made her feel more bright and tender towards him, which was a help under the present circumstances.
“For instance, he’s taken a scunner against rugs.”
“Rugs?”
“He walks around the room like this,” said Nancy, drawing a rectangle in the air. “I had to move the furniture away from the walls. Around and around and around.” Unexpectedly and somehow apologetically, she laughed.
“Oh, there’s some in here that do that,” said Tessa with a nod, an insider’s air of confirmation. “They don’t want anything to get between them and the wall.”
“And he’s very dependent. It’s Where’s Nancy? all the time. I’m the only one he trusts these days.”
“Is he violent?” Tessa spoke again, as a professional, a connoisseur.
“No. He’s suspicious, though. He thinks people are coming in and hiding things on him. He thinks somebody goes around changing the clocks and even the day on the newspaper. Then he’ll snap out of it when I mention somebody’s medical problem and do a spot-on diagnosis. The mind’s a weird piece of business.”
There. Another nice lapse of tact.
“He’s mixed up, but he’s not violent.”
“That’s good.”
Tessa set the pie plate down and began to ladle filling into it from a large, no-brand tin labelled Blueberry. The filling looked rather thin and glutinous.
“Here. Elinor,” she said. “Here’s your scraps.”
Elinor had been standing just behind Nancy’s chair—Nancy had been careful not to turn around and look. Now Elinor slid around the bake table without glancing up and began to mold together the pieces of dough that the knife had cut away.
“That man is dead, though,” Tessa said. “I know that much.”
“What man are you talking about?”
“That man. That friend of yours.”
“Ollie? You mean Ollie’s dead?”
“Don’t you know that?” Tessa said.
“No. No.”
“I thought you would’ve known. Didn’t Wilf know?”
“Doesn’t Wilf know,” said Nancy in an automatic way, defending her husband by placing him amongst the living.
“I thought he would,” said Tessa. “Weren’t they related?”
Nancy did not answer. Of course she should have thought of Ollie’s being dead if Tessa was here.
“I guess he kept it to himself then,” Tessa said.
“Wilf was always good at that,” said Nancy. “Where did this happen? Were you with him?”
Tessa wagged her head to say No, or that she didn’t know.
“Well when? What did they tell you?”
“Nobody told me. They never would tell me anything.”
“Oh, Tessa.”
“I had a hole in my head. I had it for a long time.”
“Is it like you used to know things?” said Nancy. “You remember the way?”
“They gave me gas.”
“Who?” said Nancy sternly. “What do you mean they gave you gas?”
“The ones in charge here. They gave me the needles.”
“You said gas.”
“They gave me the needles and the gas too. It was to cure my head. And to make me not remember. Certain things I do remember, but I have trouble with telling how long ago. There was that hole in my head for a very long time.”
“Did Ollie die before you came in here or after? You don’t remember how he died?”
“Oh, I saw him. He had his head wrapped up in a black coat. Tied with a cord around the neck. Somebody did it to him.” Her lips for a moment were clamped together. “Somebody should have gone to the electric chair.”
“Maybe that was a bad dream you had. You might have got your dream mixed up with what really happened.”
Tessa lifted her chin as if to settle something. “Not that. I haven’t got that mixed up.”
The shock treatments, Nancy thought. Shock treatments left holes in the memory? There would have to be something in the records. She would go and talk to the Matron again.
She looked at what Elinor was doing with the discarded bits of dough. She had molded them cleverly, sticking heads and ears and tails onto them. Little dough mice.
With a sharp swift motion, Tessa made air slits in the top crusts of the pies. The mice went into the oven with them, on their own tin plate.
Then Tessa held out her hands, and stood waiting while Elinor got a small damp towel to wipe away any sticky dough or dusting of flour.
“Chair,” said Tessa in an undertone, and Elinor brought a chair and placed it at the end of the table, near Nancy’s, so that Tessa could sit down.
“And maybe you could go and make us a cup of tea,” Tessa said. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye on your treats. We’ll watch your mousies.
“Let’s forget all we were talking about,” she said to Nancy. “Weren’t you going to have a baby, the last I heard from you? Was it a boy or a girl?”
“A boy,” said Nancy. “That was years and years ago. And after that I had two girls. They’re all grown-up now.”
“You don’t notice in here how time goes by. That may be a blessing or it may not, I don’t know. What are they doing then?”
“The boy—”
“What did you call him?”
“Alan. He went in for medicine too.”
“He’s a doctor. That’s good.”
“The girls are both married. Well, Alan’s married too.”
“So what are their names? The girls’?”
“Susan and Patricia. They both took up nursing.”
“You chose nice names.”
Tea was brought—the kettle must be kept on the boil here all the time—and Tessa poured.
“Not the best china in the world,” she said, reserving for herself a slightly chipped cup.
“It’s fine,” said Nancy. “Tessa. Do you remember what you used to be able to do? You used to be able to—you used to know things. When people lost things, you used to be able to tell them where they were.”
“Oh no,” Tessa said. “I just pretended.”
“You couldn’t have.”
