Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (14 page)

Mrs C. Talbot, ma'am, I say. Don't work yourself into a flap. That boy just ain't the type. He's a sad case, he's a nasty piece of work, but he ain't that type.

W.W. Emberson Jr blow someone away? My boys got a kick out of that one. Babyface Emberson? they laugh. You're killing us, Ma! My boys grew up with that kid. In a manner of speaking, that is. I'm not going to try to tell you old W.W. send his son to P.S. 187. But when W.W. Jr weren't at his ritzy East Side ack-ack-adda-me (that's what my boys call it) or away at his fancy-pantsy summer camp, he hung around a local joint or two. That weirdo, my boys always say; that babyface got the mind of a fox and the courage of a broken-backed worm.

You be careful how you treat that boy, their father (my late Willy) used to tell them. His daddy's a
vip
professor. His daddy's wrote books on Shakespeare. One day W.W. Jr have a say in your jobs around here, you mind your p's and q's.

Don't need no W.W. Jr or no Shakespeare either to take care of me, says Charlie. He's mean and he's got no guts, that babyface, Jake says. A dangerous combination.

You think maybe Mrs C Talbot is right? I ask my boys. You think he's mean and dangerous enough?

Don't make us laugh, Ma, my boys say. He even yellower than he mean.

She mighty scared, I say, since she went up and complained. He gives her this look on the stairs. He just shovelling his music down through her ceiling louder than ever, at busting-your-ear-drums decibels. He lean on her doorbell every time he pass, just lean on it, on and on, and she shakes like a leaf.

Yeah, my boys say. That's his style. He'll probably work up to delivering grocery bags full of shit.

He already done that, I tell them. And guess who has to clean up?

What we tell you? they say. That's his style. But he don't blow people away, give us a break. That … that …

Ain't often my boys stuck for a word, but W.W. Jr do that to people. Did it to his own father.

“Mosie,” he says to me one time, back before he died, maybe ten, fifteen years ago, “do you ever lose sleep over your boys?”

Yes sir, I says. I was bringing him lunch in his study, which can do with cleaning and tidying up, but will he let me lay a finger on anything ever? (Don't talk to me about professors' studies. There's pigs live neater.) Yes, sir, I says. I sure do.

“There's no predicting, is there?” he says. “No accounting for it. You think the family, the background, the best schools … but when it comes down to it, there's no predicting. You know, I took him to his first
Hamlet
when he was six years old. And
The Tempest
when he was seven. You know what he said when I asked him who his favourite character was?”

No sir, I say.

“Caliban,” he says. He puts his head in his hands. “
Caliban
, dear God. And what is he becoming, Mosie? He's turning into a … into a … It's not to be understood. He's had the best education that money can buy, but ten years from now, I wonder if there'll be anything to choose between your sons and mine?”

Well! I got some strong feelings about insults like that. I don't like to hear my boys mentioned in the same breath as that mean-minded lily-livered kid. But I don't say anything. That's what lack of education gives you – the know-how to say nothing at the right time. What I say is this: I don't know about no Callyban, Professor Emberson, sir, but boys will be boys. They keep you awake nights, but they mostly turn out all right in the end. That fooling around your boy does, it's harmless. Don't get yourself so worked up.

“Bless you, Mosie,” he says. “I hope you're right.”

And to tell you the truth, though I never did care for W.W. Jr, I do think he's harmless. And that's what I tell Mrs C Talbot. I do think he's nothing to make a fuss over. What do you mean, you think you'll go mad? I says to her. What are you talking about? I'm polishing her silver and she's got her head down on her book, the Emily Dickinson one (she must have read it a thousand times), she's beating her forehead against the book. “I think I shall go mad,” she says. “Sometimes, Mosie, I feel so strongly about him, I feel so angry, I actually believe I could do him harm.”

What you talking about? I ask.

“The noise,” she says. “It's driving me mad. It
inhabits
me.”

Oh, I says, they doing road work on Amsterdam, another day or so, that's all.

