â The library's just down the street, said Emma.
     A curiously apposite non sequitur. Emma's friends mumbled in agreement. At which point Robbie, thrown from his trance,
was suddenly aware of his situation. He wanted nothing so much as to flee. It
took almost superhuman resolve to put his clothes on carefully and to dress
without throwing up. Once he began to dress, the women seemed to lose interest
in him. Agnes did ask if everything was all right, but she turned away to
devote herself to washing Emma's hair. The older women, as bewildered by Emma's comment as Robbie's behaviour, began a conversation about libraries and modern morals.
     Dressed, Robbie apologized.
     â It's awfully early to be drinking, said Agnes. I'm afraid I'm going to have to tell your mother about this.
     As if he were still a boy, Robbie said
     â I'm sorry, Mrs. Atkinson
and walked out into what was now a light, warm rain.
     For all the attention paid the matter while Robbie was in Atkinson's, a stranger might have wondered if Barrow's young men did not habitually go naked into beauty parlours.  But as it is with so many unusual moments, the incident grew in the imaginations
of those who had lived it. It became more significant the more they were asked
about it. What had they seen? (Well, everything!) Did they know why Robbie had
come into the parlour like that? (He was drunk!) Was he really drunk, or is it
something worse, because, you know, there's been insanity in the Myers family before? (So true! They hid Robbie's uncle Mark away for ages, before they put him in a proper home. Robbie's most likely the same way. Just think what'll happen if Liz Denny has kids with that boy!)
     The more anyone thought about it, the more peculiar it became: slightly
sinister for some, amusing for others. Still, as nothing dangerously wrong had
happened and as Robbie's subsequent attitude â contrite, embarrassed â was not alarming, the incident was blamed on alcohol and forgotten a relatively
short time later. (That is, it was never forgotten, but, after a certain time,
it was only ever brought up in jest.)
     Jane was angry that Robbie had done what she'd asked.    Â
     Elizabeth was humiliated, or
further
 humiliated, because Robbie's humiliation was hers too: yet another dose of misery. People began to openly
wonder if he was a suitable husband for any self-respecting woman, and they all
felt compelled to tell her so. The general consensus was that Elizabeth had
good reason to back out of the wedding.
A few days after Robbie scandalized the women in Atkinson's, Elizabeth and Jane met in St. Mary's. They spoke quietly near the front of the church while a handful of sinners
waited to confess at the back. The day was dark. The rain came down in a pale,
earth-lit shower. Thunder sounded in the distance, as if the land were clearing
its throat every so often. It was a relief to enter the church, though the
interior was gloomy and the stained-glass saints, their colours darkened, lost
much of their charm. The light inside was as thin as if it were shining through
khaki cloth.
     Without a hint of triumph, Jane said
     â I told you this would happen.
     â I know that, answered Elizabeth. I'm sorry I asked you to do it.
     â You should have thought about that before you asked.
     â You don't have to go on about it.
     The wind outside sounded like distant, tuneless whistling. For a moment, the
two women sat quietly, staring at the altar while listening to the storm, to
the whispers from the confessional, to the crepitations of the church itself as
it withstood the weather.
     â I told you, Jane repeated, there isn't anything I can't get Robbie to do.
     Above all, Elizabeth hated the sound of the woman's voice. Jane Richardson was unbearable, but it was she herself who had chosen
this road. What could she say? At least the question of her marriage had been
decided.
     â There's nothing else to say, said Elizabeth. I hope you and Robbie are happy together.
     Jane felt guilt and alarm.
     â I told you, she repeated
then stopped herself. It all suddenly seemed like some kind of joke. But at
whose expense?
     Thunder rattled the church and rain now thrummed against the stained glass. It
was oppressively humid and, inside, mixed in with the smell of incense, was a
strong whiff of rot. Elizabeth rose from the pew and said, with more bitterness
than she'd intended
     â I hope I never have to see your face again.
     â That makes two of us, said Jane.
     Elizabeth walked to the back of the church, to the confessional. There was much
on her mind. Her wedding, for instance. She should have postponed it, given the
circumstances, but she had gone on with the planning and the arrangements. She
had chosen a wedding dress. And although they had not had sex for months now,
she had gone on seeing Robbie, nursing what was left of her feelings for him. Â
     How much she wanted Robbie punished, and how much she wanted Jane Richardson
hurt! For the first time in her life, she felt hatred, and was upset at how
intimate hatred was. She had said that she hoped never to see Jane Richardson
again. That was true, but it was also true that a part of her wanted Jane
Richardson near her always. She felt a physical longing to damage the woman, to
hit, to bite, to grind her into the dust. These feelings, close as they were to
desire, were the hardest to bear, and they were the ones for which she felt
shame.
     Once its thick velvet curtains were drawn together, the confessional was dark.
The sounds of the church and the noise of the storm were muffled to a rumour.
When Father Pennant opened the grilled partition between his face and hers she
could immediately smell the mint he used for his breath. She hoped her own
breath was not sour. She had intended to confess her anger and hatred, but in
the confessional she found she could not. However much she wanted to, she could
not speak of anything true.
     â Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last
confession. Since then I've ⦠been disrespectful to my parents and I've â¦
     She received forgiveness for a handful of petty â or invented â misdemeanours.
     â Go, my child, and sin no more.
And left feeling as if she had betrayed herself.
