Patrick said he understood, and thank you, and when he opened the car door, Mr. McFarlane told him that the next weekend he was home they would go up to the bank together to sign a note. He said he would tell the banker Patrick’s word was adequate collateral and a first instalment would be deposited in his account for him to manage as necessary. Patrick recognized Mr. McFarlane’s words as only the courtesy of flattery, the wilful thinking of an old man determined to back a younger, unproven man, but he accepted the flattery because by now he believed what Mr. McFarlane said, he did believe he would be able to hold up his end of the deal.
Daphne was working hard in grade twelve, carrying two of the grade-thirteen sciences because she had decided on nursing and to make the following year, which was understood to be rough, a little easier. Now that Roger was gone she had more time on her hands, so in November she started to go down to the arena to help teach the smallest skaters their figures and their little routines, to prepare them for the winter carnival when they would all be mice or rabbits on ice.
She cooked three nights a week at the drive-in and waited for someone to ask her out. No one did. No one else knew that Roger was finished with her and she could hardly make an announcement. She didn’t help Margaret as much as she might have but when her father brought this up at the supper table, as casually as he could, Margaret said, “That’s all right, Bill. She’s already working quite hard enough.”
Paul settled successfully into grade eleven, and into Andy.
T
HE
grandparents still stopped in, Bill’s mother and father, Sylvia’s mother and father. None of them talked outright about the pregnancy although they didn’t indicate anything remotely close to shock that Margaret would want and feel entitled to her own child.
In early December Sylvia’s mother pulled into the shovelled driveway with her trunk open. She came into the kitchen to put a coat over Margaret’s shoulders and then led her out to the car to show her a wicker bassinet, their gift to the baby. She had made a long white eyelet skirt for it and there was a box of satin bows to be attached after the baby was born, when they’d know whether it should be pink or blue. Left on her own, Margaret would not have had bows of any colour, but she was not on her own. She would never again be on her own.
The two of them lifted the bassinet from the trunk and brought it into the living room. That week and the week that followed, as if everyone had been waiting for a sign, other baby apparatus arrived, a big proud buggy for the spring from Bill’s parents, a playpen, a high chair, rattles and rag dolls and a small zoo of stuffed animals. People just kept arriving at the door with presents. Margaret was astonished that so many would take the trouble.
On December 19, she went into hard labour straight from sleep. Bill recognized the sounds she made but he wasn’t adequately prepared because he had not expected her to hit the ground running. He’d just assumed the older the woman, the slower, the more difficult the labour. He got her into the car and drove out of town through the dark, through the light sleet. The big highway was almost empty. There were only a few hulking semis either on their way to the Bluewater Bridge at the border or just off it, heading for Toronto. He was acutely aware of the black ice that coated the sheltered sections of the road, black the worst of all ice because it was invisible in the dark, it was not even there until your headlights made it shine and by that time you were on it, committed.
As he drove, he talked slowly and deliberately, telling Margaret that from his experience everything seemed exactly normal and that she had to try hard to relax between the contractions, had to keep some of her strength in reserve because she’d be needing it.
At the hospital, he pulled onto the emergency ramp and ran in to get someone, returning with a nurse who pushed a wheelchair. He followed as she wheeled Margaret inside to a desk to do the paperwork and then up the elevator. When they came to the case room
doors the nurse pointed him down the hall to an alcove of brown plastic chairs and then she pushed Margaret through the doors quickly, robbing him of the chance to say one last encouraging word to Margaret’s back.
They put Margaret out right after the delivery. An hour later Bill was allowed into her room but she wasn’t conscious, didn’t know he had kissed her forehead. They told Bill his second daughter appeared to be a bit early but was fine and that Margaret’s uterus was in shock, a common enough reaction with such a fast delivery. Outside Margaret’s room, a nurse wheeled the baby down the corridor and let him look at her for maybe two minutes and then she left him standing there alone. On her way back to the nursery she turned around and said, “You might as well be on your way. Your wife will need her rest.”
