The Box Garden (16 page)

We eat lunch in the kitchen. Martin is quiet. So am I. Our forks clicking on the plates chill me into a further silence.

“Hmm, delicious,” Martin says politely.

“Yes.” I agree, forcing my voice into short plumes of enthusiasm, “Really good. So tender.”

Afterwards she washes the dishes and I dry.
Always take a clean tea towel for each meal. It may be a little bit extra in the wash but when you think of the filthy tea towels some people use ....

I yearn desperately to talk to her; to say that, despite my foreboding, I have been rather taken with Louis Berceau, that I am immeasurably pleased that he and she have found each other and she will no longer have to endure the loneliness of the ticking clock, the sound of the furnace switching on and off, the daily paper thudding against the door, the calendar weeks wasting, the reminders of time slipping by which must be unbearable for those who are alone. But the words dry in my throat; if only I knew how to begin, if only I could speak to her without shyness, without fear of hurting her. Instead I poke with my tea towel into the spokes of the egg beater.

“Don’t bother drying that,” she turns to me, taking it out of my hands. “Here,” she says, “I always put it in the oven for a little, the pilot light dries it out; the gears are so old, I’ve had it since just after the war, it was hard to get egg beaters then. Cousin Hugo got it for me from the store. I don’t want the gears to rust, they would if I didn’t get it good and dry. I’ve had it so long and it will have to last me until—”

Until what? Until death? Until the end? That is what she means; the words she couldn’t say but which she must have recognized or why did she stop so suddenly? I have never thought of the way in which my mother thinks of her own death. No doubt, though, she has a plan; she will do it more neatly, more thoroughly than her sister Liddy, better than the neighbours, more gen teely than Cousin Hugo, more timely than our father; no one will laugh at her, no one will look down on her.

Still, it may be that she is a little uncertain: the way she plunges into vigorous silence beside the scoured sink hints at uneasiness, an acknowledgement at least of life’s thinned reversal, of the finite nature of husbands and egg beaters and even of one’s self.

After lunch Martin carries a kitchen chair out into the backyard (my mother has never owned. a piece of lawn furniture) and there in the sunshine he reads a book of critical essays, a recent paperback edition which he opens with a sigh. He is, I suspect, a somewhat reluctant academic, preferring perhaps to while away his time with the small change of newspapers and magazines. Nevertheless he enjoys the warmth and the serious Sis ley sky, finely marbled, gilt-veined, surprisingly large even when viewed from the postage stamp of our tiny, fenced yard.

One-thirty. My mother goes about the house closing the curtains, first the living room and then the three bedrooms. (Much of her life has gone into a struggle against the fading of furniture and curtains and rugs.) Then she goes into the spare bedroom where she slept last night and closes the door. She is going to lie down, she is going to have her rest. She has always, since Judith and I were babies, had a “rest” after lunch. Never a nap, never a sleep, never, oh never, a doze, but a rest. She will remove her laced shoes and her dress, she will button a loosely knit grey and blue cardigan over her slip and she will turn back the bedspread into a neat fan; then she will get into bed, and there she will remain for between an hour and an hour and a half. Sometimes she falls asleep, sometimes she just “rests.” “A rest is as good as a sleep,” she has said at least a hundred times. A thousand times?

Quietly I carry the
Metropolitan Toronto and Vicinity
telephone book from the hall into the kitchen and settle myself down at the table. I turn to the P‘s, running my finger down a column, looking for The Priory, Priory, the. For some reason my heart is beating wildly. But there is nothing listed. I look under the The’s where I find quite a few listings: The Boutique, The Factory, The Place, The Shop, The Wiggery. But not The Priory. I even look under the B’s for Brother Adam. There is no Brother Adam, (nor any other Brothers) then I try Adam, Brother. Nothing.

Perhaps the Priory is listed under Religious Houses or under Churches, but my mother has no Yellow Pages. I decide to phone Information.

It is necessary to whisper into the phone because my mother is resting a few yards away behind a closed door; she may even be sleeping. The operator is enraged by my muffled voice and my lack of specificity—“Did you say it was a church?”

“No.”

“Well, is it or isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure. I think it is but I’m not—”

“Is Adam the first name or last name?”

“His first. I think.”

“I have to have a last name.”

“I’ve got the address. It’s on Beachview.”

“Sorry. I need the last name.”

“But I don’t have it.”

Actually, I reflect hanging up, it was absurd of me to think that a contemplative man like Brother Adam would have a telephone. Hadn’t he implied in his many letters his ascetic obsession, his distrust of cramped, urban industrial society? A man like Brother Adam would never put himself in bondage to Bell Telephone; a man like Brother Adam would no sooner have a telephone than he would own a car. (He does, however, have a typewriter—all his letters were typewritten—but it is undoubtedly a manual model.)

I carry the phone book back to its place. I am not going to be able to phone Brother Adam after all. And it’s too late now to drop him a note. I should have written from Vancouver as I had planned. What’s the matter with me that I can’t even make the simplest of social arrangements? I’ll have to go to The Priory, there’s no other solution. If I want to see him at all I will have to turn up at his door unannounced.

But I can’t go today; my mother wouldn’t like it if I disappeared on an unexplained errand, and besides Eugene is going to phone me from downtown at three o‘clock. And tomorrow? Wednesday? Tomorrow is my day to have lunch with Louis Berceau. Friday?—the wedding is on Friday, and Friday night we’re flying back to Vancouver.

Thursday—if I go at all I’ll have to go on Thursday. Yes, I will definitely go to see Brother Adam on Thursday. He is in the city, he is within a few miles of me, looking out of his window perhaps, sitting in the sun on his fire escape perhaps, and who knows, maybe he is writing a letter, perhaps even a letter to me, a letter beginning Dear Charleen, the sky is benignly blue today, the sun falls like a blessing across this page ...

