Dear Life: Stories (16 page)

My mother and I had things we liked to eat for supper, and radio programs we liked to listen to, and always the BBC overseas news before we went to bed. My mother’s eyes would glisten when the king spoke, or Winston Churchill. I took her to see the movie
Mrs. Miniver
, and she was affected by that as well. Drama filled our lives, the fictional kind and the real kind. The evacuation from Dunkirk, the brave behavior of the royal family, the bombing of London night after night and Big Ben still ringing to announce its somber news. Ships lost at sea and then, most dreadfully, a civilian boat, a ferry, sunk between Canada and Newfoundland, that close to our own shores.

That night I could not sleep and walked the streets of the town. I had to think of the people gone to the bottom of the sea. Old women, nearly old women like my mother, hanging on to their knitting. Some kid bothered by a toothache. Other people who had spent their last half hour before drowning complaining of seasickness. I had a very strange feeling that was part horror and part—as near as I can describe it—a kind of chilly exhilaration. The blowing away of everything, the equality—I have to say it—the equality, all of a sudden, of people like me and worse than me and people like them.

Of course this feeling vanished when I got used to seeing
things, later in the war. Naked healthy buttocks, thin old buttocks, all of them being herded into the gas chambers.

Or if it didn’t quite vanish, I did learn to bat it down.

I must have run into Oneida during those years, and kept track of her life. I would have had to. Her father died right before VE-day, mixing up the funeral with the celebrations in an awkward way. The same for my mother’s, which occurred the following summer, just when everybody heard about the atomic bomb. My mother did die more startlingly and publicly, at work, just after she said, “I’m going to have to sit down.”

Oneida’s father had hardly been seen or heard of during the last year of his life. The charade of Hawksburg was over, but Oneida seemed busier than ever. Or maybe you just got the feeling then that everybody you met was busy, what with keeping track of ration books and posting letters to the front and telling about letters they had got in return.

And in Oneida’s case there was the care of that big house, which she now had to run alone.

She stopped me on the street one day and said she would like to have my advice about selling it. The house. I said that I wasn’t really the person she should be talking to. She said maybe not but she knew me. Of course she didn’t know me any more than she knew anybody else in town, but she persisted, and came to my house to talk further. She admired the paint job I had done, along with rearranging the furniture, and she remarked that the change must have helped to keep me from missing my mother.

True, but most people would not have come right out and said that.

I wasn’t used to entertaining, so I didn’t offer any refreshments, just gave her some serious and cautionary advice about selling and kept reminding her that I was no expert.

Then she went ahead and ignored everything I had said. She sold it at the first offer and did that mainly because the buyer went on about how he loved the place and looked forward to raising his family there. He was the last person in town I would have trusted, children or no children, and the price was pitiful. I had to tell her so. I said the children would make a shambles of it, and she said that was what children were for. All banging around, the very opposite of her own childhood. As a matter of fact, they never got a chance to, because the buyer proceeded to pull it down and put up an apartment building, four stories high, with an elevator, and turned the grounds into a parking lot. The first genuine building of this sort the town had ever seen. She came to see me in a state of shock when all this began and wanted to know if she could do something—have it declared a heritage building, or sue the buyer for breaking his never-written word, or whatever. She was amazed that a person could do such a thing. A person who went regularly to church.

“I wouldn’t have done it,” she said, “and I’m only good enough to go at Christmas.”

Then she shook her head and burst out laughing.

“Such a fool,” she said. “I should have listened to you, shouldn’t I?”

She was living in half of a decent rented house at this time but complained that all she could see was the house across the street.

As if that wasn’t all most people get to see, I didn’t say.

Then when all the apartments were finished what did she do but move back into one of them, on the top floor. I know
for a fact she did not get a reduced rent, or even ask for one. She had let go of her bad feelings for the owner and was full of praise for the view and the laundry room in the basement where she paid in coin every time she did her washing.

“I’m learning to be economical,” she said. “Instead of just throwing something in when I feel like it.”

“After all, it’s people like him who make the world go round,” she said of her shyster. She invited me to come and see her view, but I made excuses.

This was the beginning of a time, however, when she and I saw a good deal of each other. She had got into the habit of dropping by to talk about her housing woes and decisions, and she kept on doing so even when she was satisfied. I had bought a television set—something she had not done, because she said she was afraid of becoming an addict.

I didn’t worry about that, being out most of the day. And there were a lot of good programs in those years. Her tastes mainly coincided with mine. We were fans of public television and particularly of English comedies. Some of these we watched over and over. Situations appealed to us, rather than just the telling of jokes. I was embarrassed at the beginning by the British frankness, even smuttiness, but Oneida enjoyed that as much as anything else. We would groan when a series started all over again from the beginning, but we invariably got sucked in and watched it. We even watched the color fading. Nowadays I sometimes come across one of those old series all brightened up fresh as new, and I switch the channel, it makes me feel so sad.

I had learned early on to be a decent cook, and since some of the best things on television came on soon after supper, I would make us a meal and she would bring dessert from
the bakeshop. I invested in a couple of those folding tables and we would eat watching the news, then afterwards our programs. My mother had always insisted on our eating at the table because she thought that was the only way to be decent, but Oneida seemed to have no prohibitions in that regard.

It might be after ten when she left. She wouldn’t have minded walking, but I didn’t like the idea, so I would get out my car and drive her. She had never bought another car after getting rid of the one she used to drive her father in. She never minded being seen walking all over town, though people laughed about it. That was before the days of walking and exercising becoming fashionable.

We never went anywhere together. There were times when I didn’t see her, because she was going out of town, or maybe not going away but entertaining people who were outsiders here. I did not get to meet them.