“It bothers my head to talk about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
The Matron had appeared in the doorway.
“I don’t want to disturb you having your tea,” she said to Nancy. “But if you wouldn’t mind popping into my room for just a minute when you’re finished—”
Tessa hardly waited until the woman was out of earshot.
“That’s so you won’t have to say good-bye to me,” she said. She seemed to be settling into appreciation of a familiar joke. “It’s that trick of hers. Everybody knows about it. I knew you hadn’t come to take me away. How could you?”
“It’s not anything to do with you, Tessa. It’s just that I’ve got Wilf.”
“That’s right.”
“He deserves something. He’s been a good husband to me, just as good as he could be. I made a vow to myself that he wouldn’t have to go into an institution.”
“No. Not into an institution,” Tessa said.
“Oh. What a stupid thing to say.”
Tessa was smiling, and Nancy saw in that smile the same thing that had puzzled her years ago. Not exactly superiority, but an extraordinary, unwarranted benevolence.
“You were good to come to see me, Nancy. You can see I’ve kept my health. That’s something. You better pop in and see the woman.”
“I don’t have any intention of popping in to see her,” said Nancy. “I’m not going to sneak out. I fully intend to say good-bye to you.”
So now there was no way she could ask the Matron anything about what Tessa had told her, and she didn’t know if she should ask, anyway—it seemed like sneaking around behind Tessa’s back, and it might bring some reprisal. What could bring reprisals, in a place like this, you could never know.
“Well, don’t say good-bye till you’ve had one of Elinor’s mice. Elinor’s blind mice. She wants you to. She likes you now. And don’t worry—I make sure she keeps her hands good and clean.”
Nancy ate the mouse, and told Elinor that it was very good. Elinor consented to shake hands with her, and then Tessa did the same.
“If he wasn’t dead,” said Tessa in quite a robust and reasonable tone, “why wouldn’t he have come here and got me? He said he would.”
Nancy nodded. “I’ll write to you,” she said.
And she meant to, truly, but Wilf became such a care as soon as she got home, and the whole visit to Michigan became so disturbing, and yet unreal, in her mind, that she never did.
A SQUARE, A CIRCLE, A STAR
One late summer day in the early seventies, a woman was walking around Vancouver, a city she had never visited before and so far as she knew would never see again. She had walked from her downtown hotel across the Burrard Street Bridge, and after a while found herself on Fourth Avenue. At this time Fourth Avenue was a street given over to small shops selling incense, crystals, huge paper flowers, Salvador Dali and White Rabbit posters, also cheap clothes, either bright and flimsy or earth-colored and as heavy as blankets, made in poor and legendary parts of the world. The music played inside these shops assaulted you—it seemed almost to knock you over—as you went by. So did the sweetish foreign smells, and the indolent presence of boys and girls, or young men and women, who had practically set up house on the sidewalk. The woman had heard and read about this youth culture, as she believed it was called. It had been in evidence for some years now and in fact was supposed to be on the wane. But she had never had to make her way through such a concentration of it or found herself, as it seemed, all on her own in the middle of it.
She was sixty-seven years old, she was so lean that her hips and bosom had practically disappeared, and she walked with a bold gait, head thrust forward and turning from side to side in a challenging, inquisitive way.
There did not seem to be a person within three decades of her age anywhere in sight.
A boy and girl approached her with a solemnity that nevertheless seemed slightly goofy. They had circlets of braided ribbon around their heads. They wanted her to buy a tiny scroll of paper.
She asked if it contained her fortune.
“Perhaps,” the girl said.
The boy said, reprovingly, “It contains wisdom.”
“Oh, in that case,” said Nancy, and put a dollar into an outstretched embroidered cap.
“Now, tell me your names,” she said, with a grin that she could not suppress and that was not returned.
“Adam and Eve,” the girl said, as she took up the bill and tucked it away in some part of her drapery.
“Adam and Eve and Pinch-me-tight,” said Nancy. “Went down to the river on Saturday night . . .”
But the pair withdrew, in profound disdain and weariness.
So much for that. She walked on.
Is there any law against my being here?
A hole-in-the-wall cafe had a sign in the window. She had not eaten since breakfast at the hotel. It was now after four o’clock. She stopped to read what they were advertising.
Bless the grass. And behind these scrawled words there was an angry-looking, wrinkled-up, almost teary creature with thin hair blowing back from her cheeks and forehead. Dry-looking pale reddish-brown hair. Always go lighter than your own color, the hairdresser had said. Her own color was dark, dark brown, nearly black.
No, it wasn’t. Her own color now was white.
It happens only a few times in your life—at least it’s only a few times if you’re a woman—that you come upon yourself like this, with no preparation. It was as bad as those dreams in which she might find herself walking down the street in her night-gown, or nonchalantly wearing only the top of her pajamas.
During the past ten or fifteen years she had certainly taken time out to observe her own face in a harsh light so that she could better see what makeup could do, or decide whether the time had definitely come to start coloring her hair. But she had never had a jolt like this, a moment during which she saw not just some old and new trouble spots, or some decline that could not be ignored any longer, but a complete stranger.
