Excessive Joy Injures the Heart (7 page)

“Anyway, last year, just after New Year’s,” said Max, “he switched to a pipe.”

“
Did
he!” said Claire and she was almost ashamed of how animated and social her voice sounded. “You know, I can
see
that! He was more of a pipe type!”

Her brothers all laughed at this, and their laughter must have been what their mother heard when she came back out onto the verandah. She looked down on them all as if her low opinion of them saddened her. Then she called to them to come up on the verandah and help her with the flowers, she wanted the flowers to be carried into the parlour.

When she followed her brothers into the cool of the shaded parlour with the flowers, Claire was relieved that the coffin was still closed. It was a grey coffin and its lid had a streamlined long lip like a dolphin’s. It was a relief to have something to do, to be able to get away from it, to have to go back out to the verandah for more flowers. And so back and forth she went, among her brothers. But as they were fetching and carrying she was overwhelmed by a longing to see her father again, although only if he could still be alive. She felt a fear of seeing him dead.

The coffin also looked too light to contain him and feeling a need to get away from it — its greyness (its greyness, Your Highness) — and away too from the chilled fragrance of the banks of carnations and lilies, and above all away from her mother, rearranging the flowers around it as if she considered it an elegant but slightly problematic addition to the decor, Claire went down the steps to the sunnier living room with its sun-blocked Peruvian rugs and all its commodes in faded black, faded coral, and the house became (or had never stopped being) the house she had known at sixteen, seventeen, a house that was an endless credential, all the darker emotions held at bay by paintings of foothills and horses and a great distribution
of light. But at the same time she loved it and felt convinced she would have sold her soul to live in a house with just these rugs and this view: the bleached fields and the windbreak of cypress trees in the distance, the trees looking too eccentric to be mourners, too like upright Victorians in dark coats who belonged to some sort of stern worthy sect. And then there were all the visual pranks and odd conjunctions: her mother’s wedding bouquet dismantled and its parts mounted behind glass like a series of botanical specimens; a black whale Helmut had painted on the white piano; an unframed canvas of a small white arm boldly thrust out, a bouquet of blue flowers in its fist, the arm jubilant, disembodied, a brave little arm that made her eyes fill with tears for her father.

Later in the afternoon, while her brothers’ wives and girlfriends were out in the big kitchen making supper, Claire sat with her two little nephews on the sofa in the parlour to read one of their storybooks to them. She breathed in the smell of their hair as she was turning the pages, a mucky smell of toffee and dirt, and as she was reading them the story of a little boy pulling his sled through a blizzard she recalled a visit they’d made to her at Christmas and the way they had flung themselves at her, catching her thighs in tight thigh-locks and impeding her walking anywhere, and the way they had also charged at her in their Scandinavian sweaters and little red leggings, the ones that made them look so bow-legged and comical in their tiny old men’s maroon leather slippers, their paintings flopping and dripping with paint, damp heavy paintings in the browny
blues and muddy reds the paints would turn into the times they’d used them to paint (with the help of their spilled pineapple juice) the damp sun or pond in the middle of a landscape. “Now let’s look at
this
book of pictures,” she said, and she opened a book of reproductions of twentieth-century North American paintings, each waxy page announcing a print: the totem-pole paintings all luridly oiled and streamlined, the more impressionistic ones of women sitting at tables or walking in leafy gardens all blurry and swift.

Today was also the birthday of the littlest nephew, and while a chocolate cake was waiting at the end of the long table in the kitchen — three yellow baby candles stuck into it — and they were all (except for their mother, who was upstairs, lying down) just about to pull out their chairs so they could sit down to eat, the older nephew careened past it with a roar and a tilting low-flying wing, swiping the candles and the whole moist chocolate roof off the top of it while at the same time extinguishing the tiny fires and conveniently bearding his sleeve and even one of his armpits with peaks of wet chocolate, which led to his being smacked on the bottom, then banished (with a howl) up the stairs to his room. Three new little yellow candles were then poked into the cake and a new match was struck to light the tiny new fires (the cake looking scorched without its chocolate coat), and as the supper slowly and awkwardly progressed in the non-birthday boy’s absence (mashed turnips and overcooked green beans and very pink ham and sweet yams) and progressed, too, through a constrained silence, a child-has-been-punished silence, somehow presided over by an air of unexchanged glances having to wait until after the meal was over to meet other unexchanged glances, Claire found herself
longing to go up to visit the young offender, the little criminal, longing to bring him back downstairs to have real food to eat, or at the very least wanting to bring a plate of the birthday cake up to him, but she couldn’t very well undermine the authority of his parents, and so she had to take consolation in picturing him squatting up in a corner of his room, triumphantly sucking at the sweetened wool of his sleeve.

