After a while, just as Margaret and Patrick were settling down in the living room for one of their tired, interesting talks, Bill came halfway back down the stairs and called out to them. When they came into the hall he stood over them and asked, “After you’re gone, how am I expected to manage? I am without my best fingers, you know.” He held up his hands. “The tools seem not very heavy, but how lightweight can they be when you’re the one doing the work?” Patrick told him not to worry himself over it, the tools were not heavy and would not get heavy, that’s why he’d bought them. He said it would be fine. He said, “Go back to bed, Dad.” Bill turned on the stairs and started up, but they heard him, as he meant them to. “Get it all talked through, now. Talk it all through.”
Patrick and Margaret had been enjoying their little talks for some time. Some of the others seemed to be puzzled by this, as if Margaret was secretly teaching Patrick how to knit, or can peaches. It had begun soon after the morning they’d gone to the hospital together to see Mary, not long after Patrick had married Stephanie. Patrick’s son Stephen had phoned him at his office to tell him about his mother’s breast cancer, not before, but two days after Mary’s surgery, which had been fast and major, a double mastectomy, and, without thinking, Patrick had immediately called Margaret, to let her know.
“Well, then we’re going to go and see her,” she’d told him. “You and I. Today.” When Patrick hesitated, because he was not prepared, not quite ready with a legitimate defence, she didn’t sit quietly on the other end of the phone as was her considerate habit. She spoke quickly and with not a hint of patience. “Not loving each other any more is no excuse.”
He had waited for Margaret at a window table in the cafeteria, drinking a tolerable cup of coffee and looking out at the ugly rooftops of the office buildings that surrounded the hospital, at the bright winter sky and the streaks of clouds, which were still so white above the filth of the city air. He knew many of the office buildings he was looking at but more usually from the street-level perspective of their elaborate, arched entrances, their heavy plate-glass doors, their hushed, serious lobbies. Although it should not have been, it was a bit of a surprise, and an offence, this complete absence of architectural
finish to the rooftops. Looking at the flat gravelled surfaces and the blown garbage and the old chimneys and the air shafts and the filthy pigeons flying from one building to another, concentrating on the pigeons, counting the pigeons, fighting it off but not nearly hard enough, not hard enough to stop it, he remembered the warmth of Mary’s breasts and her undiminished modesty about her breasts, which had been so unexpected and so beautiful and, a long time ago, twenty years ago, so heavy with the tracing of veins, with the blue-white nourishment that he himself had taken, more than once, carefully, listening in the midnight quiet of the house to the sound of her soft, patient laughter, like a mother’s laughter, drifting above him, through his hair. He imagined the breasts now, disembodied. Carried away with other breasts. Burned?
To kill the image, and his one true hope for Mary was that it would never come to her, he pulled back hard to the cup of lukewarm, tolerable coffee in his hands and allowed himself to become doubly worried, about Mary and what this diagnosis might mean for her and for the kids, and about Margaret, who had turned seventy-five in the fall and was now driving alone on the snow-covered highway.
When Margaret sat down at the cafeteria table and began to pull off her gloves finger by finger the way she always had, he asked her to promise him that she wouldn’t drive the highway any more. She did promise him and she’d stuck to it, as far as he knew that trip behind the wheel had been her last beyond the town limits.
Riding down to Mary’s room on the elevator with a nurse who was attending to a hairless but still cheerful child on a stretcher, a boy who held his X-rays in his arms, Margaret told Patrick, “She won’t want anything from you but your support. And you should be able to give her that with no disrespect to Stephanie.” And just before she pushed Mary’s door open, with an obviously willed authority, as if this fight was now her own as well as Mary’s, as if, three years after Paul’s death, she had finally rediscovered some small part of her strength and was happy to see a chance to put it to use, she’d told him, “It’s not always the death sentence it used to be. Mary can live through this.” And so she had, fighting like hell all the way, seizing her luck.