Somebody she didn’t know and wouldn’t want to know.
She smoothed out her expression immediately, of course, and there was an improvement. You could say then that she recognized herself. And she promptly began to cast around for hope, as if there was not a minute to lose. She needed to spray her hair so it wouldn’t blow off her face like that. She needed a more definite shade of lipstick. Bright coral, which you could hardly ever find now, instead of this nearly naked, more fashionable, and dreary pinkish brown. Determination to find what she needed at once turned her around—she had seen a drugstore three or four blocks back—and a desire not to have to pass by Adam-and-Eve again made her cross the street.
If this had not happened, the meeting would never have taken place.
Another old person was coming along the sidewalk. A man, not tall, but upright and muscular, bald to the crown of his head, where there was a frill of fine white hair, blowing every which way just as hers did. An open-necked denim shirt, old jacket and pants. Nothing that made him look as if he was trying to resemble the young men on the street—no ponytail or kerchief or jeans. And yet he could never have been mistaken for the sort of man she had been seeing daily for the last couple of weeks.
She knew almost right away. It was Ollie. But she stopped dead, having a considerable reason for believing that this could not be true.
Ollie. Alive. Ollie.
And he said, “Nancy!”
The expression on her face (once she got over a moment of terror, which he didn’t seem to notice) must be pretty much the same as the expression on his. Incredulity, hilarity, apology.
What was the apology about? The fact that they had not parted as friends, that they had never been in touch with each other in all these years? Or for the changes that had taken place in each of them, the way they had to present themselves now, no hope for it.
Nancy had more reason to be shocked than he had, surely. But she would not bring that up for a moment. Not until they got their bearings.
“I’m just here overnight,” she said. “I mean, last night and tonight. I’ve been on a cruise to Alaska. With all the other old widows. Wilf is dead, you know. He’s been dead for nearly a year. I’m starving. I’ve been walking and walking. I hardly know how I got here.”
And she added, quite foolishly, “I didn’t know you lived here.” Because she hadn’t thought of his living anywhere. But she hadn’t been absolutely sure of his being dead, either. As far as she could make out, Wilf hadn’t had any news of that kind. Though she could not get much out of Wilf, he had slipped out of reach, even during the short time she had been on that jaunt to see Tessa in Michigan.
Ollie was saying that he didn’t live in Vancouver, he too was in town just briefly. He had come for a medical thing, at the hospital, just a routine sort of thing. He lived on Texada Island. Where that was, he said, was too complicated to explain. Enough to say that it took three boats, three ferries, to get there from here.
He led her to a dirty white Volkswagen van, parked on a side street, and they drove to a restaurant. The van smelled of the ocean, she thought, of seaweed and fish and rubber. And it turned out that fish was what he ate now, never meat. The restaurant, which had no more than half a dozen little tables, was Japanese. A Japanese boy with the sweetly downcast face of a young priest was chopping fish at a terrifying speed behind the counter. Ollie called out, “How’s it going, Pete?” and the young man called back, “Fan-tas-tic,” in a derisive North American voice without losing a bit of his rhythm. Nancy had a flash of discomfort—was it because Ollie had used the young man’s name and the young man hadn’t used Ollie’s? And because she hoped Ollie wouldn’t notice her noticing that? Some people— some men—set such store on being friends with people in shops and restaurants.
She couldn’t stand the idea of raw fish, so she had noodles. The chopsticks were unfamiliar to her—they didn’t seem like the Chinese chopsticks she had used once or twice—but they were all that was provided.
Now that they were settled, she should speak about Tessa. It might be more decent, though, to wait for him to tell her.
So she began to talk about the cruise. She said that she would never go on another one of those to save her life. It wasn’t the weather, though some of that was bad, with rain and fog cutting off the view. They got enough view, actually, more than enough to last a lifetime. Mountain after mountain and island after island and rocks and water and trees. Everybody saying, isn’t that stupendous? Isn’t that stunning?
Stunning, stunning, stunning. Stupendous.
They saw bears. They saw seals, sea lions, a whale. Everybody taking pictures. Sweating and cussing and afraid their fancy new cameras weren’t working right. Then off the boat and the ride on the famous railway to the famous gold-mining town and more pictures and actors dressed up like the Gay Nineties and what did most people do there? Lined up to buy fudge.
Singsongs on the train. And on the boat, the boozing. Some people from breakfast time on. Card games, gambling. Dancing every night, with ten old women to one old man.
“All us ribboned and curled and spangled and poufed up like doggies in a show. I’m telling you, the competition was wild.”
Ollie laughed at various points during this story, though she caught him once looking not at her but towards the counter, with an absentminded, anxious expression. He had finished his soup and might have been thinking about what was coming next. Perhaps he, like some other men, felt slighted when his food did not come promptly.
Nancy kept losing her grip on the noodles.
