“Were you engaged?” Patrick asked.
“Not officially,” she said. “They came to tell his mother. I didn’t find out how and where and when for hours.” She drained her cup again. “His mother would not have liked me much, although I didn’t ever hear that for sure.”
“Because you were rough,” he said.
“But I wasn’t,” she said. “I’ve never been rough. Only my family, my background.”
She sat up straight to begin to gather things on the tray. “I kept myself busy,” she said, “remembering him, all the things about him. It can pass a lot of time. I wouldn’t have noticed another man’s interest if it had parked itself outside my door.” Oh, such easy words, she thought. And said with such a convincing firmness, as if she had been always ready, always on guard, for questions like this.
Patrick picked up the bottle to fill his own cup again and reached across to hers but she stretched out a hand to block the flow.
“Sometimes I used to take Sandra Elliot out to the east side of the inland lakes,” he said. “For years I never travelled without a blanket.”
“You and Paul both,” she said. “I was the one who pulled your blankets from the trunk every fall and washed them. Did you never notice that they didn’t smell as bad as they might have?”
“Maybe we found the same dunes,” he said. “Do you remember where you went exactly?” He lifted his eyebrows, mimicked an exaggerated, prurient interest. “Perhaps we spread our blankets on the same warm, moonlit sand.”
Margaret laughed, abruptly, loudly, covered her mouth to stifle the sound.
“You’re blushing,” Patrick said. “This I’ve heard about but never seen.” He reached for her arm. “Take your hand away.”
She brushed him off, stood up and turned her back on him, bent to gather the cups, her laughter muted from sound to the familiar shaking movement of her broad shoulders.
She lifted the tray and started toward the kitchen, through the hall. She stopped in mid-stride. Bill was sitting on the stairs, on the steps that fanned to make the turn, curled up in his pyjamas, his arms wrapped around himself for warmth, his eyes shut tight against God knows what.
“You’re there,” Margaret said.
Bill stood up, pushed himself up, staggering a bit against the wall.
“Sylvia,” he said. “Come to bed. Both of you.”
Patrick recovered quickly. “Yes,” he said, loudly, cleanly. “It’s about that time.” He pulled off his work socks and held them tight in his hands, did not drop them to the floor and leave them for
Margaret as he had when he was a young man. “Our room?” he asked, meaning his and Paul’s. He knew it was up there waiting for him, the sheets on his old bed newly washed and ironed so they would feel cool on his skin, the faded quilts stacked three thick the way he liked them, the air in the room freshened with the late afternoon breeze. Earlier, standing sweating in the garden, he had looked up at the sound of their window being thrown open. He had seen his father’s arms spread wide to grip the heavy sash.
He understood that he was expected to get up and follow his father. This day, the work he’d done this day, had exhausted him, as he had wanted it to. His body needed and for once had earned the deepest sleep. But he stayed put. Hearing the stumbling footfalls on the stairs, he thought about the man who was still supposed to be his father sitting out there listening, knowing, if he still knew anything, that he would soon be discovered, and then climbing the stairs to his bed to lie there alone and rage about what he’d heard or thought he’d heard. A man who had possessed for most of his life no talent for rage at all, now lost, now helpless, without it.
He lowered his head. He could not, for anything, have lifted his head. He thought about Paul, how good a man he had been, how terrifying it must have been to die so fast, without warning, to be killed instantly, although surely not absolutely instantly, surely not without a brief, black comprehension, and then he thought about sweet Meg, who had not for one moment of her life been sweet and who would never again now be her beloved, difficult, ragged self but always something else, some doped, defeated thing, and he thought about his mother, a mother he could remember not only sick and dying but just as clearly alive at the kitchen table and in the car and in the yard, dying the furthest thing from her mind, her quick, light voice calling out to all of them with praise or correction or surprise, and he thought about Daphne, the steady nerve of her mothering and how wildly, recklessly courageous she was before she fell, pumping the makeshift trapeze as hard as she could above the watching crowd, above the mattresses, smiling her showmanship smile for Murray. At the end of it he thought about a finely wrought first marriage broken by a stupid, sanctimonious man, himself.