Now Patrick often found himself talking to Margaret. This too could be done with no disrespect to Stephanie, whom he enjoyed and loved with almost no reservation, partly for her solid and unheralded accomplishments as a lawyer, partly because she was full of lusty wit and shameless in the dark, and partly, and perhaps this was the largest part, because she had far too much respect for her own difficult history to launch an assault on his.
And when he did talk with Margaret, usually quietly over a cup of tea or a drink of Scotch, she never hesitated to make an honest comment if one came to her.
M
ARGARET
had made a big pot of tea. She had asked Patrick for an update on his son Stephen and he was telling her that Stephen had finally got on with the symphony, that he was at thirty the youngest French horn player the orchestra had ever hired and how proud they all were. “Whatever divorce does,” he said, “it does not diminish pride.”
Then he confessed that he felt quite bad for the times he had wished Stephen would set the horn aside and go out for a baseball team or sign up to be a camp counsellor or something. He said he hadn’t mentioned this to anyone, only thanked God he hadn’t pushed the kid any harder than he had. He said he had no idea what stopped him.
Taking this in, Margaret told Patrick that he wasn’t about to hear her say he was a model parent. “You’ve got lucky,” she said. “Good parenting is just watching for your luck, trusting it to make an appearance once in a while, and sitting up straight when it does.” She poured him his cup of tea. “Bad parenting is mostly bad luck,” she said. “I believe that.”
Listening to Patrick go on about his thoughts, his secret achievements, his small feared badness, had turned out to be one of Margaret’s old-woman pleasures. It wasn’t like hearing guilt or hesitant pride or regret from a woman. It was, in her experience, much more rare. She watched him talk the way you might watch an animal grooming himself in the dark of night. She kept still, maintained a certain distance.
As he talked this time, Margaret was getting ready to make her own confession. She had decided after Patrick’s last visit that she was going to own up to the lie she’d fed him when he was a boy, just after Sarah was born, the lie about his mother and the ball games. She was not inclined to tamper with their other lie, his pretence that he had never faltered, never spent his evenings crying in the arms of a mousy, loving young woman. Which had been the only place for it he could find. Obviously. Although she was willing to expose herself as a self-serving liar, a woman who would lie to a belligerent, grieving boy, she was by no means finished with restraint, with the shelter provided by restraint.
“When I first came here I didn’t know your mind,” she started. “I just knew that you’d lost your mother and had this new woman in your house. Me. You were so very quiet, not sulky exactly, but too quiet for my taste. So I lied to you about something.”
Patrick put his cup down and briefly closed his eyes. “Sulky would be the word,” he said. “I know I wasn’t helpful to you. Like Paul, for instance. Paul always turned up when he was needed.”
“He must have been born with his easygoing heart,” she said. “I never once saw it fail him.”
They were quiet for a minute. This was the thing given to Paul, a quiet space around his name.
“Anyway,” she said. “About the ball games. Truth be told, your mother and I hardly knew each other when we were young. She was one of the girls who finished high school, which was supposed to guarantee you the chance for a different kind of life. I didn’t, of course. My family was on the outside of things. Rougher. Not much money. No one educated. So your mother and I did not play on the same ball team. But I do remember her when she was young. When the men were away. And I remember you kids on the park bleachers, already bathed and ready for bed, you running loose, Paul and Daphne wrapped in blankets in your grandparents’ arms.” She waited a little while before she continued, as if she had made a picture they could look at together.
“They’d just put in the lights for night games, sometimes there were two a night, and I remember warming up behind the bleachers,
glancing over once in a while to see how the other game was going, seeing your mother on first base, slamming a fist into her glove, yelling ball talk with the other women, jumping funny little jumps on the bag to keep herself revved up. I remember this so clearly.”
“She wasn’t very big for first base,” Patrick said.
“No, she wasn’t,” Margaret said.
“She was a showy player,” he said.
“Showy and funny and very determined to win,” Margaret said. “That’s what people would have thought.”
“And the purpose of the lie?” he asked.
“Only to give you something,” she said. “Or maybe to win you over. Maybe I was just covering my bases, or my ass.”
