More in Anger (4 page)

Opal, Lillie, Pearly K and even Georgie gave squeals, while the men and boys made deeper sounds of pleasure. Reginald and Georgie exchanged smiles, and looks. They were impressed. First that diamond ring, and then the piano, and now this.

“A house?” Opal exclaimed, sitting back down in astonishment.
“A house!”

Yes, a house. It was situated just a block from the Elbow River, he told them, and conveniently close to a new school where their future children might go (Opal blushed). The house was a brown bungalow with white trim and a green shingled roof. Here—he would show them a photograph. As they could see, if they gathered round, a large veranda ran across the front, and half of it was glassed in for protection from the weather. The style of the house was unfamiliar to both Opal and her parents. The style, said Mac, reflected the characters of its original owners, an Englishman and his French wife. In the picture, Mac was standing on the front steps, wearing a suit and a boater, arms akimbo, proud.

June 15, 1915

Mrs. James Macaulay, née Opal King, of Winnipeg, greeted a large number of guests at the tea house yesterday, on the occasion of her first reception since her marriage. She wore her wedding gown of duchesse satin, with court train and trimmings of shadow lace. Receiving with her was Mrs. J. Deslisle May, who was wearing her wedding gown of ivory charmeuse, trimmed with duchess lace, and Mrs. Johnson, of Winnipeg, who was wearing her wedding gown of pink and white voile with shadow lace.

The tea room appointments were carried out in yellow and green, the table centred with a basket of yellow mums, swathed in yellow tulle. Mrs. George May and Mrs. D.T. Townsend shared the honours the first hour, and were later relieved by Mrs. Kiteley and Mrs. George M. Thompson. Miss Helen and Miss Genevieve Thompson waited on the door.

Opal found the clackety-clack of the train as it headed west unnerving, though it didn't seem to bother Mac, head buried deep in his thick books. She did needlework to pass the time, but she had done so much of it in the last two years that it brought her very little pleasure or sense of purpose anymore. She had finished reading her books,
Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West
and
O Pioneers!
, both travelling gifts from her sisters, as well as
The Return of Tarzan
, courtesy of Farley. (It's a loaner not a keeper, he said.) Her hands sat uselessly in her lap. She wanted to wring them. What else was there to make? Mac's suitcase was half filled with handkerchiefs, and it was early to start on baby things, not to mention bad luck.

Eventually she started feeling a little pouty. Neglected. This was, after all, their honeymoon, wasn't it? She shifted slightly. She was sore down there, but not unpleasantly. She changed her train of thought. She tried to yet again entertain herself by thinking about their house, and how she would decorate it, but this daydream went only so far when all she had seen was a photograph of the outside. Having never been to Calgary, she found
it impossible to imagine the location. This morning at breakfast she had tried teasing Mac into giving her more particulars, but he wouldn't tell her a thing. “It's a surprise,” he said. “You'll see it soon enough.” Still she pestered, until he burst out unkindly, “You'll see it when you see it. Shut your trap, would you?” Heads turned in the dining car and she was ashamed.

So she held the photograph and pictured the inside of the house herself. She pictured the front door opening, and Mac carrying her, his beloved bride, over the threshold. She saw the house as completely empty but for the trunks and crates that had arrived in their absence and were stacked in the foyer and living room waiting for her. The house echoed slightly with their footsteps. Light streamed through the windows. In the foyer Opal saw herself turning her head towards the living room, where she saw for the first time the grand piano Mac had bought as his wedding present to her. In her mind the piano was standing alone in its grandeur, gleaming in afternoon light. Dear Mac. How had he known buying the piano would make her so happy? And how had he, not a particularly musical person, chosen it?

Still he read. She sighed heavily. She might as well be by herself for all the attention he paid her, the old bookworm. He didn't notice, or pretended he didn't notice, her small ploys for attention. Difficulty getting a hat box down. Difficulty opening the compartment door. She could be murdered and thrown off the train by robbers and he wouldn't notice until dinnertime. Opal picked one of Mac's books from the pile—pages like tissue paper, and written in Greek. Another in Latin. Politics. History. Biography. Nothing, he looked up to say, suitable for a woman to read. Well, what did he think she was to do while he did all that
reading? she wondered to herself. Stare out the window forever? She did have a brain she would like the opportunity to use, if only in conversation. Was that so much to ask?