“And God Almighty, I kept thinking, just what, whatever, am I ever doing here? Everybody had been telling me I should get away. Wilf was not himself for a few years and I’d looked after him at home. After he died people said I should get out and join things. Join the Seniors’ Book Club, join the Seniors’ Nature Walks, join the Watercolour Painting. Even the Seniors Volunteer Visitors, who go and intrude on the poor defenseless creatures in the hospital. So I just didn’t feel like doing any of that, and then everybody started with Get away, get away. My kids as well. You need a total holiday. So I shillied and shallied and I didn’t really know how to get away, and somebody said, well, you could go on a cruise. So I thought, well, I could go on a cruise.”
“Interesting,” said Ollie. “I don’t think losing a wife would ever make it occur to me to go on a cruise.”
Nancy hardly missed a beat. “That’s smart of you,” she said.
She waited for him to say something about Tessa, but his fish had come and he fussed with it. He tried to persuade her to taste a bit.
She wouldn’t. In fact, she gave up on the meal entirely, lit a cigarette.
She said she had always been watching and waiting to see something more he had written after that piece that made all the furor. It showed he was a good writer, she said.
He looked bewildered for a moment, as if he could not recall what she was talking about. Then he shook his head, as if he was amazed, and said that was years ago, years ago.
“It wasn’t what I really wanted.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Nancy. “You’re not the way you used to be, are you? You’re not the same.”
“Of course not.”
“I mean, there’s something just basically, physically different. You’re built differently. Your shoulders. Or am I not remembering right?”
He said that was it, exactly. He had realized he wanted a more physical kind of life. No. What happened, in order, was that he had a return of the old demon (she supposed he meant the TB) and he realized that he was doing all the wrong kinds of things, so he changed. That was years ago now. He apprenticed to a boatbuilder. Then he got in with a man who ran deep-sea fishing. He looked after boats for a multimillionaire. This was in Oregon. He worked his way back up to Canada, and he hung around here—Vancouver—for a while and then picked up a bit of land on Sechelt—waterfront, when it was still going cheap. He started a kayak business. Building, renting, selling, giving lessons. There came a time he began to feel that Sechelt was too crowded, and he let his land go for practically nothing to a friend. He was the only person he knew of who hadn’t made money from land on Sechelt.
“But my life’s not about money,” he said.
He heard about land you could get on Texada Island. And now he didn’t often leave there. He did this and that to make a living. Some kayak business still, and some fishing. He hired out as a handyman, a housebuilder, a carpenter.
“I get by,” he said.
He described to her the house he had built for himself, in outside appearance a shack, but delightful inside, at least to him. A sleeping loft with a little round window. Everything he needed right where he could put his hand to it, out in the open, nothing in cupboards. A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter.
He grew vegetables, and shared them with the deer.
All the time he was telling her this, Nancy had an unhappy feeling. It was not disbelief—in spite of the one major discrepancy. It was more a feeling of increasing puzzlement, then of disappointment. He was talking the way some other men talked. (For instance, a man she had spent time with on the cruise ship—where she had not been so consistently standoffish, so unsociable, as she had led Ollie to believe.) Plenty of men never had a word to say about their lives, beyond when and where. But there were others, more up-to-date, who gave these casual-sounding yet practiced speeches in which it was said that life was indeed a bumpy road, but misfortunes had pointed the way to better things, lessons were learned, and without a doubt joy came in the morning.
She did not object to other men talking this way—she could usually think about something else—but when Ollie did it, leaning across the rickety little table and across the wooden platter of alarming pieces of fish, a sadness spread through her.
He was not the same. He was truly not the same.
And what about her? Oh, the trouble there was that she was quite the same. Talking about the cruise, she had got all keyed up—she had enjoyed listening to herself, to the description that was pouring out of her. Not that that was really the way she used to talk to Ollie—it was more the way she wished she had talked, and had sometimes talked to him in her mind, after he was gone. (Not until she got over being angry at him, of course.) Something would come up that made her think, I wish I could tell Ollie about that. When she talked the way she wanted to other people, she sometimes went too far. She could see what they were thinking. Sarcastic, or critical, or even bitter. Wilf would not use those words, but he would perhaps be thinking them, she never could tell. Ginny would smile, but not the way she used to smile. In her unmarried middle age she had become secretive, mild, and charitable. (The secret came out shortly before her death when she admitted to having become a Buddhist.)
So Nancy had missed Ollie a lot without ever figuring out just what it was that she missed. Something troublesome burning in him like a low-grade fever, something she couldn’t get the better of. The things that had got on her nerves during that short time she had known him turned out to be just the things, in retrospect, that shone.
Now he talked earnestly. He smiled into her eyes. She was reminded of the handy way he used to have of being charming. But she had believed that was never to be used on her.
She was half-afraid he would say, “I’m not boring you, am I?” or, “Isn’t life amazing?”
“I have been incredibly lucky,” he said. “Lucky in my life. Oh, I know some people would not say so. They’d say I hadn’t stuck with anything, or that I hadn’t made any money. They’d say I wasted that time when I was down-and-out. But that’s not true.