No. That makes it seem as if I felt snubbed. I didn’t. Meeting new people was an ordeal for me, and she must have understood that. And the custom we had of eating together, spending the evenings in front of the television together—that was so easygoing and flexible that it seemed there could never be any difficulty. Many people must have known about it, but because it was me they took little notice. It was known that I did her income tax too, but why not? It was what I knew how to do, and nobody would expect her to know how.

I don’t know if it was known that she never paid me. I would have asked for a nominal sum just to make things proper, but the subject did not come up. Not that she was tightfisted. She just didn’t think of it.

If I had to mention her name for some reason, it sometimes slipped out as Ida. She would tease me a little if I did that to her face. She would point out how I always preferred to call people by their old school nicknames if I had the opportunity. I had not noticed this myself.

“Nobody minds,” she said. “It’s just you.”

This made me slightly huffy, though I did my best to conceal it. What right had she to be commenting about how people would feel about something concerning what I did or didn’t do? The implication was that I somehow preferred to hang on to my childhood, so that I wanted to stay there and make everybody else stay with me.

That made it too simple. All my school years had been spent, as I saw it, in getting used to what I was like—what my face was like—and what other people were like in regard to it. I suppose it was a triumph of a minor sort to have managed that, to know I could survive here and make my living and not continually be having to break new people in. But as for wanting to put us all back in grade four, no thank you.

And who was Oneida to have opinions? It didn’t seem to me that she was settled yet. Actually, now that the big house was gone, a good deal of her was gone with it. The town was changing, and her place in it was changing, and she hardly knew it. Of course there had always been changes, but in the time before the war it was the change of people moving out, looking for something better somewhere else. In the fifties and sixties and seventies it was changed by new kinds of people moving in. You would think Oneida would have acknowledged that when she went to live in the apartment building. But she hadn’t altogether caught on. There was still that strange hesitation and lightness about her, as if she were waiting for life to begin.

She went away on trips of course, and maybe she thought it would begin there. No such luck.

During those years when the new shopping mall was built on the south edge of town, and Krebs’s folded (no problem for me, I had enough to do without them), there seemed to be more and more people from town taking winter holidays, and that meant going to Mexico or the West Indies or someplace we never used to have anything to do with. The result, in my opinion, was to bring back diseases we never used to have anything to do with either. For a while, this happened. There would be Disease of the Year, with a special name on it. Maybe these are still going around, but nobody notices them so much anymore. Or it could be that people my age have got beyond noticing. You can be sure you’re not going to be carried off by anything dramatic, or it would have happened by now.

One evening I got up at the end of a television show to make us a cup of tea before Oneida was to go home. I walked towards the kitchen and suddenly I felt terrible. I stumbled and went down on my knees, then onto the floor. Oneida grabbed me and got me up into a chair and the blackout passed. I told her I sometimes had spells and not to worry. This was a lie, and I don’t know why I told it, but she didn’t believe me anyway. She got me into the downstairs room where I slept, and she took off my shoes. Then somehow together, and with a bit of protest on my part, we got me out of my clothes and into pajamas. I could only realize things by fits and starts. I told her to get a taxi and go home, but she didn’t pay any attention.

She slept that night on the living-room couch, and upon
exploring the house the next day she settled into my mother’s bedroom. She must have gone back to her apartment in the daytime for such things as she needed, and maybe also to the mall for such groceries as she thought would round out my supplies. She also talked to the doctor and got a prescription from the drugstore that I swallowed whenever she held it to my lips.

I was in and out of consciousness and sick and feverish for the better part of a week. Occasionally I told her that I was feeling recovered, and that I could manage by myself, but this was nonsense. Mostly I just obeyed her and came to depend on her in the matter-of-fact way that you would on a nurse in a hospital. She was not as skilled at dealing with a fevered body as a nurse might be, and sometimes if I had the energy I would complain like a six-year-old. She would apologize then and not take offense. In between telling her I was better, and she should think about getting back to her own place, I was selfish enough to be calling her name for no reason but to reassure myself that she was there.

Then I was well enough to worry about her catching whatever it was that I had.

“You should have a mask on.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “If I was going to get it I think I’d have got it by now.”

When I first really felt better I was too lazy to acknowledge the fact that I had spells of feeling like a small child again.

But of course she was not my mother, and I had to wake up one morning and realize that. I had to think about all the things she had done for me, and that embarrassed me considerably. As it would any man, but me especially because
of remembering how I looked. I had more or less forgotten that, and now it seemed to me that she had not been embarrassed, that she had been able to do things so matter-of-factly because I was a neuter to her, or an unfortunate child.

I was polite now, and worked in, between my expressions of gratitude, my by now very genuine wish that she would go home.

She got that message, she wasn’t offended. She must have been tired out from all the broken sleep and unaccustomed care. She did a last bit of shopping for what I’d need and took my temperature for the final time and went off, as I thought, in the satisfied mood of somebody who has finished a job well done. Just before doing that she had waited in the front room to see if I could get my clothes on without assistance and had been satisfied that I could. She was barely out of the house when I got some accounts out and set into doing the work I had been doing on the day I fell sick.

My mind was slower, but accurate, and that was a great relief to me.

She left me alone until the day—or evening, rather—when we were accustomed to watch television. Then she arrived with a can of soup. Not enough to make a meal in itself, and not something she had made, but nevertheless a contribution to a meal. And she was early, to make time for that. She opened it, too, without questioning me. She knew her way around my kitchen. She heated it and got out the soup bowls and we ate together. Her behavior seemed to remind me that I had been a sick man needing immediate nourishment. And that was true, in a way. That day at noon I had been unable, for shakiness, to use the can opener myself.