Claire stayed up late, talking to Max and Felix and Helmut until almost three. But as they were talking about their father and about local politics and also finishing off the leftover wine, she would now and then picture the Valium waiting upstairs for her in her flight bag like a promise that could never be broken.

At last she said goodnight to her brothers, then carried her wine upstairs with her to swallow down her pill. It was not the most brilliant idea to swallow it with wine, but it was only half a milligram and she wanted to be knocked out. She set her wine glass down on a Viking chest carved by her father and after she got undressed drank the wine down like medicine to toss back the tiny white pill.

After she got into bed she fell asleep at once, immediately making her way through a long series of confused dreams until she found herself sitting next to a woman who was reading a book by a woman writer. The woman asked her if she’d ever heard of the book, but before Claire could see what it was called, the woman lowered a little brown velvet curtain over the title. A hard flurry of knocks came next, and she thought it was the same woman, but it was already morning, it was her mother,
her greyly fair hair tied back with a narrow black velvet ribbon, now she was even already sitting down on the end of the bed, depressing its mattress and making Claire’s legs sink. Dressed in black slacks this morning, along with a black workshirt, she had already somehow managed to acquire a tan. But didn’t she have a tan yesterday? She must have, and yet Claire’s memory of her was that she had been pale. She was also getting a bit of a moustache (bleached) and her eyes were making Claire feel sickly alert. “I’ve just been downstairs talking to Daddy.”

“What do you mean?” whispered Claire, raising herself up on an elbow with such startled quickness that one of the lace straps of her nightgown fell halfway down her arm.

“I’ve just been sitting downstairs with him, down beside his coffin, talking to him.”

After her mother had gone down to the kitchen, Claire picked up her watch and saw, with a moan of sleepy fury, that it was only ten after six. Childhood mornings that she hadn’t been allowed to sleep in came back to her, early mornings when her mother simply could not bear to be the only one awake. This was when it had all begun, the accounting, the bitter arithmetic that was a half-awake attempt to add up how many hours of sleep she’d managed to extract from the night, although she couldn’t honestly say that when she was a child she had minded being pulled out of sleep. Being awake was even almost always more fun than being asleep. And often there were treats: hot muffins with strawberry jam or a fast trip into North Battleford before breakfast to buy apple cider or hot cornbread. But now all she could think was: When is Mother ever going to learn that not letting sleeping people sleep is a criminal act? If
I
had a child, that would be rule number one: Let the sleeping child
sleep. There was no point in trying to go back to sleep either, and sitting up to dully pull on her leg-fattened black pantyhose she remembered Donna, a friend of hers from school, asking her one afternoon when they were both in grade ten, “Does your mother ever look at you as if you’re something she’d just like to
squish
?”

Oh yes, Donna, yes.

Packed tightly between brothers solemnly singing all around her, Claire tried to concentrate on correctly singing the words of the hymns — the hymns, the massed force of them, somehow holding her up — but all she could think of was the way her father had never once made her feel ashamed to be herself. How many women could say the same of a father? But how unfair life was. And death. If only her mother could have been the one to die! She bowed her head as she was following her brothers out of the cathedral. Go in peace, darling Papa.

But on the way down the stone steps into the sunshine her right leg gave out on her, and if Max hadn’t been beside her she would have fallen. Just for a moment it was as if there was only air, there was no leg there. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?” She said she was, and in fact she seemed to be, but he kept his arm squeezed around her shoulders to support her as they were walking through the gate to the cemetery, and she held an arm around him too, feeling the sweet consolation of his puffy male midriff, but too soon there was the odour of deep earth, shovelled up, the smell of the deep ditch for the coffin. Followed too soon by the fragrance of the healthy green grass
that kept on being sunk into, by flocks of highly polished high-fashion black heels, on the way to the cars.

Back at the house again Claire kept half-expecting her father to come into the big front room any minute. She thought, You should really
be
here, Dad, so many of the people who are here think really, really highly of you. Every time someone came to the front door, she was the one who hurried to open it. And then, greeting whoever stood out on the doorstep, she could barely contain her disappointment. After she’d passed around trays of teacups and poured tea and over and over again said yes and yes we will and thank you, she slipped upstairs to look at the photo albums. She wanted to find a photograph of her father when he was four years old, and after leafing through only two of the albums she found him standing posed against a photographer’s backdrop of a park in winter in either Berlin or Toronto. How very small he was, in his miniature boots and tiny belted coat. She worked the photograph out of the album and slid it into an envelope, sealed it, then hid it inside the deepest pocket of her jacket. A necessary precaution since her mother couldn’t bear to see any of her possessions leave her house. Then she looked for photos of herself when she was in high school, but was able to find only one that conveyed any kind of thoughtful adolescent sadness, her hair brushed back and her eyes gone astoundingly dark, her pupils were so dilated. Which was when she was able to remember occasionally feeling pity for others. Pity for the few people her own age who were, thank God, even more inept and lonely than she was.