Selected Stories (34 page)

And I had already had my eyes opened to some other things, by the visit of Cousin Iris.

That happened when I was living in Vancouver. I was married to Richard then. I had two small children. On a Saturday evening Richard answered the phone and came to get me.

“Be careful,” he said. “It sounds like Dalgleish.”

Richard always said the name of my native town as if it were a clot of something unpleasant, which he had to get out of his mouth in a hurry.

I went to the phone and found to my relief that it was nobody from Dalgleish at all. It was Cousin Iris. There was a bit of the Ottawa Valley accent still in her speech, something rural—she would not have suspected that herself and would not have been pleased—and something loud and jolly, which had made Richard think of the voices of Dalgleish. She said that she was in Vancouver, she was retired
now and she was taking a trip, and she was dying to see me. I asked her to come to dinner the next day.

“Now, by dinner, you mean the evening meal, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I just wanted to get it straight. Because when we visited at your place, remember, your folks always had dinner at noon. You called the noon meal dinner. I didn’t think you still would but I wanted to get it straight.”

I told Richard that a cousin of my mother’s was coming to dinner. I said she was, or had been, a nurse, and that she lived in Philadelphia.

“She’s all right,” I said. I meant decently educated, well enough spoken, moderately well bred. “She’s travelled all over. She’s really quite interesting. Being a nurse she’s met all sorts of people—” I told about the millionaire’s widow and the jewels in the carpetbag. And the more I talked, the more Richard discerned of my doubts and my need for reassurance, and the more noncommittal and unreassuring he became. He knew he had an advantage, and we had reached the point in our marriage where no advantage was given up easily.

I longed for the visit to go well. I wanted this for my own sake. My motives were not such as would do me credit. I wanted Cousin Iris to shine forth as a relative nobody need be ashamed of, and I wanted Richard and his money and our house to lift me forever, in Cousin Iris’s eyes, out of the category of poor relation. I wanted all this accomplished with a decent subtlety and restraint and the result to be a pleasant recognition of my own value, from both sides.

I used to think that if I could produce one rich and well-behaved and important relative, Richard’s attitude to me would change. A judge, a surgeon, would have done very well. I was not sure at all how Iris would serve as a substitute. I was worried about the way Richard had said “Dalgleish,” and that vestige of the Ottawa Valley—Richard was stern about rural accents, having had so much trouble with mine—and something else in Iris’s voice which I could not identify. Was she too eager? Did she assume some proprietary family claim I no longer believed was justified?

Never mind. I started thawing a leg of lamb and made a lemon-meringue pie. Lemon-meringue pie was what my mother made when the cousins were coming. She polished the dessert forks, she ironed
the table napkins. For we owned dessert forks (I wanted to say to Richard); yes, and we had table napkins, even though the toilet was in the basement and there was no running water until after the war. I used to carry hot water to the front bedroom in the morning, so that the cousins could wash. I poured it into a jug like those I now see in antique stores, or on hall tables, full of ornamental grasses.

But surely none of this mattered to me, none of this nonsense about dessert forks? Was I, am I, the sort of person who thinks that to possess such objects is to have a civilized attitude to life? No, not at all; not exactly; yes and no. Yes and no.
Background
was Richard’s word.
Your background
. A drop in his voice, a warning. Or was that what I heard, not what he meant? When he said “Dalgleish,” even when he wordlessly handed me a letter from home, I felt ashamed, as if there was something growing over me; mold, something nasty and dreary and inescapable. Poverty, to Richard’s family, was like bad breath or running sores, an affliction for which the afflicted must bear one part of the blame. But it was not good manners to notice. If ever I said anything about my childhood or my family in their company, there would be a slight drawing back, as at a low-level obscenity. But it is possible that I was a bit strident and self-conscious, like the underbred character in Virginia Woolf who makes a point of not having been taken to the circus. Perhaps that was what embarrassed them. They were tactful with me. Richard could not afford to be so tactful, since he had put himself in a chancy position, marrying me. He wanted me amputated from that past which seemed to him such shabby baggage; he was on the lookout for signs that the amputation was not complete; and of course it wasn’t.

