Various Miracles (19 page)

The previous tenant had left behind a single item, which was a paperback copy of Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park
, a book that, oddly enough, she had always intended to read. She couldn’t help feeling there had been something deliberate—and something imperative, too—about this abandoned book, as though it had been specifically intended for her and that she was being enjoined to take it seriously. But how much better it would be to be going
out;
how much easier it would be to say, should anyone ask, that on Saturday evening she would be attending an opening of an interesting new exhibition.

On Tuesday she was again taken by surprise, for in her mailbox there was another invitation, this time for a cocktail party given by a distant friend of a friend, someone she’d never met but whose name she dimly remembered having heard. It was a disappointment that the party was being held on the same night as the gallery opening and that, furthermore, it was at the same hour. For a minute she entertained the possibility of attending both functions, galloping breathlessly from one to the other. But no, it was not feasible; the two parties were at
opposite ends of the city. It was a great pity, she felt, since invitations are few and far between when one moves to a new address. She would have to make a choice.

Of course she would choose the cocktail party. The gallery opening, now that she stopped to think about it, was no more than a commercial venture, an enticement to buyers and patrons. It would be fraudulent of her to attend when she’d no intention of buying a picture, and besides, she was drawn to cocktail parties. She was attracted, in fact, to parties of all kinds, adding them as an opportunity to possess, for a few hours at least, a life that was denser, more concentrated and more vigorous than the usual spun-out wastes of time that had to be scratched endlessly for substance. She could still wear her certain velvet skirt, but with a pretty red satin blouse she’d recently acquired.

On Wednesday, strangely, she received a third invitation—and it, too, was for Saturday evening. This time the invitation was handwritten, a rather charming note which she read through quickly three times. She was being invited to a small buffet supper. There would be only a dozen or so guests, it was explained. The author of a new biography would be there, and so would the subject of the biography who was, by chance, also a biographer. A particular balding computer scientist would be in attendance along with his wife, who was celebrated for her anti-nuclear stance and for her involvement in Navajo rugs. There would be a professor of history and also a professor of histology, as well as a person renowned for his love of Black Forest cakes and cheese pastries. There would be a famous character actor whose face was familiar, if not his name, and also the hairdresser who’d invented the Gidget cut and raised razor cuts to their present
haute
status.

Of course she could not say no. How much more congenial
to go to a supper party than to peer at violent works of art and mutter, “Interesting, interesting,” and how much more rewarding than standing about with a drink and a salty canapé and trying to make conversation with a room full of strangers. Her green silk dress would be suitable, if not precisely perfect, and she could gamble safely enough on the fact that no one would have seen it before.

Thursday’s mail brought still another invitation, also unfortunately for Saturday evening. She smiled, remembering how her mother used to say, “It never rains but it pours.” The invitation, which was for a formal dinner party, was printed on fine paper, and there was a handwritten note at the bottom. “We do hope you can make it,” the note said. “Of course we know you by reputation and we’ve been looking forward to meeting you for years.”

It had been some time since she’d attended a formal dinner party, and she was flattered to be sent an invitation with a handwritten note at the bottom. It pleased her to imagine a large, vaulted dining room and parade of courses elegantly served, each with a different wine. The gleam of light through cut glass would sparkle on polished linen and on the faces of the luminaries gathered around the table. Her green silk, with perhaps the double strand of pearls, would be festive enough, but at the same time subdued and formal.

She wasn’t entirely surprised to look into her mailbox on Friday and see that she’d been sent yet another invitation. The paper was a heavy, creamy stock and came enclosed in a thick double envelope. There was to be a reception—
a gala
it was called—at the top of a large downtown hotel on Saturday evening. The guest of honor, she read, was to be herself.

She felt a lurch of happiness. Such an honor! But a moment later her euphoria gave way to panic, and when she
sat down to collect herself, she discovered she was trembling not with excitement but with fear.

On Saturday she surveyed the five invitations which were arranged in a circle on her coffee table. These missives, so richly welcoming, persuading and honoring, had pleased her at first, then puzzled her. And now she felt for the first time directly threatened. Something or someone was conspiring to consume a portion of her life, of herself, in fact—entering her apartment and taking possession of her Saturday evening just as a thief might enter and carry off her stereo equipment or her lovely double rope of pearls or a deep slice of her dorsal flesh.

She decided to stay home instead with a cup of coffee and her adventitiously acquired copy of
Mansfield Par
. Already it was dark, and she switched on the small reading lamp by her chair. The shade of the lamp was made of a pale, ivory-yellow material, and the light that shone through it had the warm quality of very old gold.

It happened that people passing her window on their way to various parties and public gatherings that night were moved to see her, a woman sitting calmly in an arc of lamplight, turning over—one by one—the soft pages of a thick book. Clearly she was lost in what she was reading, for she never once glanced up. Her look of solitary containment and the oblique angle with which the light struck the left side of her face made her seem piercingly lovely. One of her hands, curved like a comma, lay on her lap; the other, slowly, thoughtfully, turned over the pages.

Those who passed by and saw her were seized by a twist of pain, which was really a kind of nostalgia for their childhood and for a simplified time when they, too, had been bonded to the books they read and to certain golden rooms which they
remembered as being complete and as perfect as stage settings. They felt resentment, too, at the cold rain and the buffeting wind and the price of taxis and the hostility of their hosts. They felt embarrassed by their own small, proffered utterances and by the expanded social rubric they had come to inhabit.

