“Nevertheless,” I said. “Nevertheless.”
“Oh jumping Jesus,” John said. “Okay, okay.”
He walked back, never looking at the sly glances of the Tonnerre boys on the far side of the bridge. He never looked at me, either. He walked right past me, and away. There was anger in his face, but I fancied I saw there, as well, just a suggestion of relief. If he ever went there again, he never said. And if he chummed around again with the Tonnerre boys, I never knew.
When the war came—that would be the First War, of course—Marvin joined up at seventeen. I suppose he must have lied about his age. I made no attempt to stop him, feeling that there was, after all, such a thing as duty, and Henry Pearl’s eldest son had gone, and Jess’s Vernon, and Gladys had two boys in the Army. I thought Bram would raise a rumpus, considering how much he relied on Marvin to help around the place, but he didn’t.
“He’ll be as well, away,” Bram said.
Not a word about duty, or country, or anything like that, not from Bram. Merely, He’ll be as well, away.
When Marvin came to say good-by, it only struck me then how young he was, still awkward, still with the sunburned neck of a farm boy. I didn’t know what to say to him. I wanted to beg him to look after himself, to be careful, as one warns children against snowdrifts or thin ice or the hooves of horses, feeling the flimsy words may act as some kind of charm against disaster. I wanted all at once to hold him tightly, plead with him, against all reason and reality, not to go. But I did not want to embarrass both of us, nor have him think I’d taken leave of my senses. While I was hesitating, he spoke first.
“I guess I won’t be seeing you for quite a while,” he said. “Think you’ll be all right, here?”
“All right?” I was released from my dithering, and could be practical once more. “Of course we’ll be all right, Marvin—why shouldn’t we be? Well, you take care, now, and be sure to write. You’d better be getting along, or you’ll not get into town in time to catch the train.”
“Mother—”
“Yes?” And then I realized I was waiting with a kind of anxious hope for what he would say, waiting for him to make himself known to me.
But he was never a quick thinker, Marvin. Words would not come to his bidding, and so the moment eluded us both. He turned and put his hand on the doorknob.
“Well, so long,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
He sent postcards from France, saying precious little. He fought at Vimy Ridge, and lived through it. But he never came back to Manawaka. When the war was over, he went out to the coast, worked as a logger, I think, and then as a longshoreman or some such thing. He wrote home once a month, and his letters were always very poorly spelled.
It had been Bram and Marvin, the two of them, for years. You’d think Bram would have paid more heed to John after Marvin left, but not a bit of it. John was only seven then, and too young to be much help, and Bram resented that, for Marvin had done so much of the work. Sometimes in winter, if it got to forty below, Bram would drive the boy to school in the cutter, sheltered and relatively warm, when John would have frozen his face going in on his own horse Pibroch. John always maintained it wasn’t cold enough to need the cutter, and then Bram would get annoyed, for he did not want to miss the opportunity of a day in town, swapping stories with Charlie Bean or whatever it was they talked about in the dung-steamy caverns of Doherty’s Livery Stable.
Bram used to wear an overcoat that Matt’s widow had given to me to cut down for Marvin, and I never got around to it. My bother Matt had been a skinny round-shouldered man, and on Bram’s broadness the two sides of the coat tugged and never quite met properly at the front. The pockets were always swollen with odds and ends—a jackknife with which he used to pare his fingernails, a yellow oilcloth roll of Bull Durham and his pipe, scraps of frayed binder twine, a bag of sticky peppermints bearded with bits of fluff. Never, of course, a handkerchief. He had a drawerful of those, given by me at Christmas—I used to wonder if he wanted them buried with him, like an ancient king, so he need never use his fingers for that purpose in heaven. He wore a thick gray wool-felt cap, and when the ear lugs were pulled down, you couldn’t tell felt from beard. He used to snort and rumble like a great gray walrus. The cold weather always made him swear. Off they’d go, not speaking to one another, not even troubling to pass the time of day.
Once when they got home at night, and Bram was still in the barn, John, stuttering a little as though trying to make up his mind whether to tell me or not, finally burst out:
“Listen, you want to know something funny? You know what the kids call him? Bramble Shitley. That’s what they call him.”