My mother’s cousins had never visited us again, en masse. Winifred died suddenly one winter, not more than three or four years after that memorable visit. Iris wrote to my mother that the circle was broken now and that she had suspected Winifred was diabetic, but Winifred did not want to find that out because of her love of food. My mother herself was not well. The remaining cousins visited her, but they did so separately, and of course not often, because of distances. Nearly every one of their letters referred to the grand time they had all had, that summer, and near the end of her life my
mother said, “Oh, Lord, do you know what I was thinking of? The water pistol. Remember that concert? Winifred with the water pistol! Everybody did their stunt. What did I do?”

“You stood on your head.”

“Ah, yes, I did.”

C
OUSIN
I
RIS
was stouter than ever, and rosy under her powder. She was breathless from her climb up the street. I had not wanted to ask Richard to go to the hotel for her. I would not say I was afraid to ask him; I simply wanted to keep things from starting off on the wrong foot, by making him do what he hadn’t offered to do. I had told myself that she would take a cab. But she had come on the bus.

“Richard was busy,” I said to her, lying. “It’s my fault. I don’t drive.”

“Never mind,” said Iris staunchly. “I’m all out of puff just now but I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s carrying the lard that does it. Serves me right.”

As soon as she said “all out of puff,” and “carrying the lard,” I knew how things were going to go with Richard. It hadn’t even taken that. I knew as soon as I saw her on my doorstep, her hair, which I remembered as gray-brown, now gilt and sprayed into a foamy pile, her sumptuous peacock-blue dress decorated at one shoulder with a sort of fountain of gold spray. Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.

“Well, now,” she said jubilantly. “Haven’t you done all right for yourself!” She looked at me, and the rock garden and the ornamental shrubs and the expanse of windows. Our house was in Capilano Heights on the side of Grouse Mountain. “I’ll say. It’s a grand place, dear.”

I took her in and introduced her to Richard and she said, “Oh-ho, so you’re the husband. Well, I won’t ask you how’s business because I can see it’s good.”

Richard was a lawyer. The men in his family were either lawyers or stockbrokers. They never referred to what they did at work as any kind of business. They never referred to what they did at work at all.
Talking about what you did at work was slightly vulgar; talking about how you did was unforgivably so. If I had not been still so vulnerable to Richard it might have been a pleasure to see him met like this, head-on.

I offered drinks at once, hoping to build up a bit of insulation in myself. I had got out a bottle of sherry, thinking that was what you offered older ladies, people who didn’t usually drink. But Iris laughed and said, “Why, I’d love a gin-and-tonic, just like you folks.”

“Remember that time we all went to visit you in Dalgleish?” she said. “It was so dry! Your mother was still a small-town girl, she wouldn’t have liquor in the house. Though I always thought your father would take a drink, if you got him off. Flora was Temperance too. But that Winifred was a devil. You know she had a bottle in her suitcase? We’d sneak into the bedroom and take a nip, then gargle with cologne. She called your place the Sahara. Here we are crossing the Sahara. Not that we didn’t get enough lemonade and iced tea to float a battleship. Float four battleships, eh?”

Perhaps she had seen something when I opened the door—some surprise, or failure of welcome. Perhaps she was daunted, though at the same time immensely pleased, by the house and the furnishings, which were elegant and dull and not all chosen by Richard, either. Whatever the reason, her tone when she spoke of Dalgleish and my parents was condescending. I don’t think she wanted to remind me of home, and put me in my place; I think she wanted to establish herself, to let me know that she belonged here more than there.

“Oh, this is a treat, sitting here and looking at your gorgeous view! Is that Vancouver Island?”

“Point Grey,” said Richard unencouragingly.

“Oh, I should have known. We went out there on the bus yesterday. We saw the university. I’m with a tour, dear, did I tell you? Nine old maids and seven widows and three widowers. Not one married couple. But as I say, you never know, the trip’s not over yet.”

I smiled, and Richard said he had to move the sprinkler.

