A Good House Read online

  One of the oldest girls, the one most sure, who could suddenly and boldly talk the way Murray talked, folded her arms and suggested that if it was going to be for real, there should be a high-wire act, and immediately all the others jumped in, insisting on acrobatics and yes, Murray, yes, a trapeze.

  Paul and his friends filled the space between the girls and the older, more worldly, mocking boys. They were quiet and patient, waiting as they always waited to see which way it would go.

  Murray’s plan was to set up the circus right there, on the hard-packed open space where the trucks backed out of the town’s cement-block garages. His plan was to have auditions to see who was best at what.

  He tried to be fair-minded. Everyone did what they believed they could do best and Murray watched patiently, judged what he saw, and made notes in a little black notepad. After a few days of consideration, he divided them according to their abilities.

  They practised all through July, four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, and Sunday afternoon. Murray was firm with schedules, merciless with absences. The mothers who were inclined to get involved got involved. Sylvia Chambers sewed, swapped material with other mothers, took her shears to dresses she was sick of, to ratty towels, and grey dress pants shiny at the knees and rear end. The McGregor kids unearthed a navy blue cape with bright-red satin lining that smelled of mothballs. Clown costumes were adapted from Christmas pyjamas that fathers would never wear anyway and bathing suits were tarted up with sequins and organza frills and bits of velvet ribbon tied in bows.

  Jugglers trained hard in the privacy of their own backyards. There was a ventriloquist with a stuffed old-man dummy whose head he had severed from his sister’s happily no-longer-favourite baby doll and an animal act, not just dogs leaping high through hoops but two miraculous cats, mother and daughter, who could walk around on their hind legs for a long time and another equally miraculous tabby who could almost talk, who could almost say mine and never.

  One of Paul’s friends practised short riffs on a bugle which belonged to his older sister who marched in the high school bugle band and another boy learned to do a half-decent roll on an ancient snare drum loaned to him by his neighbour, an old, old man no one had ever imagined beating a drum.

  Murray selected the acrobats, the girls who cartwheeled every spring day across front lawns on the way home from school. He deferred to their wishes when it came time to pick the handlers, the boys who would lift and throw them up to each other’s shoulders and try to catch them, to protect them from injury when they fell.

  Charles Taylor, Charles the First, they called him, came every night, dressed up in his shirt and tie and, hanging from his neck on a braided cord, his silver safety whistle, his signal. Everyone was familiar with the sound of the whistle because Charles blew it when he thought he was lost and when he didn’t like the look of the dog that was following him and once, very loudly, when he tripped running across the train tracks and hurt his back. Charles stood off to the side and watched with devout attention as the girls practised their routines and the kids made him help sometimes, but not with saving the girls.

  A trapeze was suspended from one of the girders under the water tower. Murray bought the rope and the pipe new at the hardware, to be safe, to be sure, and then he had to ask to borrow the town’s extension ladder, and when he did Archie Stutt said he’d better climb up there himself. He refused to climb as high as some of the kids, the boys in particular, wanted, telling them as they steadied his ladder that they’d be smart to get themselves into the habit of thinking twice. The next day one of the boys discovered a length of braided steel for the high wire, in the back of one of the town trucks, and so Archie hauled his ladder out again and tied one end of the wire to another girder and the other end to a foothold on a telephone pole on the street. It was eight feet off the ground and it sloped, slightly, but Archie said that was all right, high wires could slope.

  Below these main aerial attractions Murray called for mattresses which were volunteered by their owners and pulled from beds and carried back and forth daily through the streets. Patrick had stepped forward to take charge of the mattresses and he made sure they were returned every night after practice to the right beds and then set them up again the next time, organizing his friends who were the oldest, sturdiest boys because it took at least two of them to keep each mattress from dragging itself to shreds on the sidewalks.

  During practices, while the girls perfected their acts, each time pushing themselves and each other further, harder, Patrick and the other boys stood at a slight distance with their arms folded, trying to keep their eyes on the mattresses in case some moron shoved one of them out of position by mistake.

