The Box Garden (11 page)

In the dark Judith asks, “Were you absolutely stunned to hear about Louis?”

“Stunned!” I say. “I’m still trying to get used to it. Is that the way you pronounce his name? Looey?”

“Yes. Like Louis the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth.”

“Have you met him?”

“Last time I was down. But just for a minute. He’s coming over tomorrow though. To get acquainted with all of us.”

“Where on earth did she meet him? I mean, she never goes anywhere.”

“At the cancer clinic,” Judith says.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You mean . . .”

“Yes.”

“What exactly?”

“You mean what kind of cancer?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure. That is, she didn’t go into details. But he’s had three operations.”

“Three operations?”

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Judith. Do you realize—that means he’s missing three parts.”

“Possibly.”

“What,” I speak slowly, “do you think they could be?”

“I don’t know. But he doesn’t look all that sick. At least not the quick look I had at him.”

“What does he look like, Judith?”

“Thin. Naturally. And I’m not sure but I think he may be a couple of inches shorter than she is.”

“Three operations! I can’t get over it. What I mean is ... don’t you think . . . I mean, imagine embarking on marriage when you’re in that state.”

“Maybe they were only minor operations.”

“Is he the same age she is?”

“Two years older. He’s seventy-two.”

“But he was married before. She wrote that—that he had been married before.”

“Yes, but I don’t know anything about his first wife, when she died or what.”

“Where does he live?”

“He has a furnished room. Not so far from here, just a few minutes. But he’s giving it up and moving in here. After the wedding.”

“After the wedding,” I repeat the words.

“Doesn’t it sound crazy?
The Wedding.”

“And he’s retired. What did he do before he was retired?” I reflect suddenly that I’m not so different after all from Doug Savage; what did he do—that was what I had to find out.

“He taught manual training. In a junior high school.”

“Manual training?”

“You know, like woodworking. And metalwork. Like when the girls went for cooking and sewing. Remember?”

“And that was his job? That’s what he did?”

“Apparently.”

“And he lived in Toronto?”

“I think so. He doesn’t speak a word of French, in spite of the French name; I asked him. But he used to be a Catholic.”

“A Catholic?”

“Uhuh.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me. When she told me about the manual training and all that.”

“She would never have told me that. She never tells me anything.”

“She doesn’t tell me much, either,” Judith says. “She writes every week, but it’s always about the same old thing: the weather and her aches and pains or how much everything costs these days. I had to pump her about Louis.”

“I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for running away with Watson.”

“Oh, Charleen, that was ages ago. I’m sure she never thinks about it anymore.”

“The scandal of it all,” I say bitterly. “Having all the neighbours think I might be pregnant.”

“Charleen, you exaggerate.”

“Well, she never tells me anything.”

“Actually, there’s something she hasn’t told me. And I’m dying to know.”

I can’t see Judith’s face in the dark. “What?” I ask.

“If she loves him. If he loves her.”

“I suppose they must. At least a little.” But I say this doubtfully.

“I’d give anything to know.”

“It’s your biographical urge coming through.”

“It could be. What I want to know is, do they say romantic things like ... well, like, ‘I love you’ and all that.”

“I can’t imagine
her
saying it.”

“I can’t either. But maybe he does. Anyway, I wish I knew.”

“I don’t suppose you could ask her?”

“God, no!” Judith says. “She’d have a fit.”

“What I’d like to know is
why.”

“Why what?”

“Why she’s getting married. It just doesn’t make sense. She’s comfortable enough. Why on earth does she want to go and get married?”

There is a long pause. Perhaps Judith has fallen asleep, I think. Then I hear her short sigh, and what she says is: “Well, why does anyone get married?”

“What I’d really like,” I say into the darkness, “is some coffee.”

“So would I,” Judith says. “I wonder if she’s got any. She mostly drinks tea now.”

“Let’s look,” I say, slipping out of bed.

“We’ll wake everyone up.”

“Not if we’re quiet.”

We move down the darkened hall. Judith walks ahead of me in an exaggerated clownish prowl, her knees pulling up through her yellow cotton nightgown in a burlesque mime of caution. The door to the kitchen is shut; she turns the knob slowly so that there is no sound, and we close it behind us with the smallest of clicks, snap on the overhead light and breathe with relief. Judith faces me, her upper teeth pulled down over her lower lip, girlish and conspiratorial.

Here in the kitchen there is a faint smell of roasted meat. Lamb? A fresh breeze blows through the window screen and the mixed scent of dampness and scouring powder rises from the sink. A newspaper, yesterday‘s, is folded neatly under the step-on garbage can beside the back door so that there will be no rust marks left on the squared linoleum; it has always been like this.

Our room, the bedroom which Judith and I shared as girls, leads off the kitchen; it is the sort of back bedroom which was commonplace in depression bungalows. Eugene and Martin—it excites me a little to think of it—are sleeping there now. Their door, which stands between the refrigerator (a model from the early fifties) and the old cupboard, is shut; Judith and I freeze for a moment in front of it, listening, straining to hear their fused breathing, but all we hear is the stirring of the wind outside the kitchen window. The trees in the back yard are swaying hugely, and I picture their new green buds, not yet fully opened, turning hard and black in the darkness. “It looks like rain,” Judith remarks.

