The Progress of Love (38 page)

They are sitting in Janet’s front room, making roses out of pink Kleenex.

“It’s just stupid,” Trudy says.

“Well. There is one thing you could do,” says Janet. “I don’t hardly know how to mention it.”

“What?”

“Pray.”

Trudy’d had the feeling, from Janet’s tone, that she was going to tell her something serious and unpleasant, something about herself—Trudy—that was affecting her life and that everybody knew except her. Now she wants to laugh, after bracing herself. She doesn’t know what to say.

“You don’t pray, do you?” Janet says.

“I haven’t got anything against it,” Trudy says. “I wasn’t brought up to be religious.”

“It’s not strictly speaking religious,” Janet says. “I mean, it’s not connected with any church. This is just some of us that pray. I can’t tell you the names of anybody in it, but most of them you know. It’s supposed to be secret. It’s called the Circle of Prayer.”

“Like at high school,” Trudy says. “At high school there were secret societies, and you weren’t supposed to tell who was in them. Only I wasn’t.”

“I was in everything going.” Janet sighs. “This is actually more on the serious side. Though some people in it don’t take it
seriously enough, I don’t think. Some people, they’ll pray that they’ll find a parking spot, or they’ll pray they get good weather for their holidays. That isn’t what it’s for. But that’s just individual praying. What the Circle is really about is, you phone up somebody that is in it and tell them what it is you’re worried about, or upset about, and ask them to pray for you. And they do. And they phone one other person that’s in the Circle, and they phone another and it goes all around, and we pray for one person, all together.”

Trudy throws a rose away. “That’s botched. Is it all women?”

“There isn’t any rule it has to be. But it is, yes. Men would be too embarrassed. I was embarrassed at first. Only the first person you phone knows your name, who it is that’s being prayed for, but in a town like this nearly everybody can guess. But if we started gossiping and ratting on each other it wouldn’t work, and everybody knows that. So we don’t. And it does work.”

“Like how?” Trudy says.

“Well, one girl banged up her car. She did eight hundred dollars’ damage, and it was kind of a tricky situation, where she wasn’t sure her insurance would cover it, and neither was her husband—he was raging mad—but we all prayed, and the insurance came through without a hitch. That’s only one example.”

“There wouldn’t be much point in praying to get the necklace back when it’s in the coffin and the funeral’s this morning,” Trudy says.

“It’s not up to you to say that. You don’t say what’s possible or impossible. You just ask for what you want. Because it says in the Bible, ‘Ask and it shall be given.’ How can you be helped if you won’t ask? You can’t, that’s for sure. What about when Dan left—what if you’d prayed then? I wasn’t in the Circle then, or I would have said something to you. Even if I knew you’d resist it, I would have said something. A lot of people resist. Now, even—it doesn’t sound too great with that girl, but how do you know, maybe even now it might work? It might not be too late.”

“All right,” says Trudy, in a hard, cheerful voice. “All right.” She pushes all the floppy flowers off her lap. “I’ll just get down on my knees right now and pray that I get Dan back. I’ll pray that I
get the necklace back and I
get
Dan back, and why do I have to stop there? I can pray that Tracy Lee never died. I can pray that she comes back to life. Why didn’t her mother ever think of that?”

Good news. The swimming pool is fixed. They’ll be able to fill it tomorrow. But Kelvin is depressed. Early this afternoon—partly to keep them from bothering the men who were working on the pool—he took Marie and Josephine uptown. He let them get ice-cream cones. He told them to pay attention and eat the ice cream up quickly, because the sun was hot and it would melt. They licked at their cones now and then, as if they had all day. Ice cream was soon dribbling down their chins and down their arms. Kelvin had grabbed a handful of paper napkins, but he couldn’t wipe it up fast enough. They were a mess. A spectacle. They didn’t care. Kelvin told them they weren’t so pretty that they could afford to look like that.

“Some people don’t like the look of us anyway,” he said. “Some people don’t even think we should be allowed uptown. People just get used to seeing us and not staring at us like freaks and you make a mess and spoil it.”

They laughed at him. He could have cowed Marie if he had her alone, but not when she was with Josephine. Josephine was one who needed some old-fashioned discipline, in Kelvin’s opinion. Kelvin had been in places where people didn’t get away with anything like they got away with here. He didn’t agree with hitting. He had seen plenty of it done, but he didn’t agree with it, even on the hand. But a person like Josephine could be shut up in her room. She could be made to sit in a corner, she could be put on bread and water, and it would do a lot of good. All Marie needed was a talking-to—she had a weak personality. But Josephine was a devil.