He thought if Margaret had not been standing in the hall, he might have…might have what? What? Broken down? Wept? Lost control? Lost himself? No. Except for the one time, the one long moment of losing Paul, the sharp, blunt shock of losing Paul…None of that had ever made itself available to him, not even when he was a boy. His options, if that’s what they were, had always been much more limited.
Margaret hadn’t moved. “Are you sitting there thinking about all of it?” she asked. She didn’t approach him, didn’t put the tray down. “Perhaps you shouldn’t,” she said. “I don’t.”
He looked up at her. “Who knew?” he said.
“Who could have known?” Margaret answered. “None of us.” She steadied the tray against the long moon curve of her stomach. “It’s all right, Patrick,” she said. “You are a kind man. I am a kind woman. There are lots of us around.”
He covered his face with his beautiful tired hands as if to hold something back, as if something behind his face was asking to be held back. “Do you ever pray?” he asked.
“I don’t waste my time asking for anything,” she said. “Although once in a while, perhaps two or three times a year when some small thing happens or maybe doesn’t happen, I catch myself feeling thankful.”
“Thankful,” he said.
“Or maybe lucky,” she said, leaving him there, calling back to him from the kitchen. “Your towels are on the dresser. Have your shower now or in the morning, it doesn’t matter to us one way or the other.”
Patrick got up to put the Scotch away and then he climbed the stairs. Margaret rinsed the cups and saucers in the sink and followed him. There was no further talk. They slept quickly and soundly, all three of them, their separate exhaustions quietly absorbed by the house, by its safety, its comfort, its simple, blessed walls.
A
FTER
a breakfast of bacon and French toast with whipped butter and a pitcher of this spring’s maple syrup, the kind of luxury breakfast Margaret allowed only once or twice a year now, Patrick and
Bill unhitched the trailer from the Lincoln and drove out to the nursery on the highway for seed. Bill had the list in his hands, held it up close to his face.
“Geraniums,” he said. “I don’t remember that we decided on geraniums.” He reached toward the radio and Patrick, anticipating his wish, turned it down for him. “Tell me if this is right,” he said. “Corn. Geraniums. Peppers. Potatoes. Broccoli. Asparagus. Peas.”
“Sounds about right to me,” Patrick said.
Bill reached out again. “Who is this guy?” he said. “What the hell is he talking about?”
When Patrick told him it was the CBC, it was Arthur Black, and that he talked very quickly, that was his style, Bill said, “I don’t like broccoli.” He was studying the radio, trailing his good left fingers over the buttons. When he finally found the right one, he punched it off. “They don’t necessarily pick up on it, what you don’t like.”
“So tell her,” Patrick said, glancing over. “It shouldn’t have to be any big deal.”
Bill shifted in his seat to look directly at this son of his. “Whatever difficulty Margaret and I might have,” he said, “would never under any circumstances become a concern of yours.” He turned away, muttered, “You worry about your own God damned life.” When they pulled into the parking lot, to close it off for good, he said, “I don’t intend to be eating very much broccoli.”
The nursery was having a busy morning. They had recently expanded, there was a bigger, better sign over the doors and a bigger, paved parking lot. Bill claimed to know a dozen cars. “Everybody’s here this morning,” he said, throwing off his seat belt, checking his tie, opening his door wide before the Lincoln had come to a full stop.
They were nearly two hours finding what they’d come for. Bill said he wanted to see where things were now, what was new. He said they had no reason to rush. Patrick let him lead them around the old greenhouse and then outside and into another and then into another. In the courtyard behind the main building, looking over several neat rows of small “accent” trees, most of them stunted, grafted at a modest height for small properties, the grafts gnarled like a big man’s hard fist, Bill laughed out loud and slapped Patrick
on the back as if they were compatriots, as if such obvious stupidity must have been staged for their enjoyment. “Whatever these are,” he said, “they sure as Christ aren’t trees. Imagine,” he said, “passing these things off as trees. And people falling for it.”
As they wandered around and around again, he made several of the other gardeners stop and shake hands with Patrick. Some of them remembered Patrick, of course, some of them did not. Bill told everyone that he had decided to replant Margaret’s garden and that he’d asked Patrick to come up and give him a hand. He told them they would have to come over to see his new space-age garden tools, said they were beyond belief. He walked up and down the same soggy aisles a dozen times, reached out to touch the barely blooming plants on either side as if he loved them. He had words for everyone he passed, smiled grandly, bent to kiss all the women who would be kissed.