I lowered my eyes to him, wondering—not for the first time—what he’d had to endure.
“That’s a good one, eh?” John said.
And then he cried. But when I tried to put an arm around him, he pulled away, clattered upstairs to his own room and locked the door.
Marvin had always been the one to take the eggs around. Most went to the Manawaka Creamery, but we sold as many as we could to town families, for we got more that way. When Marvin left, Bram took them in for a while, but then I hadn’t even the few filched coins as mine. I saw I’d have to take the eggs in, myself. That Saturday John and I went in, when Bram went to get what groceries we needed. January it was, and bitter, that evening, as we knocked at a back door. I was tired, and hardly knew which house it was, anxious only to get the dozen little baskets delivered so I could go home and sleep.
A girl about John’s age answered the door. She’d certainly been dolled up by someone, and no mistake. Her yellow and carefully ringleted hair was topped with a blue satin bow, and her white crepe de Chine dress was held with a pale blue sash. Behind her, warmth flooded from the kitchen, and I caught a glimpse of cupboards and an icebox painted primrose and trimmed with green. She looked at me, at John, at the basket in my hands. Then, inexplicably, she giggled.
“Hello, John,” she said. She turned and screeched—“Mother! The egg woman’s here!”
The egg woman. I didn’t look at John, nor he at me. I think we both looked blindly ahead at the lighted kitchen, like bewildered moths.
The girl’s mother appeared, and it was Lottie.
I don’t remember what she paid me, nor what words were spoken. I remember only her eyes, the yellow light in them, and the way she took the basket so tenderly as if it mattered to her not to break the frail nestled globes within, as though they were a kind of treasure to her. And then we went away.
“What’s Telford Simmons now?” I had to ask.
“Bank manager,” John said, his voice as cold as the night we were driving in. “I thought everyone knew that.”
“Such a homely boy he used to be”—I did not really want to say a word, but out and out they came—“and none too clever, either. He’s got there more by good luck than good management, if you ask me.”
Then a thing happened which I can’t put from mind, even now.
“Can’t you shut up?” John cried. “Can’t you just shut up?”
A Rest Room had recently been established in the town. I’d never been inside it, not fancying public conveniences. But I told John to let me off there that night. One room it was, with brown wainscoting and half a dozen straight chairs, and the two toilet cubicles beyond. No one was there. I made sure of that before I entered. I went in and found what I needed, a mirror. I stood for a long time, looking, wondering how a person could change so much and never see it. So gradually it happens.
I was wearing, I saw, a man’s black overcoat that Marvin had left. It was too big for John and impossibly small for Bram. It still had a lot of wear left in it, so I’d taken it. The coat bunched and pulled up in front, for I’d put weight on my hips, and my stomach had never gone flat again after John was born. Twined around my neck was a knitted scarf, hairy and navy blue, that Bram’s daughter Gladys had given me one Christmas. On my head a brown tam was pulled down to keep my ears warm. My hair
was gray and straight. I always cut it myself. The face—a brown and leathery face that wasn’t mine. Only the eyes were mine, staring as though to pierce the lying glass and get beneath to some truer image, infinitely distant.
I walked out into Saturday’s throng of people on the Main Street sidewalk, boots and overshoes crunching and squeaking on the hard-packed snow. Among the cutters and sleighs on the road, a few motorcars spun and struggled, their drivers sitting high and proud, punching the horns and making them rudely say “a-hoo-gah!” like boys with paper tooters at a party.
Currie’s General Store. The sign still said the same, for the man who bought it from the town thought he’d damage trade to change the name. God knows how long since I’d been inside it, but my feet took me there, and in my head was only the thought of buying some decent clothes, clothes to render me decent. I didn’t have the money, but it seemed to me that as my father had begun the store they might afford me credit for this once. I’d never asked for credit anywhere before.