“I’ll talk to both of them,” Trudy says. “I’ll tell them to say they’re sorry.”

“I want for them to
be
sorry,” Kelvin says. “I don’t care if they say they are. I’m not taking them ever again.”

Later, when all the others are in bed, Trudy gets him to sit down to play cards with her on the screened veranda. They play
Crazy Eights. Kelvin says that’s all he can manage tonight; his head is sore.

Uptown, a man said to him, “Hey, which one of them two is your girlfriend?”

“Stupid,” Trudy says. “He was a stupid jerk.”

The man talking to the first man said, “Which one you going to marry?”

“They don’t know you, Kelvin. They’re just stupid.”

But they did know him. One was Reg Hooper, one was Bud DeLisle. Bud DeLisle that sold real estate. They knew him. They had talked to him in the barbershop; they called him Kelvin. “Hey, Kelvin, which one you going to marry?”

“Nerds,” says Trudy. “That’s what Robin would say.”

“You think they’re your friend, but they’re not,” says Kelvin. “How many times I see that happen.”

Trudy goes to the kitchen to put on coffee. She wants to have fresh coffee to offer Janet when she comes in. She apologized this morning, and Janet said all right, I know you’re upset. It really is all right. Sometimes you think they’re your friend, and they are.

She looks at all the mugs hanging on their hooks. She and Janet shopped all over to find them. A mug with each one’s name. Marie, Josephine, Arthur, Kelvin, Shirley, George, Dorinda. You’d think Dorinda would be the hardest name to find, but actually the hardest was Shirley. Even the people who can’t read have learned to recognize their own mugs, by color and pattern.

One day, two new mugs appeared, bought by Kelvin. One said Trudy, the other Janet.

“I’m not going to be too overjoyed seeing my name in that lineup,” Janet said. “But I wouldn’t hurt his feelings for a million dollars.”

For a honeymoon, Dan took Trudy to the island on the lake where his mother’s hotel was. The hotel was closed down, but his mother still lived there. Dan’s father was dead, and she lived there alone. She took a boat with an outboard motor across the water to get her groceries. She sometimes made a mistake and called Trudy Marlene.

The hotel wasn’t much. It was a white wooden box in a clearing by the shore. Some little boxes of cabins were stuck behind it. Dan and Trudy stayed in one of the cabins. Every cabin had a wood stove. Dan built a fire at night to take off the chill. But the blankets were damp and heavy when he and Trudy woke up in the morning.

Dan caught fish and cooked them. He and Trudy climbed the big rock behind the cabins and picked blueberries. He asked her if she knew how to make a piecrust, and she didn’t. So he showed her, rolling out the dough with a whiskey bottle.

In the morning there was a mist over the lake, just as you see in the movies or in a painting.

One afternoon, Dan stayed out longer than usual, fishing. Trudy kept busy for a while in the kitchen, rubbing the dust off things, washing some jars. It was the oldest, darkest kitchen she had ever seen, with wooden racks for the dinner plates to dry in. She went outside and climbed the rock by herself, thinking she would pick some blueberries. But it was already dark under the trees; the evergreens made it dark, and she didn’t like the idea of wild animals. She sat on the rock looking down on the roof of the hotel, the old dead leaves and broken shingles. She heard a piano being played. She scrambled down the rock and followed the music around to the front of the building. She walked along the front veranda and stopped at a window, looking into the room that used to be the lounge. The room with the blackened stone fireplace, the lumpy leather chairs, the horrible mounted fish.

Dan’s mother was there, playing the piano. A tall, straight-backed old woman, with her gray-black hair twisted into such a tiny knot. She sat and played the piano, without any lights on, in the half-dark, half-bare room.

Dan had said that his mother came from a rich family. She had taken piano lessons, dancing lessons; she had gone around the world when she was a young girl. There was a picture of her on a camel. But she wasn’t playing a classical piece, the sort of thing you’d expect her to have learned. She was playing “It’s Three O’Clock in the Morning.” When she got to the end, she started in again. Maybe it was a special favorite of hers, something she had danced
to in the old days. Or maybe she wasn’t satisfied yet that she had got it right.