“No, no,” she says. “Not that. That's nothing, that's background sound. I mean the music.”

Music? What music? I ask her. I mean, there's a lot of competition round these parts. To hear any one sound in particular you got to concentrate real hard. I concentrate, and then I hear that W.W. Jr making very free with his stereo, his mother's stereo if we going to be exact about this. Very good speakers too, quadraphonic, bought at super-duper discount from my boys who can lay their hands every time on the best of equipment. The taste of W.W. Jr run to heavy metal rock, which is not the taste of Mrs C. Talbot, no sir, no more'n of W.W. Jr's ma, but Mrs W.W. away down in the Florida sun at this moment.

That music is bothering you, ma'am? I says to Mrs C. Talbot.

“Bothering
me, Mosie! It's like living in a courtyard of hell, there's no escape. I am really beginning to be afraid I shall either go mad, or do something violent.”

I can see she mean it. People like Mrs C. Talbot, they're not very adaptable. You and me, are we going to make a fuss over someone's stereo? But Mrs C. Talbot and Zeb, people like that, they can work themselves up into a state over the most amazing little things. They can't help themselves. They got no sense at all when to leave well enough alone. I could've told Mrs C. Talbot – I
did
tell her, but you think she listens to me when she's in a state like that? – that it weren't a good idea to go up and ask W.W. Jr to turn his equipment down, no more'n it make sense to call the police because a couple of kids play a Hallowe'en trick with eggs. I told her: Spare yourself the agony. Because you wouldn't believe the state she got in just to walk upstairs and knock on his door and ask her silly question in her silly nervous-polite voice – which just exactly the kind of voice going to make W.W. Jr dig his heels in. I told her all that. Just wait a few months, I told her, till his mother's back from Florida.

See, W.W. Jr house-sit for his ma, but come spring Mrs W.W. shut up her condo in Florida and return to the city, and W.W. Jr go back to his live-in pad at that ritzy-schnitzy country club where he teach golf and tennis to rich housewives who also lonely. Stud-in-residence is what my boys call him. They bartend at the club, what they call their up-front business, they seen a thing or two. But their father was right about one thing, W.W. Jr did have a say in those jobs which he line up for my boys in return for certain concessions.

So anyway, wait for the spring, I say to Mrs C. Talbot, when W.W. Jr. move out again.

“The
spring!”
she says, like it was a life sentence instead of a few months away.

People like Mrs C. Talbot and old Zeb, they don't have
give.
They get a little strange, they get wild. They get like that Bernie Goetz fellow on the subway, I seen it happen before. You notice it's always people with education? So when she asks me, after she sees the remains of old Zeb on the evening news, when she asks for a gun, I think to myself: Here's another one gone round the bend.

“For protection,” she says. But I know. I see the way she shakes when W.W. Jr come up the stairs, I see her with her eye to the keyhole. “I shouldn't have gone upstairs,” she says. “I shouldn't have asked him to turn down the volume.” Well, I says, I did warn you. People shouldn't make a fuss over nothing. But just the same, that babyface ain't the type, my boys agree.

“I need a gun,” she says. “I don't feel safe.”

So I watch her watching him through the keyhole and then I know. Here's another one, I think. And guess who'll have to clean up? My boys are making a book on it, but I don't think it's proper to make money out of something like that. I'm not placing my bet, I tell them. There's some things, I draw the line. Still, if I didn't have any conscience, I could tell them: three to one says she'll let him walk right on past her door up the stairs, and after that I'll hear the shot. A total waste, I could tell her. You not going to make a W.W. Jr lose any sleep because an old friend of his ma does an inside-out Bernie Goetz. But what good would it do? You think she'd listen to me?

“Where now the horse and his rider?” she'd say. That's all the sense I'd get out of her. “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,” she'd say. Something like that.

I guess I've heard just about everything.

So goon then, is what I say. Goon on your pilgrimage. I wash my hands. Nobody listens to me.

And guess who going to have to clean up?