He drove the thirty miles home just before dawn. The wet snow was thicker on the windshield and the traffic had picked up so he was forced to take it slow.
When he walked into the kitchen Daphne and Paul were waiting at the table with a pot of coffee ready for him on the stove. “A girl,” he told them. “And Margaret’s all right. She did fine.” He said Margaret was sleeping now, that they’d decided to put her to sleep because it had been extremely fast. “It was very, very fast,” he said. In answer to Daphne’s questions, he said he had no idea how much their sister weighed, all he could say was that she was tiny, a real little runt, and he couldn’t say either if she looked like anyone or when they might come home. After only a few sips of coffee he stood to go upstairs to get ready for work. “I’ll come home at noon,” he called back from the stairs, “and we’ll go back in together.”
Daphne called Patrick and Murray in London and got them out of bed. She talked to each of them, said the same things twice. “It’s a girl and Margaret came through with flying colours. She’s absolutely fine. It’s sister Sally.”
Margaret’s uterus gradually came out of shock and when she woke up, alone, she ran her hands over her sore, softened stomach and then up over her breasts, which in the last few months had become ridiculously large and which were now aching and hard as melons.
They fed Sally sugar water in the nursery and brought her to Margaret several times a day to try to take the breast, one nurse staying with them always, even after Margaret told her that it might be better if they were on their own. By the second day Sally had caught on and the nurse finally left them in peace. Bill had brought Daphne and Paul in that first day to look at their sister through the nursery window and the boys drove down from London, coming awkwardly into the quiet of Margaret’s room in their coats and boots. After four days of it, Margaret told Bill she wanted out, as soon as possible, yesterday.
When Margaret brought Sally home everyone was ready to hold her, she was never down. Bill called her the Christmas present. After the boys got the tree up and decorated, Daphne wrapped Sally’s squirming naked body in a red ribbon and carefully tucked her in among the other presents for a picture. Margaret leaned against the living-room arch and watched Daphne do this not because she was even slightly worried about Sally in Daphne’s beautiful hands but because before Sally joined them she had not once seen Daphne reach to touch anyone, man or beast.
Murray’s parents were on their first Caribbean cruise, so the big brick house beside the United Church was dark and empty. Murray unpacked but he didn’t stay even long enough for the heat to come up before he got back in his car. He had every reason to go over to Bill and Margaret’s. More reason now. He assumed he would be welcome to join them for Christmas dinner but he offered to buy the turkey anyway and Margaret said sure, that would be fine, although she would appreciate it if he let her go up to Sylvia’s father at Clarke’s and pick it out herself. Last year Bill had gone up on his own and after a Christmas drink or two out back with everyone he had come home with a twenty-eight pounder and, although she hadn’t said so and would not have said so, she believed the meat in a younger, smaller bird was just a lot more tender. If quantity was going to be an issue, better two smaller birds than one monster. That was her policy.
Margaret knew that with all this help around she had it much easier than most new mothers. She rested, aware of her good
fortune. When Sylvia’s mother asked discreetly if her milk was coming down all right, Margaret put her hands to her astonishing breasts and laughed out loud, said there was enough for Sally and likely quite a few others. Sally thrived.
I
N
early April of the following year, at the end of a beautiful first long week of spring, Margaret stood with her hands buried in soapy water at the kitchen sink watching evening overtake the backyard. Sally was in her basket on the floor at her feet, sleeping as she always did with her small fists curled and her arms uplifted in the position of surrender, her soft scent almost visible. Margaret liked to stand at the kitchen window watching the shadows from the trees make their way across the grass. There were patterns she could anticipate now. She didn’t know if it was having Sally or just more time alone since she’d given up her job, but she saw things here, lovely things, all the time.