“I heard the call,” he said, raising his eyebrows, half smiling at himself. “Seriously. I did. I heard the call to get out of the box. Out of the got-to-do-something-big box. Out of the ego box. I’ve been lucky all along. Even lucky that I got struck down with TB. Kept me out of college, where I’d have clogged my head up with a lot of nonsense. And it would have kept me from being drafted if the war had come along sooner.”
“You couldn’t have been drafted anyway once you were a married man,” said Nancy.
(She had been in a cynical enough mood, once, to wonder out loud to Wilf whether that could have been the reason for the marriage.
“Other people’s reasons aren’t a great concern of mine,” Wilf had said. He said there was not going to be a war, anyway. And there hadn’t been, for another decade.)
“Well, yes,” said Ollie. “But actually that wasn’t a thoroughly legal arrangement. I was ahead of my time, Nancy. But it always slips my mind that I wasn’t really married. Maybe because Tessa was a very deep and serious sort of woman. If you were with her you were with her. No easygoing sort of thing with Tessa.”
“So,” said Nancy, as lightly as she could manage. “So. You and Tessa.”
“It was the Crash stymied everything,” Ollie said.
What he meant by this, he went on to say, was that most of the interest, and consequently the funding, had dried up. The funding for the investigations. There was a change in thinking, with the scientific community turning away from what they must have judged to be frivolity. Some experiments were still going on for a while, but in a half-arsed way, he said, and even the people who had seemed the most interested, the most committed—people who had contacted him, said Ollie, it wasn’t as if he had contacted them—those people were the first to be out of reach, to fail to answer your letters or get in touch, until they finally sent you a note by their secretaries to say the whole deal was off. He and Tessa were treated like dirt by these people, like annoyances and opportunists, once the wind had changed.
“Academics,” he said. “After all we went through, putting ourselves at their disposal. I have no use for them.”
“I’d have thought you were dealing mostly with doctors.”
“Doctors. Career builders. Academics.”
To move him out of this byway of old injuries and ill temper, Nancy asked about the experiments.
Most of them had involved cards. Not ordinary cards but special ESP cards, with their own symbols. A cross, a circle, a star, wavy lines, a square. They would have one card of each symbol faceup on the table, the rest of the deck shuffled and held facedown. Tessa was supposed to say which symbol in front of her would match the symbol on the top card of the deck. That was the open matching test. The blind matching test was the same, except the five key cards were facedown as well. Other tests increasing in difficulty. Sometimes dice were used, or coins. Sometimes nothing but an image in the mind. Series of mind images, nothing written down. Subject and examiner in the same room, or in separate rooms, or a quarter of a mile apart.
Then the success rate Tessa got was measured against the results you would get from pure chance. Law of probability, which he believed was twenty percent.
Nothing in the room but a chair and a table and a light. Like an interrogation room. Tessa would emerge from there wrung out. The symbols bothered her for hours, wherever she looked. Headaches began.
And the results were inconclusive. All kinds of objections were coming up, not about Tessa but about whether the tests were flawed. It was said that people have preferences. When they flip a coin, for instance, more people will guess heads than tails. They just will. All that. And added to it what he had said previously, about the climate then, the intellectual climate, putting such investigations into the realm of frivolity.
Darkness was falling. The CLOSED sign was put up on the restaurant door. Ollie had trouble reading the bill. It turned out that the reason he had come down to Vancouver, the medical problem, had to do with his eyes. Nancy laughed, and took the bill from him, and paid.
“Of course—aren’t I a rich widow?”
Then, because they were not through with their conversation—nowhere near through, as Nancy saw it—they went up the street to a Denny’s, to drink coffee.
“Maybe you’d rather someplace fancier?” Ollie said. “Maybe you were thinking of a drink?”
Nancy said quickly that she’d done enough drinking on the boat to last her for a while.
“I’ve done enough to last me my whole life,” said Ollie. “I’ve been off it for fifteen years. Fifteen years, nine months, to be exact. You always know an old drunk when he counts the months.”
During the period of the experiments, the parapsychologists, he and Tessa had made a few friends. They got to know people who made a living from their abilities. Not in the interests of so-called science but by what they called fortune-telling, or mind reading, or telepathy, or psychic entertainment. Some people settled down in a good location, operating out of a house or a storefront, and stayed for years. Those were the ones who went in for giving personal advice, predicting the future, doing astrology, and some sorts of healing. Others put on public performances. That might mean hitching up with Chautauqualike shows made up of lectures and readings and scenes from Shakespeare and somebody singing opera and slides of travels (Education not Sensation), all the way down the ladder to the cut-rate carnivals that mixed in bits of burlesque and hypnotism and some near-naked woman wrapped up in snakes. Naturally Ollie and Tessa liked to think of themselves as belonging to the first category. Education not sensation was indeed what they had in mind. But there too the timing was not lucky. That higher-class sort of thing was almost done for. You could listen to music and get a certain amount of education on the radio, and people had seen all the travelogues they needed to see at the church hall.