“We go to Vancouver Island tomorrow, then we’re taking the boat to Alaska. Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I’ve never been there, isn’t that a
good enough reason? No bachelors on the tour, and do you know why? They don’t live to be this old! That’s a medical fact. You tell your hubby. Tell him he did the right thing. But I’m not going to talk shop. Every time I go on a trip they find out I’m a nurse and they show me their spines and their tonsils and their whatnots. They want me to poke their livers. Free diagnosis. I say enough of that. I’m retired now and I mean to enjoy life. This beats the iced tea a mile, doesn’t it? But she used to go to such a lot of trouble. The poor thing. She used to frost the glasses with egg white, remember?”

I tried to get her to talk about my mother’s illness, new treatments, her hospital experiences, not only because that was interesting to nie but because I thought it might calm her down and make her sound more intelligent. I knew Richard hadn’t gone out at all but was lurking in the kitchen.

But she said, no shop.

“Beaten egg white, then sugar. Oh, dear. You had to drink through straws. But the fun we had there. The john in the basement and all. We did have fun.”

Iris’s lipstick, her bright teased hair, her iridescent dress and oversized brooch, her voice and conversation were all part of a policy which was not a bad one: She was in favor of movement, noise, change, flashiness, hilarity, and courage. Fun. She thought other people should be in favor of these things too, and told about her efforts on the tour.

“I’m the person to get the ball rolling. Some people get downhearted on a trip. They get indigestion. They talk about their constipation. I always get their minds off it. You can always joke. You can start a singsong. Every morning I can practically hear them thinking, What crazy thing is that Chaddeley going to come up with today?”

Nothing fazed her, she said. She told about other trips. Ireland. The other women had been afraid to get down and kiss the Blarney Stone, but she said, “I’ve come this far and I’m going to kiss the damn thing!” and did so, while a blasphemous Irishman hung on to her ankles.

We drank; we ate; the children came in and were praised. Richard came and went. Nothing fazed her; she was right. Nothing deflected
her from her stories of herself; the amount of time she could spend not talking was limited. She told about the carpetbag and the millionaire’s widow all over again. She told about the dissolute actor. How many conversations she must have ridden through like this—laughing, insisting, rambling, recollecting. I wondered if this evening was something she would describe as fun. She would describe it. The house, the rugs, the dishes, the signs of money. It might not matter to her that Richard snubbed her. Perhaps she would rather be snubbed by a rich relative than welcomed by a poor one. But had she always been like this, always brash and greedy and scared; decent, maybe even admirable, but still somebody you hope you will not have to sit too long beside on a bus or at a party? I was dishonest when I said that I wished we had met elsewhere, that I wished I had appreciated her, when I implied that Richard’s judgments were all that stood in the way. Perhaps I could have appreciated her more, but I couldn’t have stayed with her long.

I had to wonder if this was all it amounted to, the gaiety I remembered; the gaiety and generosity, the worldliness. It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better. Unsympathetic places and people might have made us harsh, in efforts and opinions. I used to love to look at magazine advertisements showing ladies in chiffon dresses with capes and floating panels, resting their elbows on a ship’s rail, or drinking tea beside a potted palm. I used to apprehend a life of elegance and sensibility through them. They were a window I had on the world, and the cousins were another. In fact, the cousins’ flowery dresses used to remind me of them, though the cousins were so much stouter, and not pretty. Well, now that I think of it, what were those ladies talking about in the balloons over their heads? They were discussing underarm odor, or thanking their lucky stars they were no longer chafed, because they used Kotex.

Iris collected herself, finally, and asked when the last bus ran. Richard had disappeared again, but I said that I would take her back to her hotel in a cab. She said no, she would enjoy the bus ride, truly she would, she always got into a conversation with somebody. I got out my schedule and walked her to the bus stop. She said she hoped
she hadn’t talked Richard’s and my ears off and asked if Richard was shy. She said I had a lovely home, a lovely family, it made her feel grand to see that I had done so well in my life. Tears filled her eyes when she hugged me goodbye.