The rolling April sky was threatening to do something before nightfall and three yard squirrels were quarrelling stupidly over the hickory nuts they’d hidden in the fall, chasing each other across the garage roof and halfway up the trees, around and around the lawn chairs, which were still overturned from the winter. Bill had been talking about having the back hickories cut down, using the space they took for a shed to store the odds and ends that accumulated, of their own volition, he said, in the garage. He said he could disguise the shed with a trellis or an arbour, maybe add a garden bench. He said with some of the shade gone Margaret could plant some vegetables out there if she liked.
Patrick had come home for Easter to work a week at the feed mill because one of the full-time guys had some heart trouble, and as Margaret rinsed the glasses under the hottest possible water she heard him coming quietly down the stairs. Sylvia had been correct about her oldest son. Lately he had been spending a lot of his free time in his room with his stereo, listening to records, and he always moved quietly now, you never quite knew where he was. He was too well mannered, too thoroughly trained for much outright anger, for outbursts, and she would not have thought to use the word
depressed
because that word was saved for people who were in serious difficulty, but she did come up with the word
cranky.
She assumed that a good part of his crankiness was directed at her, although she did not dream that Patrick would tell her what was on his mind. From what she had seen so far, they were not in the habit of levelling with each other in this house, certainly not the way she was used to anyway, with screaming matches and foul, ugly words that had to be mopped up the next day, with mindless accusations that still rang clear miles and years away. And she wasn’t about to teach them how.
Patrick walked into the kitchen wearing a new ball glove, his Christmas gift from Murray. He was working it with his fist, pounding it, giving it shape, and when he pushed the screen door open to leave she stopped him with a question. “When you consider the fact that men generally have longer legs,” she said, “do you believe the greater distance between the bases really does make baseball a harder game than softball?”
His face showed mild surprise but he thought for a minute and gave her a serious answer. “Well, I think that’s the idea,” he said.
“I wonder,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if I couldn’t have played baseball, given my legs.” She turned to look at him. “Your mother and I played softball together,” she said. “She was a topflight first baseman and I myself was a half-decent shortstop. You likely don’t remember,” she said, “but sometimes your grandparents brought you guys to the park to watch in your pyjamas.” And then to give him some context, to give him a way to imagine it, she told him, “This was when the men were overseas.”
He was halfway out the door, leaning against the screen, waiting.
She picked up the pile of plates from the counter and lowered them carefully down through the water. “Although no one ever put it in so many words,” she said, “your mother and I were pretty much the backbone of that team. We were good,” she said, nodding once and firmly as someone would after any fair judgement. When she said, “One year we came this close to the provincial championship,” she lifted her hand from the suds to show him the smallest possible space between her thumb and forefinger.
Patrick looked at her soapy hand and for just a split second, but
surely, his face softened. There it is, Margaret thought, and, Now maybe that’s done. Then he gave her his own clumsy nod and turned his face to the sound of Murray’s car on the gravel in the driveway.
Margaret raised her head to smile at Murray through the window. She knew he would be watching to see if she did, they all kept an eye on her to see what she might do. And she knew he would be able to see the smile because she had been walking Sally up and down the streets in her high, proud buggy in the evenings and now she understood better than some that what looked from the inside like a square of shadowy darkness was really in the dusk a square of framing light. Murray would see the smile and not as a freakish reflection as she saw it, but clearly, unmistakably. Seeing it, he might put one more tick in his Margaret’s All Right column. She realized that Murray, too, had needed time to get used to things. She had watched him grieve, maybe not as obviously as the others, but not less.
“Sally and I might come to some of your games this summer,” she offered, and although Patrick had nothing to say to this, he did take the time before he jumped the steps to use his elbow against the closing of the screen door so Sally wouldn’t be frightened awake by a bang.
The last part of what Margaret had told Patrick had been a lie, had been what her notoriously blunt, profane, and long-deceased father would have called a bare-assed lie. She had hardly known Sylvia. They had never played on the same ball team and neither of them had ever got close to any championship.