Opal did smile as Mac carried her over the threshold of her new Calgary home. But as soon as he set her down in the foyer, she looked around completely baffled. Whose was all this furniture? Puzzled, she looked at Mac, who was uncharacteristically grinning from ear to ear. Pictures and curtains, furniture, lamps, carpets and doilies—whose house was this? Without moving, she looked around her.

“Mac? Whose house is this?”

“Well, it's yours, of course.”

And then he told her the rest of the story. An Englishman and his bride, a Frenchwoman, had, as he had told her in Winnipeg, built this house five years before. The Frenchwoman had had no particular love for Canada, but since she was so terribly in love with her debonair husband, she had agreed to settle in “the colonies.” But then, without warning, the Englishman died, and the Frenchwoman wanted to flee this
très mauvais
country as fast as she could and return to France. So Mac had seized the opportunity—
carpe diem!
—and bought this house completely furnished, right down to the tea towels in the kitchen and right up to the grand piano in the living room. Opal wouldn't have to do a thing except unpack her clothes, he crowed.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she asked him, her throat so constricted she could barely speak.

“It wouldn't have been much of a surprise if I had told you, would it?” Things were not unfolding as he had imagined they would. And whose fault was that? He strode over to the sideboard to pour himself a Scotch. He got out a glass. The decanter.

“Mac! What do you think you're doing?”

“I'm taking a drink.”

“Mac! You promised me. You
promised
me not to drink in our home! We haven't been here an hour!”

Mac took up the decanter and held it tight against his chest like a child with a doll. “Go to hell,” he said, glaring at her. Then he took up the glass and went out to the garage.

Opal sobbed as she walked from room to room looking at the elegant furniture—the intricately carved living room pieces upholstered in rose-coloured jacquard; the china cabinet and long sideboard; the large circular dining table with carved claw legs and the eight matching chairs upholstered in dark blue velvet. Upstairs, the Italian walnut bedroom suite, the pale green and yellow satin duvets on the beds, the thick white towels in the bathroom. Every drawer and cupboard she opened was filled. In spite of its obvious quality, there was nothing—nothing—she would have chosen herself. She sat down on the landing and cried.

She could have packed away the woman's towels, and sheets, and linens, but she didn't, and for years she would feel she was snooping through another woman's house. She left her own things packed in their crates and boxes, and had the maid, once
she'd hired one through the YWCA employment services, help her move them down the narrow wooden stairs into the basement.

And so she tried to acclimatize, and succeeded somewhat. Once she knew her house better she relaxed a bit, and while Mac was at work she set herself to learning to play the music for the song version of “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose” for him. To show him she had forgiven him for not telling her about the house; to try to get them on an even keel.

“Sit down,” she told him a few weeks later with a smile when he came home. “I have a surprise for you.”

But it wasn't a good day for romance: Mac's work that day had been difficult. He had been wrangling with plans for the railway, and what he had hoped would take an hour or two had taken the whole day. After stopping in the garage for a drink, what he craved now more than anything was some supper and some time to himself, not some female malarkey. But to please her he sat down and appeared to listen. He stood up the moment she finished and said, “Very nice. Thank you.” And as he left the room, he turned to say, “I bought you the piano for your
own
pleasure, not mine. I'll thank you not to play while I'm here.”

And that was the kind of daily exchange that occurred in the life they settled into. Every day Mac went out into the world and then came back to the house again at night via the garage. Opal adapted as best she could to her husband's wants, but she never felt secure. His lack of physical and verbal affection made her suspect early on that he simply didn't like her; it seemed to her as though he had
expected
to be disappointed by her, but she didn't know why. She had always considered herself, and thought
others considered her, a good person. She had never questioned herself. But now she began to ask herself what was
wrong
with her. And why had he married her if he didn't like her? It made no sense. Nor did the times he behaved as though it were
she
who didn't like
him
. The unfairness with which she felt he treated her made her chronically worried, and stubbornly certain he was wrong in his opinion of her, while she also began fearing that he was right. Eventually she became a little snappy herself. And then more. She gradually changed until she didn't always recognize herself; she started to doubt things that she had never spent a breath on before. Perhaps, it occurred to her one day, she had deformities of person or personality that only
she
could not see, and that her own family had loved her too much ever to point out. It was such a gradual and subtle erosion of her confidence that she barely noticed it; it was as though her self-esteem were a bar of rosewater soap run under warm water for hours on end.