I find the jar of instant coffee at once; without thinking my hand finds the right shelf, reaches for the place beside the tea canister where I know it must be. A very small jar, the lid screwed tightly on. Judith boils water in the green enamel kettle and finds the everyday cups, and then we sit facing each other across the little brown formica table.

Suddenly there is nothing to say. We are uneasy; we are guilty invaders in our mother’s clean-mopped kitchen; we have disturbed the symmetry of her lightly stocked shelves, have helped ourselves to sugar from her blue earthenware sugar bowl with its two flat-ear handles and its little flowered lid. “Never leave a sugar bowl uncovered,” she always said. “You never know when a fly might get in.” It is as though she is sitting here with us now, measuring, observing, censoring, as though she is holding us forcibly inside the sudden, unwilled silence we seem to have entered. I try to drink my coffee, but it’s too hot.

Judith says at last, a little warily, “Eugene seems nice.” It is not a statement; Judith would never make a statement as banal as that; it is a question.

And I answer conversationally. “I wrote you about him, didn’t I?”

As always there is a kind of ritual to our dialogue, for of course I know that I have written to Judith about Eugene and she knows it too. I wrote to her long ago telling her I had met Eugene, that he was working on Seth’s teeth, that we had taken a holiday together in San Francisco. I can even recall some of the careful phrases I used in my letters to her. She has not suddenly forgotten, not Judith. It is only that she and I see each other so rarely that we are afraid we might misjudge the permitted area of intimacy. It is necessary to prepare the ground a little before we can speak. There is on Judith’s side a wish not to weigh too heavily what I might have written off-handedly and perhaps now regret. On my side there is a wish to project nonchalance and laxity, to preserve at least a shadow of that fiction she half-believes me to be, a runaway younger sister, a casual libertine who has the edge on her, but only superficially, as far as worldliness goes. West-coast divorcee, free-wheeling poet, and now a sort of semi-mistress. We talk in careful, mutually drawn circles.

“When exactly did you meet him, Charleen?”

“Two years ago,” I tell her, “two years now.”

“And?” Judith asks.

“Just that. Two years.”

“What about marriage?” she asks suddenly, recklessly, apparently tiring of fencing with me.

“I don’t know,” I tell her.

“He’s divorced too?”

“Yes.”

“It’s all final and everything?”

“Yes. It’s not that. Actually he’d like to get married again. I like his two boys and they like me. There’s nothing to stop us really.”

“But you’re not quite sure of him? Is that it?”

“I just can’t seem to think straight these days.”

“What about Seth? What does he think of Eugene?”

“That’s no problem. He likes Eugene. And he gets on great with the two kids. Seth likes everyone.”

It’s so quiet in the kitchen. The red and white wall clock over the stove says five minutes past two. The refrigerator whines from its muffled electric heart and a very fine rain blows against the screen over the sink. Judith gets up and shuts the window.

“Seth likes everyone,” I say again. To understate is to risk banality, and these words echoing in the silent kitchen sound both trite and untrue. But they are true; he does like everyone, a fact which makes me feel—and not for the first time—a little frightened at my own child’s open, unquestioning acceptance. Is it natural? Is it perhaps dangerous?

Judith doesn’t notice. “That’s good,” she says. And waits for me to go on.

“I’m just waiting until I’m sure,” I tell her. “I’m not rushing this time. I’m going to wait.”

How can I tell her what it is I’m waiting for; I hardly know myself. But I feel with the force of absolute, brimming certainty that there is something bulky and positive in the future for me, a thing, an event perhaps, which is connected with me in some way, with me, Charleen Forrest. If I were superstitious I might say it was written in the stars, and if I were half as bitter as Judith believes me to be, I might say it is because I deserve something at last. I know it’s there. The numbers tell me: I lived in this brick bungalow for eighteen years. Then I was married to Watson Forrest for eight years. Now I have been divorced for twelve. The shapes, the pattern, the order of those random numbers spell out a kind of logic in my brain; they suggest the approach of another era, another way of being. I’m not a mystic but I know it’s there, whatever it is.

I tell Judith about Brother Adam.

She is, as I might have expected, skeptical. Though she prizes her tolerance, in actual fact the edges of her life are sealed to exclude the sort of human flotsam which I have always been able to embrace. The title Brother is not definitive enough for Judith; it is loosely and embarrassingly sentimental, hinting at imposed familiarity and chummy handshakes.

“What’s it supposed to mean exactly?” she questions. “Is he a priest? Or what?”

“I think so. I’m not sure.”

“You mean in all these letters you’ve written, you’ve never asked him?”

I pause; it’s hard to explain; some things do not yield to simplicity. “That’s the sort of question he might consider trivial. Too particularized, if you see what I mean.”

“But you think he
might
be a priest?”

“Well, he lives in a place called the Priory.”

“Which priory.”

“Just ‘The Priory’.”

“And it’s in Toronto?”