Why does Trudy now remember this moment? She sees her young self looking in the window at the old woman playing the piano. The dim room, with its oversize beams and fireplace and the lonely leather chairs. The clattering, faltering, persistent piano music. Trudy remembers that so clearly and it seems she stood outside her own body, which ached then from the punishing pleasures of love. She stood outside her own happiness in a tide of sadness. And the opposite thing happened the morning Dan left. Then she stood outside her own unhappiness in a tide of what seemed unreasonably like love. But it was the same thing, really, when you got outside. What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life—what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?

She goes into the front hall and listens for any noise from upstairs.

All quiet there, all medicated.

The phone rings right beside her head.

“Are you still there?” Robin says. “You’re not gone?”

“I’m still here.”

“Can I run over and ride back with you? I didn’t do my run earlier because it was so hot.”

You threw the jug. You could have killed me. Yes.

Kelvin, waiting at the card table, under the light, looks bleached and old. There’s a pool of light whitening his brown hair. His face sags, waiting. He looks old, sunk into himself, wrapped in a thick bewilderment, nearly lost to her.

“Kelvin, do you pray?” says Trudy. She didn’t know she was going to ask him that. “I mean, it’s none of my business. But, like for anything specific?”

He’s got an answer for her, which is rather surprising. He
pulls his face up, as if he might have felt the tug he needed to bring him to the surface.

“If I was smart enough to know what to pray for,” he says, “then I wouldn’t have to.”

He smiles at her, with some oblique notion of conspiracy, offering his halfway joke. It’s not meant as comfort, particularly. Yet it radiates—what he said, the way he said it, just the fact that he’s there again, radiates, expands the way some silliness can, when you’re very tired. In this way, when she was young, and high, a person or a moment could become a lily floating on the cloudy river water, perfect and familiar.

“I don’t know what color,” says Denise, answering a question of Magda’s. “I don’t really remember any color in this house at all.”

“Of course you don’t,” says Magda sympathetically. “There was no light in the house, so there was no color. There was no attempt. So dreary, I couldn’t believe.”

As well as having the old, deep, light-denying veranda on the Log House torn down, Magda—to whom Denise’s father, Laurence, is now married—has put in skylights and painted some walls white, others yellow. She has hung up fabrics from Mexico and Morocco, and rugs from Quebec. Pine dressers and tables have replaced badly painted junk. There is a hot tub surrounded by windows and greenery, and a splendid kitchen. All this must have cost a lot of money. No doubt Laurence is rich enough now to manage it. He owns a small factory, near Ottawa, that manufactures plastics, specializing in window panels and lampshades that look like stained glass. The designs are pretty, the colors not too garish, and Magda has stuck a few of them around the Log House in inconspicuous places.

Magda is an Englishwoman, not a Hungarian as her name might suggest. She used to be a dancer, then a dancing teacher. She is a short, thick-waisted woman, still graceful, with a smooth, pale neck and a lovely, floating crown of silver-gold hair. She is wearing a plain gray dress and a shawl of muted, flowery colors that is sometimes draped over the settee in her bedroom.

“Magda is style through and through,” Denise said once, to her brother, Peter.

“What’s wrong with that?” said Peter. He is a computer engineer in California and comes home perhaps once a year. He can’t understand why Denise is still so bound up with these people.

“Nothing,” said Denise. “But you go to the Log House, and there is not even a jumble of scarves lying on an old chest. There is a
calculated
jumble. There is not a whisk or bowl hanging up in the kitchen that is not the most elegant whisk or bowl you could buy.”

Peter looked at her and didn’t say anything. Denise said, “Okay.”

Denise has driven up from Toronto, as she does once or twice every summer, to visit her father and her stepmother. Laurence and Magda spend the whole season here, and are talking of selling the house in Ottawa, of living here year-round. The three of them are sitting out on the brick patio that has replaced part of the veranda, one Sunday afternoon in late August. Magda’s ginger pots are full of late-blooming flowers—geraniums the only ones that Denise can name. They are drinking wine-and-soda—the real drinks will come out when the dinner guests arrive. So far, there have been no preposterous arguments. Driving up here, Denise determined there wouldn’t be. In the car, she played Mozart tapes to steady and encourage herself. She made resolves. So far, so good.