The episode at Atkinson's was humiliating for Robbie, but not because he'd been naked. The look on Agnes Atkinson's face â embarrassed, peeved, maternal â was a source of pain whenever he remembered it. And then Agnes had complained
to his mother and, worse yet, Â his mother had felt compelled to speak to him about it.
     â I've been hearing strange things from Agnes Atkinson, Robbie. Now, you're old enough for me to speak to you like a man and I shouldn't have to tell you, you shouldn't be exposing yourself to women. Don't interrupt. I understand you might be thinking it's not as bad, you exposing yourself to older women. Most young men, they think
older women don't have feelings, but we do. And it's bad enough the women in Atkinson's have to see you in your birthday suit, but did you even think about what
Elizabeth's going through? How's she supposed to hold her head up with her fiancé embarrassing himself all over town? Don't you dare interrupt, Robert. There's nothing you can say about this. Your father's convinced this is some stupid dare. One of the Bigland boys dared you, didn't they? Don't interrupt. You don't have to tell me anything. I don't want to hear your explanation. I want you to promise you won't be doing this kind of thing again. Barrow isn't the place for these shenanigans. You need to move to Sarnia if you're going to expose yourself like that. Sarnia's too big for anyone to know anyone else. No one cares about anything there. You
and those damned Bigland boys should move to Sarnia and not ruin things for
people in Barrow. Honestly, I don't know why Elizabeth has stuck with you. You should thank your stars. And that's the last I'm going to say about all this. You understand? I want you to promise this isn't going to happen again and then we'll drop the subject. You understand?
     He had, of course, promised, because he did not want to talk about this with
his mother any more than she wanted to talk about it with him. Still, the
humiliation and embarrassment were things one might have expected to feel after
traipsing around in one's altogethers. The strange thing, the thing he could not have predicted, was the
exhilaration he'd been feeling since walking out of the beauty parlour. He had faced his
greatest fear and he had overcome it. He had done all that for Jane. How much
he loved her! He had never loved anyone like this, maybe not even Liz.
     He did not want to repeat the experience, it's true, but he now knew what it was to love someone beyond what he'd thought possible. Though he could not understand why Jane had asked him to
walk into Atkinson's, he would be grateful to her for the rest of his life. Days after his mother
had chewed him out for acting foolishly, he felt more willing than ever to
follow where Jane led. What a woman she was! He would never leave her.
     And, again: was he not marrying the wrong woman?
     Wasn't this feeling, the exhilaration of submission, what marriage was all about?
For generations, the men in Lowther's family had been dying at the age of sixty-three. Lowther's father, grandfather, great-grandfather â¦
 all the way back to at least seven times great. It was taken by most in his
family to be a curse. Lowther's mother had seen it that way, as had his father. But Lowther took the matter
differently. He took it as a promise, God's word.
     He hadn't always faced his âpre-ordained' death with equanimity. As a younger man, he had been defiant, angry. Knowing he
would die at the age of sixty-three gave Lowther, when he was younger, a
disregard for his life.
     Of course, his early attitude had something to do with the moment he learned
that his time on earth was fixed. On Lowther's twelfth birthday, his father, drunk and lugubrious, had taken him aside and
let him in on his fate. Mr. Williams, going through a spiritual crisis, had
wept and then apologized for having passed on a death sentence. What had
impressed and traumatized the young Lowther was not the age at which he was to
die. As for any twelve-year-old, sixty-three seemed ancient verging on
unreachable. At twelve, he himself might have chosen a more reasonable age at
which to go: thirty-five, say, or fifty at the outside. It was the spectacle of
his drunken father and the fact of his father's certainty (a certainty that proved well-founded), his father's conviction that this was an injustice handed down to them from God Himself.
The Williamses, in other words, were cursed by a God whose attention they had,
though they could not put it to good effect.
     It was no doubt sad that his days were so specific in number, thought Lowther,
but the opposite side of the coin was: he would not die
until
 he was sixty-three. If God's word was true, Lowther had been given licence to do whatever he liked until
then.
     His twenties and thirties were filled with a recklessness that would have made
most men blanch. He went in search of danger to test his destiny. He did the
usual jumping from planes and tall cliffs. He worked in the jungles of South
America, handled poisonous snakes as a member of a cult in rural Georgia, and
travelled to the most unfriendly parts of the world, in pursuit of death. As a
result, he and death were on familiar terms long before his sixty-third
birthday. By the age of forty, Lowther had seen men, women and children shot,
stabbed, run over, thrown from high windows, set alight. He had seen a severed
human hand still holding a cigarette, the head of a woman, eyes open, thrown
into a shallow hole in a dirt path and a newborn child nailed to a tree. The
death of others meant little to him.
     When Lowther was in his forties, his father died of liver cancer. It took a
year, a year during which Mr. Williams longed for a death that would not come.
Whenever they spoke, his father was either gone on morphine, drifting in and
out of consciousness, or lucid enough to feel bitter that the cancer had
pounced on him somewhere around his sixty-second birthday, leaving him with a
year to suffer. As his sixty-third birthday approached, however, knowing that
his death was coming at last, Lowther's father held his son's hand and apologized for what he'd passed on. Lowther saw his father off on the morning of May 4th, as a robin
sang and a breeze came through an open window. It was the morning of his father's sixty-third birthday. The inevitable was inevitable, after all.
     As father and son had both expected the end to come around the time it did, his
father's death could not be said to have drastically changed Lowther's view of life. It had been eerie to have the thing arrive so tightly to
schedule, but the death that changed him for good came
after
 his father had passed.