Port after Port, the Same Baggage

One wouldn't have expected daughters in full free flight to be so reactionary, Doris Mortimer thought. Yet there it was. The world was riddled with a lack of probity, double standards thick as dandelions in even the best-weeded lives.

But Mother, her daughters said, you know nothing about the predatory habits of men. And travelling alone, well, it's like an advertisement. You'll be fair game.

Doris knew that they meant: You need a man to go with you, to protect you from other men; you can't manage alone. But of course they couldn't come right out and say this, since it flew in the face of all their principles. She had to smile at their malaise.

You've led such a sheltered life, they said. You're so innocent and trusting.

Which is why you should stand up and cheer, Doris countered. Better, surely, to bloom so unseasonably late than never at all.

But both of her daughters were against the scheme from the start. They thought of it as a sudden madness brought on by the recent death of their father. Via elaborate desk phones, they conferred on her over-reaction. The views of colleagues in Legal Aid office and university department alike were passed on to Doris. There was unanimous disapproval of her plan. All the ex-husbands, with whom the two daughters were on the most cordial of terms, were brought in to concur.

To no avail.

Doris was quietly stubborn.

But a
cargo
boat! they said. It's perverse. At least, her daughters pleaded, she should go by – she had
earned
– a luxury liner. If only, they cajoled, she would take along her teenage grandchildren, who would –

“No,” Doris said.

Doris was fond of her grandchildren. Nevertheless it was her observation that few segments of society were as morally rigid as adolescents. And the first of their engraved absolutes was this: The elderly shall be above reproach.

Doris was tired of being above reproach.

It was not that she had outrageous plans. Not specifically. She did not expect occasions for transgression to flourish in the path of an elderly widow. It was simply that nothing in her life had ever allowed for the errant and indiscreet, and she had a hankering to put herself in the way of temptation. After all, she thought, would St Augustine's life, or Thomas Merton's, have meant anything at all without a counterpoint of piquant profligacy?

She did not, however, want to cause needless distress. Gillian and Geraldine had sufficient to worry about, and she had always put the family first – something deplored often enough by her daughters. Gillian had even given a paper at a conference on this subject; it was subtitled: “Can our fathers be forgiven?” and had discussed the slow debilitation of years of exemplary wifely support of an otherworldly scholar.

Now that this gentlest and most self-absorbed of pedants had been buried from the university chapel with full academic honours, it was true that Doris felt in some sense free; that she woke each morning to an aura of strangeness, to a part-frightening part-delicious sense of new beginnings. But her freedom seemed to her something at once overwhelmingly sad, quavering with promise, and infinitely private.

She did not, certainly, want to discuss it. She found her daughters' litany to past waste oppressive. Such dicta, she saw, sharpened their sense of purpose and made their own quite different brands of unhappiness worthwhile. She felt almost guilty for tampering with sacrosanct traditions, but the more she tried to settle into the role for which they were convinced she was (alas) destined, the more she toyed with startling subversions and new energies.

So finally she said fretfully: “After a lifetime of kowtowing to your father's needs, do I have to be bullied by my children and grandchildren?”

She knew that this was hitting below the belt. Jabbing them in the soft underbelly of their principles.

Gillian, a psychology professor at a major university, said bravely: “Certainly no one has more of a right to … to be a little
eccentric
for once. To self-indulge. It's just that …”

“If anything happens to you,” Geraldine said lugubriously, “we'll never forgive ourselves.”

Geraldine saw terrible things every day in Legal Aid. This did not make for optimism. Doris, who felt contrite because she hadn't disliked her life nearly as much as she felt she should have for her daughters' sake, had tried to join Geraldine's office as a volunteer. She had hoped it would cure her of congenital tranquillity and optimism. But Geraldine wouldn't hear of it.

“Mama,” she said. “You've paid your dues. I don't even want you to
know
about some of what goes on.”