“Well, it worked,” Patrick said, smiling because he liked it when she swore, which was not very often any more. “Perhaps I can tell you a lie some day.”
“That would be nice, dear,” she said.
He sat up straight to finish his tea and then he asked, “You never thought of getting married before you came to us?”
“Thought about it all the time,” she said. “I was lonely. Take my word, it’s not good to be alone.”
“I’d know that,” Patrick said. He got up and walked into the dining room and opened the buffet door to find the Scotch, his own bottle, his own brand, kept there and replaced as needed. He sat down again and lifted Margaret’s cup from the saucer to drink the last of her tea. Then he poured them both a healthy shot.
“Your dad saved me,” she said. “Asking me.” She lifted the teacup and the saucer together to take a sip. “A life wants work.”
“There must have been others,” he said. “Before.”
“Almost all the men were married,” she said, “all the good ones. And that didn’t appeal to me much. Sneaking around.” These were the necessary words, the lies that betrayed nothing. “It could have got known.”
“But before,” he said. “Before everyone was married.”
“I was very tall,” she said. “About as tall as I am today. Most men then didn’t even like to stand beside a tall woman. Let alone lay her down.”
Patrick laughed, leaned his head way back. In the middle of his pleasure he noticed for the first time in his life the array of fine spiderweb cracks in the plaster ceiling. He thought maybe he should acknowledge the cracks out loud and offer to fix them or to have them fixed, but then he thought he would probably let them go. It had to stop somewhere.
“Men your age have had to learn to hide their egos,” Margaret said. “I’ve noticed this. And it’s a good thing. But they didn’t hide them then. A woman had to have a certain look about her. Not weak exactly, but if you looked like you could make it on your own, mostly they let you make it on your own. The last thing wanted was a partner.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” Patrick said, watching her face.
“And pretty true,” she said. “In my judgement.”
“Too harsh,” he said, shaking his head, refusing to believe.
“Your dad needed a partner,” she said. “Because he’d been stopped. Because he had something under way here that had to be carried on with.”
“Us,” he said.
“And himself,” she said. “He was a settled man. He needed to stay settled.”
“I heard once,” he said, “just after you came to us, that you had someone who went overseas. Someone who didn’t get back.”
Came to us, she thought. Like a revelation? Is that how he thinks about it now? “Heard that, did you?” she said. “I didn’t think busy boys had time for gossip.”
He most certainly would have described her joining them differently when he was a boy. But at the time, although she’d been casually affectionate with him, and careful and smart and patient, she had not really concerned herself with how Patrick judged her decision because at eighteen he’d been just too young to comprehend much about how a life got built. And she would have to say that she didn’t really care now, either.
“Was it true?” he asked.
He wasn’t going to stop. He was going to keep at her and that was fine. “It’s still true,” she said.
“And…?” he said. “And…?”
“I’m an old woman, Patrick,” she said.
“You are old,” he said. “An old tall woman.”
She thought she heard something and looked toward the stairs, stretched back to look around the archway into the hall to make sure it was empty. She coughed, once and hard.
“He was,” she started, just loud enough to be heard across the coffee table, “tall. Not noticeable, not handsome or extraordinarily smart. But he would have been able to make a good living somehow. He would have been as steady as a rock, not unlike your father. And he had the best possible body.”
“Whoa,” Patrick said. “Do I really want to hear this?”
“His body almost matched mine,” she said. “We used to take our bodies out to the inland lakes, over to the east side where there weren’t any cottages.” This is quite nice, she thought, this memory of an innocent young woman, before the war. And she did remember a purity, the pure grace of good sex just discovered, and she felt so lucky to have had that when she was starting out, when she surely could not have survived without it. “I loved him,” she said, finishing her Scotch, “and he most certainly loved me.”
Patrick topped up their drinks. “And then there was a war,” he said. “And because he was young and fit he got sent overseas. And then he was killed.”
“And then he got blown to bits in a field in France. And he wasn’t alone. There were sixteen from just here, so multiply that. And lots of the ones who did get back were lost in some other way. Some of your father’s bits got left behind, remember. Bits he could have used.”