As in Father’s day, the groceries were sold at the front counters, and all around were barrels of dried apples and apricots, shriveled and desiccated, kegs of sultanas and coarse brown sugar, orange mousetrap cheese large as a wagon wheel, a glass cabinet with jelly doughnuts and chocolate eclairs and bakery bread, open wooden boxes full of boughten cookies, gingersnaps as hard as slivers of stone, and those raisin biscuits we used to call “squashed flies.” At the back was the section where yard-goods were sold, and ladies’ and children’s ready-to-wear garments hanging dejectedly on racks.
The manager greeted me courteously enough, listened and nodded, cleared his throat and didn’t look at me. I’d stumbled halfway through my spiel before I realized it was a plea and not the aloof request I’d intended. I would have gone on, though, even knowing that, if there hadn’t been an interruption.
The young man excused himself and flurried off. I waited beside a counter, almost hidden by stacked bolts of cloth. Then through the bee-like drone of general noises, I heard Bram’s voice.
“I never asked for nothing free. You got no call to speak to me like that. I only asked about the stale doughnuts, for Chris’ sake. I’d of paid for them, but not the fancy prices you’re asking for them fresh ones.”
Then the clerk’s voice, lowered, to the manager.
“It’s the lemon extract he’s after, really, Mr. Cooper. The constable said we weren’t to sell any more if we thought—you remember? Charlie Bean’s waiting outside—I saw him. They get three times the price for it, from the Indians, for drinking.”
The manager was almost inarticulate with embarrassment. “All right, all right—give him the doughnuts and one bottle of extract, for goodness’ sake. We can’t refuse to sell one, can we? But don’t make it any more, or we’ll be in dutch. Oh Lord, I wish we didn’t have this sort of thing—”
He didn’t know how he could return and speak to me. I saved him the bother. Nothing mattered to me then, for I knew at last what must be done, and in the knowing there was a kind of relief. I stepped out into the open and walked down the center aisle of the store, moving slow and firm in buckled galoshes, my head up high, not looking around at all. When I reached Bram, I saw how old he’d grown. His mouth opened when he saw me, and all I remember noticing was that his teeth had developed brown ridges at the front.
We walked out of the store together, down the steps, past wrinkled Charlie Bean, gaping and shivering in his vigil, and that was the last time we ever walked anywhere together, Brampton Shipley and myself.
Each venture and launching is impossible until it becomes necessary, and then there’s a way, and it doesn’t do to be too fussy about the means. I had my mother’s opal earrings, as well as the sterling silver candelabra and the Limoges dishes, a dinner set for twelve, with the platters and tureens, patterned so delicately in mauve violets and edged with gold. I’d never had occasion to use those dishes. Even at Christmas, I thought they’d be wasted on Bram and his daughters with their silent husbands and runny-nosed young.
You hear of people selling family things and being mortified, as though it meant disgrace. I didn’t look at it that way at all. Lottie was overdressed that day, I need hardly say, in rose and cream chiffon, but I was prepared. I wore the black silk dress I’d bought for my father’s funeral, which I didn’t attend, having discovered the day before the terms of his will and being too put out to go. Even so, I may have looked less fashionable than Lottie that afternoon in her cushioned sitting-room, so stuffed with lace doilies, cerise plush sofa, laden knick-knack cupboard. But I was past caring. My only thought was that she could count herself lucky to get the Currie things so reasonably. We sipped at tea together like two old friends. Her cups were that poor bone china that you buy for half a dollar apiece.
As we finished tea, Lottie smiled insinuatingly.
“Why sell them now, Hagar? You’re not taking a trip or anything, are you?”
Placidly, I denied. Then I took Telford Simmons’s hard-earned cash and did just that.
“Mother—come on.”
A voice, and a hand shaking my shoulder. Startled, I draw away.
“Eh? Eh? What is it?”
“It’s time,” Doris says, with forced patience. “Come on, now.”
“Mercy, it can’t be time to get up yet, can it?”
“To get up!” she whinnies. “It’s dinner time, not morning.”
“Of course,” I come back at her quickly. “I’m well aware of that. I only meant—”
“You must have dozed,” she says. “It’ll do you good.”
“I never did. I was wide awake.”