But Doris was sick and tired of knowing about everything second-hand from books and newspapers and daughters, and when she finally stood on the deck of the cargo boat and waved to them all on the wharf, she had a deep inner certainty that an insurance settlement had never been put to better use.

Everyone came to the wharf. Gillian and Geraldine, and the four grandchildren, and the five former sons-in-law. Actually, only two of them had been sons-in-law, strictly and legally speaking, but in their various seasons Doris had regarded them all as such. She blew kisses and tossed coloured streamers and generally behaved (as one teenage granddaughter remarked to another) in an embarrassing manner. As the boat pulled away and the first of the streamers dipped soggily into the water, she called down to them: “I'm tough as nails, you know.”

And her daughters laughed nervously, with tears in their eyes.

Doris sat at the captain's table. One of the pleasures of travelling by cargo boat was the intimacy possible between crew and passengers, of whom there were only four when the
Lord Dalhousie
left the St Lawrence estuary, its belly full of Saskatchewan grain. Doris waited expectantly for salty tales of philandering in foreign ports, but the officers were disappointingly discreet.

“My little boy,” the captain said, “my second one, the twelve- year-old, he's doing computers at school already. Astonishing.” He shook his head, not so much in pride, Doris thought, as in bewilderment. “While I was home this time, he showed me a note from his teacher. It said he was ready to be individualised if we'd sign the consent slip. I called the teacher. He said electronic communications is where it's at, and there's no question my son can lock into the fast track if he's individualised now.”

Everyone pondered this cryptic future in silence.

“At twelve years of age,” the captain said wonderingly.

“I hope you had the sense to say no.” Wendell, a passenger, was on assignment for a book.
The Organics of Life,
commissioned by a New York publisher. “There's a lot of evidence coming in on the dangers. Not just eye strain and migraines from the video screen. Radiation risks too. I'm serious. They did tests on the programmers for a major corporation. Punching keys eight hours a day, watching that flickering monitor. I'm telling you, people think the exposure is negligible but it's a lie. A cover-up. I should know, my father's in Digital. You think he wants to broadcast the dangers? Hah. Those tests would make your hair curl. Eczema, dermatitis, hair loss, way above average infertility, all the early signs. Soon even mid-ocean won't be safe.”

“Do you have children, Mrs Mortimer?” the captain asked.

“Two daughters,” Doris said.

“How did they – you know – turn out?”

“Well, one became a lawyer, and the other became a college professor.”

“Amazing, isn't it?” The captain sighed. “I suppose it all works out.” He nodded at her vaguely and smiled, as though she had offered cautious promises and consolation. “It's a bit like planting squash and getting – I don't know – getting melons, isn't it? Of course I'm away for such long stretches. Still” – he raked his fingers through his hair – “I'd planned to take him canoeing. Wilderness trekking, you know? Sort of thing boys are supposed to … but he's enrolled in computer camp for the summer.”

“I intend to show,” Wendell announced, “that a simple but physically demanding life is the answer.”

“The answer for what?” Doris asked.

“For happiness. For vigour and potency to the very end. For example, look at what you're all drinking. Madness! If you had any idea what coffee and alcohol, either one of them … how toxic for the system …” He shared his extensive knowledge of herbal teas which cleanse the body without harmful side-effects, rose hip especially, of which he had brought along a six-month supply. They would all notice the benefits within days. “I mean, look at you,” he said to Doris. “Just like my mother. All pallor and soft flesh.”

“I think Mrs Mortimer is a very attractive lady,” the captain said gallantly.

Wendell huddled into himself, sulking. “I'm only trying to be helpful. People don't
care
what they do to their bodies.”

Doris saw that, like her daughters, he was pricked constantly by the burden of a proselytising truth. He was so young. All his muscles and nerves were knotted, the guy wires of crusading righteousness. She thought of massaging the back of his neck with her fingers, the way she used to do when her girls were in high school – if they'd just lost a game, say; or if they hadn't done as well as expected in an exam.