The only way to make any money that they discovered was to go with the travelling shows, to operate in town halls or at fall fairs. They shared the stage with the hypnotists and snake ladies and dirty monologuists and strippers in feathers. That sort of thing, too, was winding down, but the war coming along gave it an odd sort of boost. Its life was artificially prolonged for a while when gas rationing stopped people from getting to the city nightclubs or the big movie houses. And television had not yet arrived to entertain them with magic stunts while they sat on their couches at home. The early fifties, Ed Sullivan, et cetera— that really was the end.
Nevertheless there were good crowds for a time, full houses—Ollie enjoyed himself sometimes, warming up the audience with an earnest but intriguing little lecture. And soon he had become part of the act. They had had to work out something a little more exciting, with more drama or suspense to it, than what Tessa had been doing alone. And there was another factor to be considered. She stood up to it well, as far as her nerves and physical endurance went, but her powers, whatever they were, didn’t prove so reliable. She started to flounder. She had to concentrate as she never had done before, and it often didn’t work. The headaches persisted.
What most people suspect is true. Such performances are full of tricks. Full of fakery, full of deception. Sometimes that’s all it is. But what people—most people—hope for is occasionally also true. They hope that it’s not all fake. And it’s because performers like Tessa, who are really honorable, know about this hope and understand it—who could understand it better?— that they can begin to use certain tricks and routines, guaranteed to get the right results. Because every night, every night, you have to get those results.
Sometimes the means are crude, obvious as the false partition in the box of the lady who is sawed in half. A hidden mike. More likely a code is used, worked out between the person onstage and the partner on the floor. These codes can be an art in themselves. They are secret, nothing written down.
Nancy asked if his code, his and Tessa’s, was an art in itself?
“It had a range,” he said, his face brightening. “It had nuance.”
Then he said, “Actually we could be pretty hokey, too. I had a black cloak I wore—”
“Ollie. Really. A black cloak?”
“Absolutely. A black cloak. And I’d get a volunteer and take off the cloak and wrap it around him or her, after Tessa had been blindfolded—somebody from the audience did that, made sure it was a proper blindfold—and I’d call out to her, ‘Who have I got in the cloak?’ Or ‘Who is the person in the cloak?’ Or I’d say ‘coat.’ Or ‘black cloth.’ Or, ‘What have I got?’ Or ‘Who do you see?’ ‘What color hair?’ ‘Tall or short?’ I could do it with the words, I could do it with tiny inflections of my voice. Going into more and more detail. That was just our opening shot.”
“You should write about that.”
“I did intend to. I thought of an exposé sort of thing. But then I thought, who would care anyway? People want to be fooled, or they don’t want to be fooled. They don’t go on evidence. Another thing I thought of was a mystery novel. It’s a natural milieu. I thought it would make a lot of money and we could get out. And I thought about a movie script. Did you ever see that Fellini movie—?”
Nancy said no.
“Hogwash, anyway. I don’t mean the Fellini movie. I mean the ideas I had. At that time.”
“Tell me about Tessa.”
“I must have written you. Didn’t I write you?”
“No.”
“I must have written Wilf.”
“I think he would have told me.”
“Well. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I was at too low a point then.”
“What year was it?”
Ollie could not remember. The Korean War was on. Harry Truman was president. It seemed at first as if Tessa only had the flu. But she did not get better, she grew weaker, and became covered with mysterious bruises. She had leukemia.
They were holed up in a town in the mountains in the heat of summer. They had been hoping to get to California before winter. They were not able even to make it to their next booking. The people they had been travelling with went on without them. Ollie got some work at the radio station in the town. He had developed a good voice doing the show with Tessa. He read the news on the radio, and he did a lot of the ads. He wrote some of them, too. Their regular man was off taking the gold cure, or something, in a hospital for drunks.
He and Tessa moved from the hotel to a furnished apartment. There was no air-conditioning, naturally, but luckily it had a bit of a balcony with a tree hanging over it. He pushed the couch up there so Tessa could get the fresh air. He didn’t want to have to take her to the hospital—money came into this too, of course, for they had no insurance of any kind—but he also thought she was more peaceful there, where she could watch the leaves stirring. But eventually he had to take her in, and there in a matter of a couple of weeks, she died.
“Is she buried there?” said Nancy. “Didn’t you think that we would send you money?”
“No,” he said. “No, to both. I mean, I didn’t think of asking. I felt that it was my responsibility. And I had her cremated. I skipped town with the ashes. I managed to get to the Coast. It was practically the last thing she had said to me, that she wanted to be cremated and she wanted to be scattered on the waves of the Pacific Ocean.”
So that was what he had done, he said. He remembered the Oregon coast, the strip of beach between the ocean and the highway, the fog and chilliness of the early morning, the smell of the seawater, the melancholy booming of the waves. He had taken off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pant legs and waded in, and the gulls came after him to see if he had anything for them. But it was only Tessa he had.
“Tessa—” said Nancy. Then she couldn’t go on.
“I became a drunk after that. I functioned after a fashion, but for a long time I was deadwood at the center. Till I just had to pull out of it.”