  Daphne was the youngest of the girls chosen for the trapeze and the high-wire act. She was chosen because she was slight and fearless and because her natural expression was an open smile. Showmanship, Murray called it. He said it was more important than anything else and he told the older girls to watch Daphne smile, to do it that way. Daphne had known she would be picked even before Murray gave her the nod because at twelve she already knew quite a bit about showmanship and its rewards. Like many happy girls, she had long since learned that a laugh or a smile paid off.

  Paul was a clown, he asked to be, and he volunteered to stand on the stump beside the telephone pole on the street to take the money when everyone lined up to get in to see the show.

  One of the scout tents was hauled from the scoutmaster’s garage and set up as a change room and Archie gave them a long length of his own greasy rope which they strung to cordon off the performance area. Strings of Christmas lights, enough to cover a dozen trees, were draped from girder to girder to telephone pole to make a canopy.

  The girls who couldn’t cartwheel created elaborate signs with circus scenes and information, the date, the time, and the price of admission, or they organized a stand for Freshie, the ice-cold coloured water that people would buy at five cents a glass, distribution of profit to be decided later. Murray’s father, who owned the feed mill, was a very busy man and only vaguely aware that the kids were up to something behind the Town Hall but at his wife’s insistence he threw in the money for hot dogs and buns and onions. The hot dogs were to be cooked on the Rotary grills by two other fathers and sold at a substantial mark-up to pay for the things Murray had needed to buy with his own money: a roll of yellow admittance tickets, a box of bandages, extension cords for the Christmas lights, some twine, a few cans of cheap tuna for the cats, and soup bones for the dogs.

  * * *

  THEY BEGAN THEIR performance at seven-thirty sharp the Thursday night before the weekend of the Town Frolic, which was always held down at the fairgrounds. Everyone but the performers and the babies and the two fathers who were cooking onions and hot dogs was supposed to pay Paul twenty-five cents to walk past the telephone pole. The bread man, whose daughter was one of the sign painters, had loaned him a money belt with chrome cylinders, which he’d loaded up with the quarters and dimes and nickels Murray had solemnly counted out to start him off, a float, Murray called it. Just before people began to arrive, after he was into his clown suit with his face painted on, Paul took a few minutes behind the tent to practise sliding the coins into the cylinders and pushing the thumb-sized levers to release them down into his palm. Murray had admonished him that it had to be right, it had to balance. He said they should know how many people attended, to plan for next year.

  Nearly everyone showed up: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, bachelors and old maids, babies in buggies, teachers, the ministers, the priest, the old priest. A few summer cadets from the army camp out at the lake came, which sent the older girls into spasms of dreamy hope, for a walk home in the dark after the circus was over, for an arm over a shoulder, or the very serious promise of letters after the boy had left the army camp to go back to his real life in Peterborough or Toronto or Galt.

  Several kids from the reservation had got themselves into town and they stood ar
ound quietly, mixed in with the crowd separately or in pairs. People slipped them quarters to get in or to treat themselves to Freshie and hot dogs.

  Standing on the stump waiting for Murray’s signal, Paul took the expected abuse from the people waiting in the line-up. Several of the women said loudly how much they liked his clown suit and when Margaret Kemp, who had worked at the hardware store with Bill Chambers for years, said, “That’s Sylvia,” another woman said, not exactly kindly, “Yes, isn’t it just.” The bank manager, who knew full well who Paul was, asked him, “How do we know you’re not some stranger? How do we know you won’t pocket our money and vamoose?” Charles Taylor stood close beside Paul on the stump like a guard.

  When he got the signal from Murray, Paul didn’t hesitate to make everyone wait so he could add and subtract properly. One guy, some rich farmer he didn’t even know, gave him a five-dollar bill, told him to keep the change.