Martin is restless. He has brought his chair inside; the sky has clouded over with alarming suddenness, and a few drops of heavy rain have already fallen onto the pages of his book. He is brooding mysteriously by the living room window.

I can never quite believe in the otherness of people’s lives. That is, I cannot conceive of their functioning out of my sight. A psychologist friend once told me this attitude was symptomatic of a raging ego, but perhaps it is only a perceptual failure. My mother: every day she lives in this house; it is not all magically whisked away when I leave; the walls and furniture persist and so do the hours which she somehow fills. When Seth was five and started school I came home the first day after taking him and grieved, not out of nostalgia for his infancy or anxiety for his future, but for the newly revealed fact that he had entered into that otherness, that unseeable space which he must occupy forever and where not even my imagination could follow. It is the same with Martin who, year after unseen year, pursues objectives, lives through unaccountable weeks and months. Martin by the window, shut up in his thoughts, might be standing on the tip of the moon.

When my mother wakes up she goes into the kitchen and begins browning a small pot roast on the back of the stove. “Nothing fancy,” she explains. “I’m not going to fuss even for company, not at today’s prices, not that there’s anything wrong with a good honest pot roast and they don’t give those away nowadays. Maybe it takes a few hours, you have to brown it really well, each side and the ends too, most people don’t want to bother, they’d just as soon take a steak out of the freezer, never mind the cost, and call that a meal.”

Because I make my mother nervous in the kitchen I go into the living room and stand beside Martin. He glances at his watch and says, “They should be home soon.”

Is it a question or a statement? “You mean Judith?” I ask.

He nods.

“It’s quite a distance,” I remind him. “Remember? Out in the country somewhere.”

“He’s over seventy,” Martin says grimly.

“Seventy-two,” I nod.

“These old coots really shouldn’t be on the road,” Martin says with surprising ferocity.

The word “coots” shocks me; it seems a remarkably uncivilized word for Martin to use. What is the matter with him?

I spring to Louis’s defence. “He seems alert enough for a man of his age. I’m sure he wouldn’t drive if he felt he wasn’t capable.”

Martin looks again at his watch, and I can see by the involuntary snap of his wrist that he’s seriously worried.

“I’m sure he’s a careful driver,” I insist again.

“But how do you
know?”

I shrug. “He certainly didn’t strike me as the reckless type.”

“Didn’t strike you,” he says sourly, mockingly. But then he asks seriously, “How
did
he strike you, Charleen?”

“Why are you so worried, Martin?”

“Because,” Martin says, “have you considered that we don’t know a damn thing about this man? Absolutely nothing.”

“He used to be a Catholic,” I say, as though that fact were exceptionally revealing, “and he used to teach carpentry or something like that. In a junior high. In the east end I think.”

“Yes, yes,” Martin says wearily, “but what do we really know about him?”

“His health, you mean?”

He sighs, faintly exasperated. “No, not his health. What I mean is, we don’t know anything. Christ, maybe he’s queer. Or maybe he molests children. Or sets fire to buildings or passes bum cheques. How would we know?”

I feel my mouth pulling into the shape of protest.

Martin continues, “He’s an odd enough looking bird, you can see that. For your mother’s sake we should have looked into him a bit more. And now here he goes off with Judith to God only knows where. We never even asked exactly where they were headed. And now a storm’s coming up.” He sighs again. “I don’t know.”

How odd Martin is becoming. I point out to him the obvious facts: that it is not even quite three o‘clock yet, that it was after eleven when Judith and Louis left the house; that Louis distinctly said it was an hour’s drive. True, we know next to nothing about him, but we couldn’t very well call in a detective three days before the wedding; we would have to go by instinct, and my instinct—but would Martin believe it?—my instinct is to trust him. An odd-looking man, yes, and a strange marriage, perhaps—I nod in the direction of the kitchen— but I feel certain, a certainty which I can in no way justify, that there is nothing to be afraid of.

Martin shakes his head, not entirely convinced but obviously wishing to be. He regards the empty street and the pulsing sky; the rain is holding back, squeezing laboured tears out of the scrambled grey clouds. Clearly Martin will not be happy until Judith is safely home; his devotion touches me, especially when I think of Judith’s careless departure, how she went off without a thought about how Martin would pass the day, making a swift grab for her bag, yanking a cardigan over her shoulders; she took Louis’s arm with huge, loping cheerfulness and sailed past the lilac tree; she drove away in his little Fiat without so much as a good-bye wave. And what else? Oh, yes, she hadn’t told me about Martin’s promotion; she hadn‘t, in fact, mentioned Martin at all; it is rather as though he were no more than a distant acquaintance.

I want to reassure Martin about Louis’s reliability. “I don’t know how to explain it,” I tell him, “but I know Louis’s okay. And I’m usually right about things like this.” (Am I?)

He smiles a twisted, academic smile. “Intuition, I suppose.”

I smile back. We will be friends. “Look,” I say, “it’s a rather odd marriage, but they may surprise us by being happy.”

“Happy?” He looks amused at the idea.

“Well, a kind of happiness.”

Happiness. Such a word, such a crude balloon of a word, such a flapping, stretched, unsightly female bladder of a word, how worn, how slack, how almost empty.

“Happiness,” Martin repeats dully.

And before I can say anything more, the telephone rings. It’s Eugene.

“Charleen.”

“Yes. Eugene? How’s it going? The conference?”

“Not bad. A bit draggy.” (I rejoice at his detachment. If he had greeted me with ecstasy my heart would have sickened; I am queasy about misplaced enthusiasm.)

“What time are you coming?” I ask him.

“That’s why I’m phoning. What I’d really like is if you could come downtown.”