As they moved to and fro in large, brightly-lit rooms, so high up in glittering towers that they felt they were clinging to the sides of cliffs, their feet began to ache and exhaustion overcame them. Soon it was past midnight, no longer the same day, but the next and the next. New widths of time clamored to be filled, though something it seemed, some image of possibility, begged to be remembered.

Outside, the wind blew and blew. The sky slipped sideways, turning first yellow, then a mournful, treasonous purple, as though time itself was drowning in a waterfall of shame.

GWENETH MCGOWAN
, the Disraeli scholar, was awarded the Saul Appeldorf Medal at a gala reception. She carried it home and put it in a dresser drawer under a pile of underwear. Her morale was high. Recognition in the academic world seemed assured, her rent was paid up for six months and, in addition, she had a number of good friends, some deserving of her friendship, and some not.

“Dear Gweneth,” came a letter from Calgary, Alberta where one of the deserving friends lived. “So! Now you’re famous! Well, well. Why not treat yourself to a visit—come and see me.”

Within a week Gweneth was on a plane. Northie McCord, her friend and former roommate at school, met her at the airport with a bouquet of daisies. “Ah, daisies,” Gweneth said without amazement. Memory was the first bag they reached into on their infrequent meetings, and Northie’s offering of daisies was meant to dislodge and recover images
of her wedding day when bride and bridesmaids, Gweneth included, had worn crowns of daisies on their heads. They also had worn peace buttons pinned to their smooth silk bodices.

“Just who the hell did we think we were?” Northie asked Gweneth later that day when the two of them were settled on canvas chairs in Northie’s untidy backyard. “Who exactly did we think we were performing for?”

She passed Gweneth what was left of a joint. “I don’t know about you, but I think I was trying to say I hadn’t capitulated just because I was marrying a chemical engineer. What I should have said was that I was damn well ready to capitulate.”

“We were tired,” said Gweneth, who had no recollection of being tired, but wasn’t ready yet to talk about Northie’s husband, who had been mauled to death by a grizzly in a provincial park the year before. (According to a news report in an eastern paper, the attack had been “provoked” by the ham sandwich he carried in the pocket of his jacket; such an innocent act, Gweneth had thought at the time, to carry a ham sandwich.)

“A remarkable sky”, she said to Northie, and the two of them fell into a loop of silence that only very old friends can enter easily.

There had been a period of several years when they’d been out of touch. In those years Gweneth was working on a Ph.D. and, for the most part, was without money. Being without money made her wayward, and waywardness permitted her a series of small abdications: letters, phone calls, reunions—they all went by the board. Sometimes, too, she lacked courage. “I don’t have anything to show!” she confessed to an early lover, not sure whether she meant silverware or children or that hard lacquer she thought of as happiness. Later, she came to see happiness as something chancy and unreliable,
a flash of light beating at the edge of a human eye or a thin piece of glass to be carried secretly inside her head.

Northie McCord’s fifteen-year-old daughter, also named Gweneth but called Gwen for short, was excited by Gweneth’s visit and insisted on making supper for the three of them. On a card table on the back porch she set out cold sliced beef, potato salad from a carton and glasses of iced tea.

Along with the cold beef there was a ceramic pot of fiery mustard. “Superb,” Gweneth pronounced as her mouth filled with splendid heat. “Whenever did you get such wonderful stuff?”

Northie and her daughter exchanged sly smiles. “It’s our own,” Northie said. “Didn’t you notice those mustard plants in the yard?”

Gweneth helped herself to more beef and mustard. “God forgive me, I thought it was weeds.” She felt for a moment that rare sensation of stepping outside her body and entering a narrative that belonged not to any one of them, but that was shared equally.

After supper, Gwen washed the dishes and Northie led Gweneth over to the cedar fence where there was a double row of mustard plants. There are two types, Northie explained, black and white, and the best mustard in the world is made by combining the two.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself last winter,” Northie said, “but I remembered how you read right through Carthusian-to-Crockroft when you were seventeen. What was it?—volume four of the encyclopedia?”

“Volume five. If I remember, I was troubled by my virginity and looked up
coitus
one day, and then just buried myself in all those lovely C’s. That’s how I discovered John Clare and that led me to the nineteenth century and that led to Disraeli.”

“I settled down with volume fifteen,” Northie said, “maybe because Gwen was fifteen. Maximinus-to-Naples, that’s what volume fifteen is called. Maximinus, in case you’re wondering, was one of the Roman emperors. About February I got to
mustard
. According to the encyclopedia, mustard grows plentifully in Montana, and so I thought, well, why not in Alberta? I had a devil of a time getting the right seedlings. You can cook the greens, too, if you rinse them twice, but I thought I’d better not inflict that on you.”

She bent down to pick a leaf for Gweneth, and when she stood up her eyes were filled with tears. “It’s a diversion,” she said. “It’s something to show people when they drop in.”

“You are,” Gweneth said loudly, hugging her, “the most successful mustard farmer I’ve ever met.”

The girl, Gwen, flushed from the heat of the kitchen, carried two cups of coffee into the yard. “For McCord and McGowan,” she said, and dropped a mock curtsy.

“We sound like sweater manufacturers.”

“Or quality chocolates.”

The two women moved the lawn chairs into a last remaining patch of sun and sat talking about the past, about what they had been like as girls of sixteen and seventeen. They’d done this before, but it seemed to Gweneth that they’d never done it so thoroughly—it was as though they were obliged, for the sake of the future, to rescue every moment. She remembered what one of her lovers had said: “What is the point of nostalgia if not to wring memory dry.”