  They had what was called a full house. Murray wore the satin-lined wool cape and an old black homburg which had belonged to his grandfather, a man he had never met. He draped his father’s white, monogrammed, silk scarf around his neck and to finish it off, to bring attention to his hands, he wore a pair of his mother’s white cotton wrist gloves, which he had found beside the Bible in the drawer in the front-hall table and tried on without her permission, a trick that was both out of character and effective because once he’d tried them on the gloves were forever useless to Mrs. McFarlane.

  He welcomed the crowd using elaborate circus language. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Feast your eyes.…” he said. “Ask yourselves if you have ever seen.…” He praised each act as he introduced it, indicated with a broad sweep of the cape where the crowd’s attention should direct itself. He gestured dramatically with the baton that had been loaned to him by a retired drum majorette who was new in town and who worked in the Bank of Commerce. She had pushed it through her teller’s window after she’d changed his bills to coins, asking him only to promise her he would be careful with it.

  They were good. Nearly all of them were very good. People applauded generously, laughed in appreciation for the obvious effort behind the performances. Archie’s ropes and cables held fast and the girls’ tarted-up costumes looked almost professional under the Christmas lights. The dogs and the cats seemed oblivious to the crowd, did what they knew they had to do to earn their treats out behind the tent. The smell of onions frying in butter prompted people who were not even slightly hungry to fork out an exorbitant fifty cents for a hot dog and someone put a baby in Paul’s arms for a picture. The baby stared up into his white clown face and oversized red lips calmly, as if these were just one more thing to learn.

  When Daphne fell near the end of her thoroughly practised trapeze routine, the mattresses, although laid down just as Patrick had ordered them laid down, were not enough. People who’d had experience in such things immediately agreed that the loud cracking break in Daphne’s right forearm would mend, kids broke their arms regularly, but the break in her jaw looked like it might turn out to be a dog’s breakfast.

  Sylvia Chambers had just finished telling Margaret Kemp about her new sewing machine. Watching her daughter drop and then seeing her hand go to her face soon after she’d landed, she said aloud, “Oh, Daphne. Oh, honey.” And looking quickly up at the trapeze, which was still swinging in the twisted air, still moving with the last of Daphne’s tricks, she thought, Why does it have to be us?

  Bill Chambers was standing over near the Rotary grills, talking to some of the other men. He had watched the first part of Daphne’s performance but then someone said his name and he’d looked away. He didn’t see her fall. After the guy beside him pulled roughly on his arm to turn him around again he thought only to move forward, to push his way forward, and kneel to hold his daughter gently under the shoulders. Holding her he told her to go ahead and yell if she had to. “Let it out,” he whispered. “There’s no need to be brave.” The skin at her wrist had been pierced by a small nub of bloody bone and he recognized the break for what it was, knew that it could be set and that it would in time heal. But her mouth and inside her mouth. The skin covering her jaw was firm, unbroken, but the bones under it had been knocked out of alignment. The bones were completely askew. He had to steel himself, counsel himself not to look away.

  He was leaning over, watching her face, waiting, as if the next move was up to her, and Daphne did make a sound but when it came into the air it was not the sound she had sent from her throat. She could see as soon as she heard it that she had terrified her father. He hadn’t been ready at all.

  Sylvia was on her now too, cradling her bare legs which were shaking and blanched white, as if the fall through the air had bleached the deep summer tan. Sylvia told her, “Hold on, sweetheart, that’s a girl.” She told her that Doctor Cooper had left for his office already, that they were going to carry her right on the mattress and take her over to Cooper’s in the back of somebody’s truck, which was parked just in front of the Town Hall and coming around for her now.

  Daphne looked away from her parents to the other worried faces hanging over her and then she looked up past the faces at the Christmas stars. She swallowed a mouthful of blood, and recognizing the warm, sour taste and knowing that you weren’t supposed to swallow your own blood she pushed herself up with her good arm and tried to spit, leaning over as far as she could to keep the mattress clean. Then the silence she hadn’t heard was broken by loud crying, girls crying, her friends, and turning again to spit, she said, “I’ve hurt myself.”