On the way home with the seeds and the geraniums, Bill checked the time and then told Patrick to turn at Albert Street, to swing by Turnball’s barn down at the creek. He said the Old Babes’ Committee was dedicating the new park today and why didn’t they stop off for a few minutes to watch the proceedings.
“Who are they dedicating it to?” Patrick asked.
“Oh, themselves, I expect,” Bill said.
Turnball’s barn was gone but there were a dozen cars parked where it had once stood and about thirty people standing around down near the creek. The park wasn’t big. It was only a cleaned-up section of Stonebrook Creek with a wide footbridge over the water to an open expanse of cleaned-up land on the other side. Whoever was behind the park had got enough money together for an elaborate wooden swing set and a slide and a complicated climbing gym on the far side of the water and the grass had been roped off and reseeded, although it was still pretty patchy. Several small red maples and a clump-birch had been staked for strength against the hazard of wind and there were three large picnic tables placed in the shade of the willows at the water.
And it was obvious even sitting in the car that they had tampered with the creek bed, that rocks and stones had been either hauled in or substantially, carefully rearranged. Someone with a forklift or a
front-end loader had tried to make themselves a little work of art, tried to complicate the course, the appearance and sound, of the current. As if the random placement, the natural state of things, was not worth watching. And all of this effort, this expense, all of it for the benefit of someone who might want to stand for a while on a footbridge.
Bill didn’t get out of the car this time. “Too blazing hot,” he said. “It’s going to be one of those days when walking is more like swimming. Our first this year.” He was leaning forward studying the controls on the dash. “We’ll just sit here with the air on if you don’t mind.”
Patrick adjusted the air-conditioning. “What a fine park,” he said.
“Maybe,” Bill said. “We’ll hope so.” Sitting there, he began to play at the stubs of his missing fingers, a habit he had begun only recently. Soon after the war, the scarred skin had healed and faded back to an almost fleshy pink but now it had been rubbed raw, it was once again a wound. “They came knocking,” he said. “I gave them fifty bucks and Margaret gave them her own fifty. You should give some thought to doing the same.”
Patrick did not respond to the admonition. After Mr. McFarlane’s note was paid off, years before, he had found his own private way to move that generosity on down the line. Now, with student loans, no kid was as trapped as he would have been, and he believed this was a good thing, removing the chance for success from the realm of sheer, dumb luck. And it certainly had been sheer, dumb luck, Mr. McFarlane being there to decide that he was worthy of risk. Anyway, if he remembered correctly, such things were not to be bandied about.
Bill was searching around for the control that would make his seat go back. “Your mother would have been pleased as punch to be part of this,” he said, nodding toward the crowd. “It’s just her kind of thing. Improving the filthy creek.” He’d found the right knob to push and he stretched out his legs and crossed his arms. “And she has always supported Margaret. Don’t ever doubt that. All these years not a word against Margaret.” He pointed his left index finger, directing Patrick’s attention to the activity at the creek.
Patrick looked from face to face and finally recognized Charles Taylor, who was dressed as he’d always been dressed in pressed pants and a shirt and tie, maybe the same tie. Except for the snowwhite hair, Charles hadn’t changed much. From this distance, at least, he still had the body of the young man who’d spent one of his summers watching a bunch of kids get ready for a circus performance. Patrick tried to calculate just how elderly the rarely seen Mrs. Taylor might be by now and then he recognized the woman standing beside Charles. It was Margaret’s friend Angela Johnston, who was old and small and bent over a stainless-steel walker that reflected the sunlight. Perhaps Angela was the mother now.
A middle-aged man who was probably the mayor spoke briefly and then a woman Patrick was sure he had never known stepped forward to bend down and pull a bright red cloth off a plaque. The plaque was affixed to a rough chunk of black granite that sat low to the ground like a modest grave marker and as soon as the words of dedication were exposed everyone standing down at the creek began to applaud. When some of them lifted their clapping hands high in the air to signify a particular pleasure, Bill joined them with his own hands, shouting, “Hurray for the Old Babes.”