He did not look up at Nancy. There was a heavy moment, while he fingered the ashtray.
“I suppose you found that life goes on,” said Nancy.
He sighed. Reproach and relief.
“Sharp tongue, Nancy.”
He drove her back to the hotel where she was staying. There was a lot of clanking of gear in the van, and a shuddering and rattling throughout the vehicle itself.
The hotel was not particularly expensive or luxurious—there was no doorman about, no mound of carnivorous-looking flowers to be glimpsed within—and yet when Ollie said, “I bet there hasn’t been any old heap like this drive up here in a while,” Nancy had to laugh and agree with him.
“What about your ferry?”
“Missed it. Ages ago.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“Friends in Horseshoe Bay. Or I’ll be all right in here, if I don’t feel like waking them up. I’ve slept here enough times before.”
Her room had two beds in it. Twin beds. She might get a dirty look or two, trailing him in, but surely she could stand that. Since the truth would be a far cry from what anybody might be thinking.
She took a preparatory breath.
“No, Nancy.”
All this time she had been waiting for him to say one true word. All this afternoon or maybe a good part of her life. She had been waiting, and now he had said it.
No.
It might have been taken as a refusal of the offer she had not quite made. It could have struck her as arrogant, insufferable. But in fact what she heard was clear and tender and seemed at the moment as full of understanding as any word that had ever been spoken to her. No.
She knew the danger of anything she might say. The danger of her own desire, because she didn’t really know what sort of desire it was, what it was for. They had shied away from whatever that was years ago, and they would surely have to do so now that they were old—not terribly old, but old enough to appear unsightly and absurd. And unfortunate enough to have spent their time together lying.
For she had been lying too, in her silence. And for the time being, she would go on lying.
“No,” he said again, with humility but without embarrassment. “It wouldn’t turn out well.”
Of course it wouldn’t. And one reason was that the first thing she was going to do when she got home was write to that place in Michigan and find out what had happened to Tessa, and bring her back to where she belonged.
The road is easy if you know enough to travel light.
The piece of paper Adam-and-Eve had sold to her remained in her jacket pocket. When she finally fished it out—back home, after not having worn that jacket again for nearly a year—she was bewildered and irritated by the words that were stamped on it.
The road wasn’t easy. The letter to Michigan had come back unopened. Apparently no such hospital existed anymore. But Nancy discovered that there were inquiries you could make, and she set out to make them. There were authorities to be written to, records to be unearthed if possible. She did not give up. She would not admit that the trail had gone cold.
In the case of Ollie, she was maybe going to have to admit it. She had sent a letter to Texada Island—thinking that address might be enough, there must be so few people there that any of them could be found. But it had come back to her, with one word written on the envelope. Moved.
She could not bear to open it up and read what she had said. Too much, she was sure.
FLIES ON THE WINDOWSILL
She is sitting in Wilf’s old recliner in the sunroom of her own house. She does not intend to go to sleep. It is a bright afternoon late in the fall—in fact, it is Grey Cup day, and she is supposed to be at a potluck party, watching the game on television. She made an excuse at the last moment. People are getting used to her doing this sort of thing now—some still say they are worried about her. But when she does show up old habits or needs reassert themselves and she sometimes can’t help turning into the life of the party. So they stop worrying for a while.
Her children say that they hope she has not taken to Living in the Past.
But what she believes she is doing, what she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.
She doesn’t believe she is sleeping when she finds herself entering another room. The sunroom, the bright room behind her, has shrunk into a dark hall. The hotel key is in the door of the room, as she believes the keys used to be, though this is not something she has ever encountered in her own life.
It is a poor kind of place. A worn-out room for worn-out travellers. A ceiling light, a rod with a couple of wire hangers on it, a curtain of pink and yellow flowered material that can be pulled around to hide the hanging clothes from view. The flowered material may be meant to supply the room with a note of optimism or even gaiety, but for some reason it does the opposite.
Ollie lies down on the bed so suddenly and heavily that the springs give out a miserable whine. It seems that he and Tessa get around by car now, and he does all the driving. Today in the first heat and dust of spring it has made him extraordinarily tired. She cannot drive. She has made a good deal of noise opening the costume case and more noise behind the thin plank partition of the bathroom. He pretends to be asleep when she comes out, but through the slits of his eyelids he sees her looking into the dresser mirror, which is speckled in spots where the backing has flecked away. She is wearing the yellow satin ankle-length skirt, and the black bolero, with the black shawl patterned with roses, the fringe half a yard long. Her costumes are her own idea, and they are neither original nor becoming. Her skin is rouged now, but dull. Her hair is pinned and sprayed, its rough curls flattened into a black helmet. Her eyelids are purple and her eyebrows lifted and blackened. Crow’s wings. The eyelids pressed down heavily, like punishment, over her faded eyes. In fact her whole self seems to be weighted down by the clothes and the hair and the makeup.
Some noise that he did not mean to make—of complaint or impatience—has reached her. She comes to the bed and bends down to remove his shoes.