  Patrick pushed his parents aside and took one corner of the mattress firmly in both hands, watching the men on the other corners, lifting when he was told to lift. He told Daphne it was all right, meaning we’re all here. When she looked up directly at him, he said the worst of all the words he knew to comfort her. “Bugger it,” he said, just loud enough for her to understand before she blacked out.

  He was glad she’d blacked out. He knew it was better from playing hockey. What he didn’t know was why he’d ever let himself believe that one layer of mattresses would do any good. He was supposed to be learning stuff, he was supposed to be understanding things like the cross section of the earth in his geography textbook that showed miles and miles of strata down there, most of it rock. He tried to remember if Murray had told him one layer of mattresses or if he had decided one layer himself.

  Paul, whose feelings were usually written on his face in plain English for anyone to read, stood in his clown costume at terrified attention directly under the water tower. He was on his own and in a state but because Sylvia had meticulously reshaped his tight little mouth into a fat red smile his crying made no difference, no one came to him. He had been close enough to hear the bones break when his sister landed and he had seen her body go limp in their father’s arms, but he didn’t know how bad it was, what it meant, and no one thought to walk over to reassure him, to tell him that his sister had blacked out because of the pain, that it was a natural reaction and likely a blessing. He gulped at the air with his smile, working hard to get the extra air he needed.

  After the mattress was lifted, people stepped back so Bill and Sylvia could see Daphne safely out to the truck. Bill pulled Sylvia tight to his side, which made their progress more awkward than it would have been normally, if they’d walked separately. “She’ll be all right,” he told her. “There isn’t much that can’t be fixed now.” He tried to kiss the top of her head. “We’ll get this dealt with.”

  The men lifted Daphne up into the truck bed, and when the last of them jumped down to close and bolt the tailgate, Sylvia pulled her skirt up to her hips and crawled in after her. “She’s not going alone,” she said, turning to offer Bill a hand. She knelt and Bill crouched and finally the truck began to move. Daphne was still unconscious. “Did you hear what she said?” Sylvia asked. “She said, ‘I’ve hurt myself.’” Now that they were moving she was allowing herself the release of tears. “Something this bad happens and it’s sti
ll, I’ve hurt myself, it’s still, This must be my fault.”

  “It’s just an expression,” Bill said, although he knew it was more than an expression. Even in the midst of a loud, bloody battle, when they should have screamed, Jesus, some bastard tore my leg off, some bastard has just blinded me, some grey-haired captain of industry sent me all this way only to bleed to death, he had heard grown, dying men say only, I’m hurt, I am hurt here.

  “She was doing really well,” Sylvia said. “She worked so hard.”

  “We’ll get her through this,” Bill said.

  Murray had followed the mattress out to the truck too, running along beside the carriers. A few people in the crowd, the old priest foremost among them, were taking the opportunity to mutter quietly that such a thing was bound to happen. As if they’d known there would be an accident, as if they’d been waiting for it. But most people took a different tack. Murray was told repeatedly by men and by some of the women too, “It wasn’t your fault, Murray. Accidents will happen.” And, “Don’t berate yourself, son.”

  He didn’t hear any of it. He was talking faster than he’d ever talked, eager to articulate and receive all of the blame, ready for someone to yank him around by the shoulders and yell, It’s your fault, Murray, you and your big-time ideas. Sometimes ideas are better left alone. You are old enough, you should know that.

  All he wanted from this night and from this whole summer was blame and another chance, to choose an older, stronger girl or to lower the trapeze down closer to the ground or to stand directly under Daphne with his arms braced as she slid and turned and dropped and caught herself and then didn’t.

  * * *

  DAPHNE WENT BACK to school that September almost immediately after she came home from the hospital in London. Sylvia had decided that even with the pain, which was sometimes severe, sometimes just plain pain, even though the doctors seemed to like the word discomfort, Daphne would be much better off involved again in some kind of normal life with her friends. In Sylvia’s experience, distraction was more often than not a good thing.