Instead she raised her coffee mug to the captain by way of thanks for his support. She also agreed to do yoga on deck with Wendell every morning. She found it difficult to shed the habit of instinctive peace-making.

“You should be more assertive,” the twins asserted. Or rather, Pam said this, and Pat said: “Pam's right, you know, Doris. You shouldn't let Wendell push you around.”

The twins were supposed to be spending the year apart. Their parents, their teachers, and sundry therapists all insisted it was necessary. So Pam had been sent to college in New York and Pat had been packed off to Vermont. But now, as they joked, they were eloping. They had sent a ship's cable to their parents as soon as North America dipped safely below the horizon.

“Just so they won't panic,” Pam said.

“And partly,” Pat admitted, “to make them sorry for what they did.”

“You have to follow your own star, Doris,” Pam said. “You shouldn't take up yoga just to please Wendell.”

“But I'm happy,” Doris said, “for the chance to experience something quite new and different.”

* * *

By the time they reached the Azores, Doris had mastered two or three elementary yogic contortions and had decided that the lotus position was as inaccessible as her own youth. This Wendell hotly denied.

“It's all in your mindset,” he told her. “You're rigid through and through, you're the essence of rigidity. If you
think
limits, there'll
be
limits.”

“You know, Wendell,” Doris said mildly, as they watched the on-loading of citrus fruits, “I have been your age, but you haven't been mine.”

“Just like my mother,” he fumed. “A closed mind. You know it all, don't you? Can't tell you anything.”

At Lisbon a cable awaited the twins. We
love you,
it said. Come
home and we'll work something out.

“Hah!” Pam sniffed. “I'll bet. I can just see that therapist leaning over their shoulders and dictating.”

“I don't think they've suffered enough yet,” Pat agreed.

They sent a reply:
Hitch-hiking across Europe. Will communicate from time to time. Don't worry, everything fine.

“And stop letting Wendell bully you,” they said to Doris in farewell. “He's such a wimp.”

They set out for the Pyrenees with backpacks, while the
Lord Dalhousie
off-loaded the Azorean oranges and half of its Canadian grain, and took on a cargo of wine and iron ore.

Doris admired the sheen of sweat on bare muscles. She wondered which of the dock workers beat their wives and which ones took home flowers on occasional impulse. She amused herself by speculating on the ones who might have ended up in Geraldine's Legal Aid office, and the ones who might have passed through Gillian's classes – if she and her family had lived in Portugal. But then of course the girls would have had different names and a different sort of education and different expectations. They wouldn't have been able to get divorces and perhaps wouldn't have wanted to.

She watched some old women moving along the docks as they sold fish from wicker baskets, and thought: And I would have been wearing black for the remainder of my life.

* * *

In Morocco, declining Wendell's offer of himself as chaperon, she went ashore and wandered through the bazaar alone.

“You'll be sorry,” Wendell warned. “But of course, you can't let go the reins for a moment, can you? Don't blame me if something happens.”

Doris felt that she would rather like something to happen.

In the bazaar, she was the only woman who was not moving inside a private and portable tent. It's like a loose shroud, she thought. Perhaps they are buried in it, a garment for all purposes. She could feel male eyes like a film of sweat on her skin. It was strange to be a sexual object at the age of sixty-five. Perhaps it was the way she was dressed – in white linen pants and a long-sleeved white cotton blouse. The outfit had not seemed at all provocative when she packed it.

Smells assaulted her. Camel dung, exotic flowers, rotting vegetables, incense. She felt a quirky elation, and smiled into the startled faces of men. They did not respond. She might have been from the moon, a thought that pleased her. With a sandalled toe, she doodled yes in the virgin soil of new experience.

She stopped at an orange-seller's booth. Five, please, she indicated with her fingers, and offered a handful of coins. The merchant took all of her money without comment or expression – by which she knew she had offered more than was necessary – and handed her the oranges. A dilemma. She had expected to receive them in some sort of bag, and the extent of her pampered middle-class Western ignorance embarrassed her. She felt obscurely guilty.