He tells her not to bother.
“I have to go out again in a minute,” he says. “I have to go and see them.”
Them means the people at the theater, or the organizers of the entertainment, whoever they are.
She says nothing. She stands in front of the mirror looking at herself, and then still bearing the weight of her heavy costume and hair—it is a wig—and of her spirit, she walks around the room as if there are things to be done, but she cannot settle herself to do anything.
Even when she bent to take off Ollie’s shoes she has not looked into his face. And if he shut his eyes the moment he landed on the bed—she thinks this—it might have been to avoid looking into her face. They have become a professional couple, they sleep and eat and travel together, close to the rhythms of each other’s breathing. Yet never, never—except during the time when they are bound together by their shared responsibility to the audience—can they look into each other’s faces, for fear that they will catch sight of something that is too frightful.
There is no proper space against a wall for the dresser with the tarnished mirror—part of it juts across the window, cutting off what light can get in. She looks at it dubiously for a moment, then concentrates her strength to move one corner of it a few inches out into the room. She catches her breath and pulls aside the dirty net curtain. There on the farthest corner of the windowsill, in a spot usually hidden by the curtain and the dresser, is a little pile of dead flies.
Somebody who was in this room recently has passed the time killing these flies, and has then collected all the little bodies and found this place to hide them in. They are neatly piled up into a pyramid that does not quite hold together.
She cries out at the sight. Not with disgust or alarm but with surprise, and you might say with pleasure. Oh, oh, oh. Those flies delight her, as if they were the jewels they turn into when you put them under a microscope, all blue and gold and emerald flashes, wings of sparkling gauze. Oh, she cries but it cannot be because she sees insect radiance on the windowsill. She has no microscope and they have lost all their luster in death.
It is because she saw them here, she saw the pile of tiny bodies, all jumbled and falling to dust together, hidden in this corner. She saw them in their place before she put a hand on the dresser or shifted the curtain. She knew they were there, in the way that she knows things.
But for a long time, she hasn’t. She hasn’t known anything and has been relying on rehearsed tricks and schemes. She has almost forgotten, she has doubted, that there ever was any other way.
She has roused Ollie now, broken into his uneasy snatch of rest. What is it, he says, did something sting you? He groans as he stands up.
No, she says. She points at the flies.
I knew they were there.
Ollie understands at once what this means to her, what a relief it must be, though he cannot quite enter into her joy. This is because he too has nearly forgotten some things—he has nearly forgotten that he ever believed in her powers, he is now only anxious for her and for himself, that their counterfeit should work well.
When did you know?
When I looked in the mirror. When I looked at the window. I don’t know when.
She is so happy. She never used to be happy or unhappy about what she could do—she took it for granted. Now her eyes are shining as if she has had the dirt rinsed out of them, and her voice sounds as if her throat has been freshened with sweet water.
Yes, yes, he says. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck and presses her head against his chest so tightly that she makes the papers rustle in his inside pocket.
These are secret papers that he has got from a man he met in one of these towns—a doctor who is known to look after touring people and to oblige them sometimes by performing services that are beyond the usual. He has told the doctor that he is concerned about his wife, who lies on her bed and stares at the ceiling for hours at a time with a look of hungry concentration on her face, and goes for days without saying a word, except what is necessary in front of an audience (this is all true). He has asked himself, then the doctor, if her extraordinary powers may not after all be related to a threatening imbalance in her mind and nature. Seizures have occurred in her past, and he wonders if something like that could be on the way again. She is not an ill-natured person or a person with any bad habits, but she is not a normal person, she is a unique person, and living with a unique person can be a strain, in fact perhaps more of a strain than a normal man can stand. The doctor understands this and has told him of a place that she might be taken to, for a rest.
He is afraid she will ask what the noise is that she can surely hear as she presses against him. He does not want to say papers and have her ask, what papers?
But if her powers have really come back to her—this is what he thinks, with a return of his nearly forgotten, fascinated regard for her—if she is as she used to be, isn’t it possible that she could know what was in such papers without ever laying her eyes on them?
She does know something, but she is trying not to know.
For if this is what it means to get back what she once had, the deep-seeing use of her eyes and the instant revelations of her tongue, might she not be better off without? And if it’s a matter of her deserting those things, and not of them deserting her, couldn’t she welcome the change?
They could do something else, she believes, they could have another life.
He says to himself that he will get rid of the papers as soon as he can, he will forget the whole idea, he too is capable of hope and honor.
Yes. Yes. Tessa feels all menace go out of the faint crackle under her cheek.
The sense of being reprieved lights all the air. So clear, so powerful, that Nancy feels the known future wither under its attack, skitter away like dirty old leaves.
But deep in that moment some instability is waiting, that Nancy is determined to ignore. No use. She is aware already of being removed, drawn out of those two people and back into herself. It seems as if some calm and decisive person—could it be Wilf?—has taken on the task of leading her out of that room with its wire hangers and its flowered curtain. Gently, inexorably leading her away from what begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash.