Small Ceremonies

  “Well, can’t you see?” He is smiling now, suddenly sunny. “This is no more than a variation on one, of those great primordial plots.”

  I am hopelessly confused. It is unbelievable that he should be sitting here beside me smiling. That he has shaken off every particle of guilt like an animal shaking water from his coat. My mouth is open; I am literally gasping for air; I cannot believe this.

  “I’m sure you’ll understand, Judith, when you take time to think about it.”

  My hands are shaking, and my mouth has gone slack and shapeless like a flap of canvas! I am unable to speak for a moment. Finally I sputter something, but even to me it is unintelligible.

  “Ah, Judith, just think for a minute, where did Shakespeare – not that I am placing myself in that orbit for a second – but where did Shakespeare get his plots? Not from his own experience, you can be sure of that. I mean, who was he but another young lad from the provinces? He stole his plots, you would say, Judith. Borrowed them from the literature of the past, and no one damn well calls it theft: He took those old tried and true stories and hammered them into something that was his own.”

  “It’s not the same,” I manage to gasp.

  “Judith, Judith, it is. Surely you can see that this is all a terrible misunderstanding.”

  I am numb. Is it all a misunderstanding? I try to think. But at that moment Polly Stanley, doing her hostess rounds, discovers us. “Oh, dear. I’ve been neglecting you two,” she frets. “Here I am, about to serve dessert, and I don’t believe you two have had a thing to eat.”

  “We were having a chat.” Furlong beams. “Judith and I were discussing some old established literary traditions.”

  “Oh, dear, shop talk.” She giggles faintly, but she is clearly annoyed that we have confused the progression of her dinner, and she takes Furlong firmly by the arm and leads him into the dining room. He goes off gratefully, and I follow behind them, mechanically filling a plate with food. The beef is rather cold; there is a dull skin of grease floating on top, but I load my plate anyway. Furlong hurries away to join a cheerful group in the solarium, and I am left.

  Something is wrong. There is something I have not quite managed to assimilate., Furlong has declared his innocence. He has refused to accept a grain of guilt. He is emphatic; he is all sweet reason.

  But then what in heaven’s name have he and I been talking about?

  “Judith.”

  “Yes.” I am almost asleep. I had thought that Martin was asleep too.

  “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “To Toronto?” I ask. Martin is leaving on the morning train for the Renaissance Society meeting.

  “Why not come, Judith? Meredith could look after things here, and it would do you good to get away.”

  “I could never never be ready in time.”

  “We could take a later train.”

  “I don’t know, Martin. Richard is so sort of depressed that I hate to leave him.”

  “Richard?”

  “He still hasn’t got a letter from England. What do you suppose has happened?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry, Judith. Everything comes to an end eventually.”

  “I suppose so,” I say.

  I lie very still on my side of the bed. I am waiting for Martin to encourage me, to list the reasons why I should go to Toronto with him, and to brush aside my petty objections. I wait, believing that he will succeed in persuading me. I could wear my green skirt on the train; my long dress is back from the cleaners; I could have my hair done in Toronto; leave the rest of the ham for the children; phone them in the evening.

  A street light shines into our bedroom from the place where the curtains don’t quite meet, making a white streak down the bed. About two inches wide I estimate. It is very quiet. I can hear the Baby Ben ticking. Martin has set the alarm for six so he can make the early train.

  Under the electric blanket I lie at attention. In a moment he will speak again, pressing me to go. But five minutes pass. I check the luminous dial of the clock. Ten minutes. I lift myself on one elbow to look at Martin.

  He is very relaxed. His eyes are shut and he is breathing regularly, very deeply with a low diesel hum, and I notice that he is definitely asleep.

  “Teen-agers are often sulky, resentful and hostile,” writes Dr. Whittier Whitehorn in the second of a series of articles on adolescent behavior. “And because they revolve so continuously around their own tempestuous emotions, they tend to interpret even the most general remarks as applying to themselves.”

  I read these newspaper articles less for their factual information than for the comfort of their familiar, kindly rhetoric. I know that Dr. Whitehorn can do no more in the end than counsel patience for “this difficult and trying emotional time,” and I skip through the paragraphs to the closing line, noting with cheerful satisfaction that “in the battle to win a teen-ager’s confidence, sensitivity and patience are the only weapons a wise parent can wield.”

  I let the newspaper fall to the floor, switch off the bedside lamp and try to sleep. When Martin is away the bed feels irrationally flat; I kick a leg out sideways, testing the space.

  Dr. Whitehorn’s advice glows in front of me as I review in my mind the strange, almost surreal discussion I had with Meredith this morning.

  She had slept late, and at eight-twenty on a Monday morning she was still tearing through the house looking for her books.

  “Do you have your bus tokens?” I asked her.

  She answered with a short and heavy, “Yes, Mother.”

  “Your books?”

  “No. I can’t find Graven Images."

  “What do you want with that?”

  “I’m doing a report on it. For English.”

  “A report on Graven Images?"

  “Why not?” she asked sharply. “Most people consider that it’s quite good.”

  “It’s in my room,” I confessed.

  “Do you mind if I take it?” she asked, elaborately polite now.

  I replied with a tart, heavy-on-every-syllable voice, “Not in the least.”

  She whirled around, studied my face closely, and pronounced, “You really do have something against Furlong.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What?”

  I shrug. “I just don’t trust him".

  “Why not?”

  “I used to,” I said, “but not anymore.”

  She was plainly alarmed at this. And hastened to his defense. “Look, Mother, I think I know what you’re saying. About not trusting him. I mean, I know what you think.”

  “What?”

  “I – I can’t say anything. But just take my word for it that it’s not true. It may look true at this moment but it isn’t.”

  “What isn’t?” I asked.

  “That’s all I can say. Just that it isn’t true.” And then with a touch of melodrama she added, “You’ll just have to trust me.”

  “You’ll miss your bus, Meredith,” I said suddenly.

  Why had I said that? Because it was all I could think of to say.

  Now, Dr. Whitehorn, what do you make of that? Is that enigmatic enough for you? Perhaps I have remembered the conversation imperfectly. Or perhaps I have missed some of the underlying nuances, failed to exercise that sensitivity you’re so big on. But why is my daughter talking in these tense, circular riddles? And why is it that I, her mother, can’t understand her?

  Nancy Krantz is a practicing Roman Catholic, but she is also a believer in signs. Nothing so simple as horoscopes or palm reading; the signs she watches for and obeys are subtle and, to the casual eye, minuscule. She has come to rely on these small portents (a postage stamp upside-down, an icicle falling on the stroke of midnight, a name misspelled in the telephone book) but she is uneasy about admitting her faith in them. “If I confessed to sign-watching,” she says, “I would be asked to name a Regulating Agent who sets up the signs and points the way.” She prefers to see her omens as part of a system of electrical impuls
es which relate unlike objects, suggesting mysterious connections in another dimension of time. But admitting to such a belief, she says, leaves her open to charges of superstition or worse, marks her as a follower of the cult of intuition. Yet, she believes in signs and, furthermore, she believes that most other people do too.

  Susanna Moodie, in one of her splendidly irrelevant asides, says much the same thing. “All who have ever trodden this earth, possessed of the powers of thought and reflection, have listened to voices of the soul and secretly acknowledged their power; but few, very few, have had the courage boldly to declare their belief in them.”

  And today I too have received a sign. Nothing flimsy like a dream; or mysterious like the surfacing of a familiar face: just a word, a single word, that started a chain reaction.

  It began with a book by Kipling which Richard is reading for school. He hates it; it’s dull, and he doesn’t like the stylized way in which the characters speak. It is also rather long. Every night he brings it home from school, puts it on the front hall table, and in the morning he carries it back again, unopened. It is an old book from the school library. The binding is an alarming tatter of cloth and glue, and the dull-red cover is frayed around the edges. Its position on our hall table is becoming familiar, part of the landscape now; we expect it to be there. The lettering on the cover is shiny gold, and the title is curved along a golden hoop. Underneath it, curled the other way, is the name Rudyard Kipling.

  Rudyard. Poor man to have such a strange name. Cruel Victorians to name their children so badly. I am struck by something half-remembered. Of course! Furlong’s real name is Rudyard. His mother let it slip out once by mistake when she was talking to me. He never uses it, of course, and as far as I know no one else knows it. Rudyard. A secret name.

  Secret. It hints at other secrets. Why is it I have kept this particular secret to myself? Why not? – it is a trifling fact – but it seems strange I’ve never mentioned it to Martin or to Roger.

  Roger. Does Roger know about the name Rudyard? He did his Ph.D. thesis on Furlong. He is the authority on Furlong Eberhardt in this country; he cornered that little market about six years ago and stuffed it all into a thesis.

  Thesis. Where is Roger’s thesis? It is, without a doubt, where all doctoral theses are – on microfilm in the university library.

  Library. What time does the library close? It’s open all evening, of course. Until eleven o’clock. Martin is still in Toronto and I have the car.

  The car. It is sitting outside on the snowy drive. The tank is full of gas and the keys are on the hall table. I can go. I can go this very minute.

  Roger’s thesis proved to be disappointing.

  I had no trouble finding it. The librarian was helpful and polite: “Of course, Mrs. Gill. I’m sure we have Dr. Ramsay’s thesis here.” With her bracelet of keys she opened cupboards and pulled out metal drawers which were solidly filled with rows of neatly boxed microfilm. Hundreds of them. Each loaded with information which had been laboriously accumulated and assembled and then methodically stuffed away in these drawers where they were wonderfully, freely – almost, in fact, recklessly – available.

  The films were arranged alphabetically, and it took only a few minutes before I found what I wanted: Ramsay, Roger R. – Furlong Eberhardt and the Canadian Consciousness. I yanked it out, electrified with happiness; it was so easy.

  It took something like two hours to read it on the microfilm machine, but after the first hour I contented myself with skimming. For there was almost nothing of interest. And it was hard to believe that Roger with his fat yellow curls and Rabelaisian yelp of laughter could have produced this river of creamy musings. He had actually got past the examining committee with these long, elaborate, clustered generalizations, all artificially squeezed between Roman numerals and subdivided and resubdivided until they reached the tiny fur of footnotes, appendices and, at last, something called the Author’s Afterword? Hadn’t someone along the line demanded something solid in the way of facts?

  And the timidity, the equivocation – the use of hesitant pleading words like conjecture, hypothesis, probability – alternating with the brisk, combative, masculine “however” which introduced every second paragraph, as though Roger had been locked into debate with himself and losing badly.

  His design, as outlined in the Preface, was to survey the texts of Furlong’s first four novels, collate those themes and images which were specifically related to the national consciousness – which were, in short, definitively Canadian – all this in order to prove that Furlong Eberhardt more or less represented the “most, nearly complete flowering of the national ethos in the middle decades of this century.”

  I had to remind myself that I hadn’t come to carp at Roger’s prose or even to question his ultimate purpose; I had come to unseal some of the mystery surrounding the person of Furlong Eberhardt. I had come for biographical material, and in that respect Roger’s thesis was useless.

  The explanation for the omission of personal data came in the Afterword in which Roger explained at length that in his study of Eberhardt he had attempted to follow the dictates of the New Criticism, a critical method which, he explained, eschewed the personality and beliefs of the author and concentrated instead on close textual analysis.

  It was a disappointment. And it came as a surprise to me after spending a year and a half painfully abstracting the personality of Susanna Moodie from the rambling, discursive body of her writing, that anyone would deliberately set out to purify prose by obliterating the personality that had shaped it.

  A paradox. I saw that I would have to find another way.

  Thursday. I wake up early remembering that this is the day Martin is to make his presentation to the Renaissance Society.

  When I drove him to the train on Monday I noticed that, in addition to his battered canvas weekender, he was carrying a heavy cardboard carton to which he had attached a rough rope handle. His woven tapestries must be packed inside, although he didn’t mention them to me. Were they finished, I wondered. How had they turned out? How would he display them? But because they seemed to represent something obscurely humiliating, I kept silent. The subject of the Paradise Lost weavings, had been so assiduously avoided by both of us, that I felt a last-minute plea on my part to abandon the presentation would be ridiculous.

  So I said nothing; only kissed him and told him I would meet his train on Friday night, and watched him walk toward the train in a wet sludgy snow, carrying the shameful suitcase, a ludicrous umbrella from Birmingham days, and the damning cardboard box that banged against his leg as he climbed aboard, set on his lunatic journey. Oh, Martin!

  This morning at ten o’clock he is scheduled to give his talk and presentation. I have seen the conference program which says “Dr. Martin Gill – Paradise Lost in a Pictorial Presentation.” I will have to keep busy; I will have to make this day disappear.

  It strikes me that I might as well continue my pursuit of information regarding Furlong. So after lunch I go to the big downtown library.

  Granite pillars, crouched lions, the majestic stone entrance stairs covered with sisal matting and boards for five months of the year (what a strange country we live in!), a foyer imperial with vaulting, echoes, brass plaques, oil portraits, uniformed guards, a ponderous check-out desk and on it, purring and whirring, the latest in photostatic machines. Two librarians, tightly permed, one fat, one thin, stand behind the desk. The card catalogue snakes back and forth in a room of its own; surely I will find something here.

  I carry books to a table, check indexes, cross-check references, try various biographical dictionaries and local histories, and conclude after several hours that Furlong had done a remarkable job of obscuring his past. He seems hardly to have existed before 1952 when his first book was published. I do find two passing references to a Rudyard Eberhart in the forties; the surname is misspelled and the geographical location is wrong; they are cryptic notations which I don’t really understand but which I neve
rtheless make note of. I will have to go to the Archives if I am to discover anything more. Another day.

  This is the library where Ruthie St. Pierre works, and as I put on my coat and scarf, I think that it would be nice to stop and have a chat with her.

  Her office is on the top floor, a tiny glassed-in cubicle in the Translation Department. I climb the stairs and go past a maze of other tiny offices.

  And then I glimpse her through the wall of glass. She is bending over a filing cabinet in the corner and she is wearing a pantsuit of daffodil yellow and platform shoes of prodigious thickness. She finds what she wants, straightens up and turns back to her desk.

  And I would have knocked on the glass, I would have gone in and embraced her and told her how much I had missed her all winter (for I had missed her) and told her how morose and sullen and seedy Roger is looking and how he doesn’t even know where she is living or how she is getting along – but I don’t go in because I can see plainly that she is in the seventh, perhaps eighth, and who knows – she is such a tiny girl – maybe even the ninth month of blooming, swelling, flowering pregnancy.

  I watch her for a moment to be sure, to be absolutely certain, and then, quickly and quietly, I make my retreat.

  Afterwards, driving home, I can’t understand why I had left her like that. It was a shock, of course, and then too I hadn’t wanted to create what for Ruthie might be a painful and embarrassing meeting. Certainly she had gone out of her way to avoid friends all winter.

  When I was sick with the flu she had sent a basket of fruit – not ordinary apples and oranges, but wonderful and exotic mangoes, kiwifruit, red bananas, passion fruit, figs and pomegranates, and I had written her a thank-you note, mailing it to the library where she works. Once in the following weeks she had phoned to see if I was better. “I’m fine now, Ruthie,” I had said, “but how are you?”

  “Fine, Jude, fine.” (She is the only person in the world who consistently calls me Jude.) “I guess you know that Roger and I have called it quits.”