Open Secrets (16 page)

I kept saying no, and yes, trying to juggle these responses appropriately.
No
, I cannot take them for my store.
Yes
, they are very fine.
No
, truly, I’m sorry, I am not the one to judge.

“If we had been living in another country, Gjurdhi and I might have done something,” Charlotte was saying. “Or even if the movies in this country had ever got off the ground. That’s what I would love to have done. Got work in the movies. As extras. Or maybe we are not bland enough types to be extras, maybe they would have found bit parts for us. I believe extras have to be the sort that don’t stand out in a crowd, so you can use them over and over again. Gjurdhi and I are more memorable than that. Gjurdhi in particular—you could
use
that face.”

She paid no attention to the second conversation that had developed, but continued talking to me, shaking her head indulgently at Gjurdhi now and then, to suggest that he was behaving in a way she found engaging, though perhaps importunate. I had to talk to him softly, sideways, nodding all the while in response to her.

“Really you should take them to the Antiquarian Bookstore,” I said. “Yes, they are quite beautiful. Books like these are out of my range.”

Gjurdhi did not whine, his manner was not ingratiating. Peremptory, rather. It seemed as if he would give me orders, and would be most disgusted if I did not capitulate. In my confusion I helped myself to more of the yellow wine, pouring it into my unwashed sherbet glass. This was probably a dire offense. Gjurdhi looked horridly displeased.

“Can you imagine illustrations in modern novels?” said Charlotte, finally consenting to tie the two conversations together. “For instance, in Norman Mailer? They would have to be abstracts. Don’t you think? Sort of barbed wire and blotches?”

I went home with a headache and a feeling of jangled inadequacy. I was a prude, that was all, when it came to mixing up buying and selling with hospitality. I had perhaps behaved clumsily, I had disappointed them. And they had disappointed me. Making me wonder why I had been asked.

I was homesick for Donald, because of “Joe Hill.”

I also had a longing for Nelson, because of an expression on Charlotte’s face as I was leaving. A savoring and contented look that I knew had to do with Gjurdhi, though I hardly wanted to believe that. It made me think that after I walked downstairs and left the building and went into the street, some hot and skinny, slithery, yellowish, indecent old beast, some mangy but urgent old tiger, was going to pounce among
the books and the dirty dishes and conduct a familiar rampage.

A day or so later I got a letter from Donald. He wanted a divorce, so that he could marry Helen.

I hired a clerk, a college girl, to come in for a couple of hours in the afternoon, so I could get to the bank, and do some office work. The first time Charlotte saw her she went up to the desk and patted a stack of books sitting there, ready for quick sale.

“Is this what the office managers are telling their minions to buy?” she said. The girl smiled cautiously and didn’t answer.

Charlotte was right. It was a book called
Psycho-Cybernetics
, about having a positive self-image.

“You were smart to hire her instead of me,” Charlotte said. “She is much niftier-looking, and she won’t shoot her mouth off and scare the customers away. She won’t have
opinions
.”

“There’s something I ought to tell you about that woman,” the clerk said, after Charlotte left.

That part is not of interest
.

“What do you mean?” I said. But my mind had been wandering, that third afternoon in the hospital. Just at the last part of Charlotte’s story I had thought of a special-order book that hadn’t come in, on Mediterranean cruises. Also I had been thinking about the Notary Public, who had been beaten about the head the night before, in his office on Johnson Street. He was not dead but he might be blinded. Robbery? Or an act of revenge, outrage, connected with a layer of his life that I hadn’t guessed at?

Melodrama and confusion made this place seem more ordinary to me, but less within my grasp.

“Of course it is of interest,” I said. “All of it. It’s a fascinating story.”

“Fascinating,” repeated Charlotte in a mincing way. She made a face, so she looked like a baby vomiting out a spoonful of pap. Her eyes, still fixed on me, seemed to be losing color, losing their childish, bright, and self-important blue. Fretfulness was changing into disgust. An expression of vicious disgust, she showed, of unspeakable weariness—such as people might show to the mirror but hardly ever to one another. Perhaps because of the thoughts that were already in my head, it occurred to me that Charlotte might die. She might die at any moment. At this moment. Now.

She motioned at the water glass, with its crooked plastic straw. I held the glass so that she could drink, and supported her head. I could feel the heat of her scalp, a throbbing at the base of her skull. She drank thirstily, and the terrible look left her face.

She said, “Stale.”

“I think it would make an excellent movie,” I said, easing her back onto the pillows. She grabbed my wrist, then let it go.

“Where did you get the idea?” I said.

“From life,” said Charlotte indistinctly. “Wait a moment.” She turned her head away, on the pillow, as if she had to arrange something in private. Then she recovered, and she told a little more.

Charlotte did not die. At least she did not die in the hospital. When I came in rather late, the next afternoon, her bed was empty and freshly made up. The nurse who had talked to me before was trying to take the temperature of the woman tied in the chair. She laughed at the look on my face.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Not that. She checked out of here this morning. Her husband came and got her. We were transferring
her to a long-term place out in Saanich, and he was supposed to be taking her there. He said he had the taxi outside. Then we get this phone call that they never showed up! They were in great spirits when they left. He brought her a pile of money, and she was throwing it up in the air. I don’t know—maybe it was only dollar bills. But we haven’t a clue where they’ve got to.”

I walked around to the apartment building on Pandora Street. I thought they might simply have gone home. They might have lost the instructions about how to get to the nursing home and not wanted to ask. They might have decided to stay together in their apartment no matter what. They might have turned on the gas.