“It must have relaxed you, talking with Mr. Troy. That’s fine. I thought it would.”
“With mister who?”
“Oh Lord. Never mind. Come on, now. Marv’s waiting. The meat loaf will be stone cold.”
After we’ve eaten, Doris announces she’s going to the corner store for ginger ale.
“I’ll come along.” Suddenly I feel the need to stretch my legs and get a breath of air.
“Well—” She seems doubtful. “If you feel up to it—”
“Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Oh, all right. I thought you’d stay and talk to Marv.”
She brings me my summer coat—a black grosgrain, loose-fitting and cool, yet just enough to keep the evening chill away. I feel comfortable and smart in it. Even Doris likes this coat. She takes my arm, quite needlessly, and off we go. I haven’t been for a walk in ages. This evening I feel sprightly. I step out with a will, sniffing the air, which is light and sweet with a hay perfume, for everyone on the block has been out cutting the lawns today.
At the corner store a young girl is paying for a loaf of bread. She counts the money carefully. She’s scarcely more than a child. I’m fascinated by her hands.
“Well, I never. Do you see her, Doris? She’s wearing black nail polish. Black with specks of gilt. Really, I ask you—what’s her mother thinking of, to allow it?”
The child turns and stares malevolently, and I see from her face that she’s considerably older than I thought.
“Oh, Mother—” Doris breathes into my ear. “Can’t you hush? Please, just for once—”
How has it happened? I can’t face Doris or the black-fingered girl or anyone. Oh, I’ll speak no more, ever, to a living soul. Until my last breath I’ll hold my wayward tongue. I won’t, though—that’s the trouble.
We blunder home, I holding to Doris’s arm, fearing to fall. In the living-room, Marvin is walking to and fro like a pacing bear in some zoo pit. He has that look of difficult concentration which he wears when he’s forced to deal with something he’d rather procrastinate about. He hesitates as though he’s been rehearsing in our absence and has now clean forgotten his speech. Finally his voice blurts in my direction.
“It’s all arranged. The nursing home. I’ve booked you in. You’re to go a week from today.”
Five
“ARE YOU SURE you
wouldn’t like a Seconal?” Doris inquires.
From my soft web of sheets and pillows, I shake my head. “No thanks. I’ll sleep.”
This is a lie. I’ll not sleep a wink tonight. Sleep is the last thing I want. I have to think. They’re greatly mistaken if they think I’ll bend meekly and never raise a finger. I’ve taken matters into my own hands before, and can again, if need be. I’ll have a word or two to say, you can depend on that, before my mouth is stopped with dark.
Revelations are saved for times of actual need, and now one comes to me. I can recall a quiet place, I think, and not so very far from here. Didn’t we go there for a picnic? Was it this year? Now, if the name will only come to me. The name is necessary, essential. For the ticket.
Point Something. Was it? What’s the Point? Like a plague of blackflies, the phrases buzz and mock me. Then it comes. Shadow Point. So named because the cliffs at noon cast shadows on the sea.
Marvin looks after my money. The account’s in his name now. I had forgotten. I haven’t a nickel. I’m stumped once more, but only for an instant. How well I’m thinking tonight. Ideas come thick and fast. The old-age pension check, of course. I’m sure I saw the envelope on the den desk today. I haven’t signed this month’s, I’m almost certain of that. Normally I sign them and Marvin takes them to the bank. It’s not a great sum, goodness knows, but it would do. If only it’s still there. Dare I rise and look? Tiptoe downstairs? Yes, and trip, more than likely, tumble and break my neck, rouse Marvin and Doris like scared ducks from a swamp. No, that wouldn’t do. I’ll wait. When morning comes, I must be light-spoken, sly and easy, never letting on. Excitement burns through my arteries, making me wakeful just when I want to sleep.
I packed our things, John’s and mine, in perfect outward calm, putting them in the black trunk that still bore the name Miss H. Currie. John, twelve, watched.
“Are you going to tell him?”
“I’ll tell him,” I said, “when he comes in.”
“Maybe we should just go and not say,” John said.