At first I could not find the building and thought that I must be in the wrong block. But I remembered the corner store and some of the houses. The building had been changed—that was what had happened. The stucco had been painted pink; large, new windows and French doors had been put in; little balconies with wrought-iron railings had been attached. The fancy balconies had been painted white, the whole place had the air of an ice-cream parlor. No doubt it had been renovated inside as well, and the rents increased, so that people like Charlotte and Gjurdhi could have no hope of living there. I checked the names by the door, and of course theirs were gone. They must have moved out some time ago.

The change in the apartment building seemed to have some message for me. It was about vanishing. I knew that Charlotte and Gjurdhi had not actually vanished—they were somewhere, living or dead. But for me they had vanished. And because of this fact—not really because of any loss of them—I was tipped into dismay more menacing than any of the little eddies of regret that had caught me in the past year. I had lost my bearings. I had to get back to the store so my clerk could go home, but I felt as if I could as easily walk another way,
just any way at all. My connection was in danger—that was all. Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn’t we rather have a destiny to submit to, then, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?

I let myself slip, then, into imagining a life with Nelson. If I had done so accurately, this is how it would have gone.

He comes to Victoria. But he does not like the idea of working in the store, serving the public. He gets a job teaching at a boys’ school, a posh place where his look of lower-class toughness, his bruising manners, soon make him a favorite.

We move from the apartment at the Dardanelles to a roomy bungalow a few blocks from the sea. We marry.

But this is the beginning of a period of estrangement. I become pregnant. Nelson falls in love with the mother of a student. I fall in love with an intern I meet in the hospital during labor.

We get over all this—Nelson and I do. We have another child. We acquire friends, furniture, rituals. We go to too many parties at certain seasons of the year, and talk regularly about starting a new life, somewhere far away, where we don’t know anybody.

We become distant, close—distant, close—over and over again.

As I entered the store, I was aware of a man standing near the door, half looking in the window, half looking up the street, then looking at me. He was a short man dressed in a trenchcoat and a fedora. I had the impression of someone disguised. Jokingly disguised. He moved toward me and bumped my shoulder, and I cried out as if I had received the shock of my life, and indeed it was true that I had. For this really was Nelson, come to claim me. Or at least to accost me, and see what would happen.

When Lottar was leaving the Bishop’s courtyard, she was wrapped in a long cloak they had given her, perhaps to conceal her ragged clothing, or to contain her smell. The Consul’s servant spoke to her in English, telling her where they were going. She could understand him but could not reply. It was not quite dark. She could still see the pale shapes of roses and oranges in the Bishop’s garden.

The Bishop’s man was holding the gate open.

She had never seen the Bishop at all. And she had not seen the Franciscan since he had followed the Bishop’s man into the house. She called out for him now, as she was leaving. She had no name to call, so she called, “
Xoti! Xoti! Xoti
,” which means “leader” or “master” in the language of the Ghegs. But no answer came, and the Consul’s servant swung his lantern impatiently, showing her the way to go. Its light fell by accident on the Franciscan standing half concealed by a tree. It was a little orange tree he stood behind. His face, pale as the oranges were in that light, looked out of the branches, all its swarthiness drained away. It was a wan face hanging in the tree, its melancholy expression quite impersonal and undemanding, like the expression you might see on the face of a devout but proud apostle in a church window. Then it was gone, taking the breath out of her body, as she knew too late.

She called him and called him, and when the boat came into the harbor at Trieste he was waiting on the dock.

“And they almost didn’t even go,” Frances said. “Because of the downpour Saturday morning. They were waiting half an hour in the United Church basement and she says, Oh, it’ll stop—my hikes are never rained out! And now I bet she wishes it had’ve been. Then it would’ve been a whole other story.”

It did stop raining, they did go, and it got so hot partway out that Miss Johnstone let them stop at a farmhouse, and the woman brought out Coca-Colas and the man let them take the garden hose and spray themselves cool. They were grabbing
the hose from each other and doing tricks, and Frances said that Mary Kaye said Heather Bell had been the worst one, the boldest, getting hold of the hose and shooting water on the rest of them in all the bad places.

“They will try to make out she was some poor innocent, but the facts are dead different,” Frances said. “It could have been all an arrangement, that she arranged to meet somebody. I mean some man.”

Maureen said, “I think that’s pretty farfetched.”

“Well, I don’t believe she drowned,” Frances said. “That I don’t believe.”

The Falls on the Peregrine River were nothing like the waterfalls you see pictures of. They were just water falling over limestone shelves, none of them more than six or seven feet high. There was a breathing spot where you could stand behind the hard-falling curtain of water, and all around in the limestone there were pools, smooth-rimmed and not much bigger than bathtubs, where the water lay trapped and warm. You would have to be very determined to drown in there. But they had looked there—the other girls had run around calling Heather’s name and peering into all the pools, and they had even stuck their heads into the dry space behind the curtain of noisy water. They had skipped around on the bare rock and yelled and got themselves soaked, finally, plunging in and out through the curtain. Till Miss Johnstone shouted and made them come back.

“Seven was all she could get,” Frances said. “And every one of them, there was a reason. Robin Sands, doctor’s daughter.
Lucille Chambers, minister’s daughter. They can’t get out of it. The Trowells—country. Glad to get in on anything. Ginny Bos, the double-jointed monkey—she’s along for the swimming and the horsing around. Mary Kaye living next door to Miss Johnstone. Enough said. And Heather Bell new in town.
And
her mother away on the weekend herself—yes, she was taking the opportunity. Getting off on an expedition of her own.”

It was about twenty-four hours since Heather Bell had disappeared, on the annual hike of the C.G.I.T.—which stood for Canadian Girls in Training—out to the Falls on the Peregrine River. Mary Johnstone, who was now in her early sixties, had been leading this hike for years, since before the war. There used to be at least a couple of dozen girls heading out the County Road on a Saturday morning in June. They would all be wearing navy-blue shorts and white blouses and red kerchiefs round their necks. Maureen had been one of them, twenty or so years ago.