A Good House Read online

  Sylvia’s mother remained stoic. A born coordinator, she discussed practical matters with Margaret to reassure herself that everything was well in hand. She took the laundry home with her because she had a new clothes dryer in her basement and she wrote the letters that had to be written to tell the news that had to be told, attempted to supervise the homework at the dining-room table. And privately but firmly she scolded Paul. “I can’t abide this crying, Paul,” she said. “Not now. And trust me, there will be plenty of time for it after.”

  One evening in the middle of a week when Sylvia appeared to have a resurgence of strength, she called Daphne to come into the living room alone. When the door was shut and Daphne was comfortable on the bed, Sylvia said she wanted to tell her how much she regretted that she wouldn’t be around to help later, with her marriage and her babies. She lifted her hand when Daphne tried to speak, tried to say, Don’t say that, Mom. Don’t say that. Sylvia wanted badly to be frank, to be truthful. She wanted to say, Take your time when you think you’re ready for a husband, don’t just go by looks, make him talk, find out how he thinks. Or, Don’t let your heart outshout your head. Or, Whatever happens to you, don’t just settle. But she said what she had rehearsed.

  “It seems to me that smart women look for comfort and loyalty when they’re deciding on a husband and I think men want more or less the same thing. And it never hurts to have a bit of laughter thrown in.” She didn’t mention the long-ago break in Daphne’s jaw, or her apprehension about men whose interest might be queered by the malformed face, who might, instinctively, turn away.

  “Childbirth,” she said, “isn’t nearly as bad as some women will happily lead you to believe. A young body can be trusted.” She put her hands on her own distended stomach. “There are specialized muscles in there with a job to do and one job only.” She didn’t say anything specific or descriptive about sex, except that Daphne shouldn’t be afraid of it. “Sex is mostly just for comfort and fun,” she said. “And meant to be.”

  Listening now with her eyes wide open and her hands covering her mouth, Daphne nodded and tried to lift her hands away. “I want three babies,” she said. “I’m going to have three.”

  “Three is a very good number,” Sylvia said. “Tell me what you’ll call them.”

  “Girls will be Maggie or Jill or Paula,” Daphne said. “Boys will be David or Daniel or Michael.”

  “Those are very fine names,” Sylvia said. “I like those names a lot.”

  The next evening she called Patrick and Paul and Murray in and sat them down to tell them that they would soon have wives and children, which made them look down through their knees at their feet and shake their heads. Thinking about this talk all afternoon, she had known she would have to thread her way carefully between one son’s rage and the other’s anxious tears, and looking at them now she could see her boundaries announcing themselves in Patrick’s clenched fists, in Paul’s wet cheeks. What she wanted to say to them was, Take it slow, as slow as you can. And, Before you decide, have a good long look at the mother because a daughter usually turns out just the same or just the opposite. She wanted to say, Loud, silly girls often grow up to be loud, silly women, and sullen girls tend to stay sullen.

  Instead, she told them, “Women expect strength from men, and gentleness and absolute loyalty. And a good ear.” She said, “You will have to work hard if you expect to raise a family.” Looking just at Patrick and Paul, meaning it as a joke, she said, “You might even have to think about giving up hockey.” Then she took the deepest breath she could take. “Of course sex is fun,” she said. “Likely, you have already discovered that. But you should try to get it into your heads that with just a little extra thought, a little extra time taken, it can be something altogether different, altogether more.” She didn’t make them sit there wondering if they had to say anything back to her about any of this. She shooed them out of the room like small boys told to stay away from the creek in the spring, hoping only that she hadn’t lied to them.

  Bill had offered to set up a small bed for himself in an empty corner of the living room in case his rolling around in his sleep disturbed Sylvia or gave her discomfort. As proof of his consideration, he borrowed a foldaway cot from the McKellars down the street and wheeled it into the dining room where it stood ready, sheets and all, but Sylvia told him no, she didn’t want that, not yet. All these months they had continued to do what they could, when they could. Cooper had told them early on and pointedly to go ahead and take whatever pleasure was available to them.

  Cooper told Bill now that Sylvia was on a very high dosage, which he was more than ready to up if he became convinced she needed it. He said that death comes in different ways to different people, more ways than an average layman could imagine, and that an easy death was still possible. He said there was no reason to anticipate extraordinary pain, not with the dosage he had her on.

  Bill never did set up the cot. In the last week of July, Sylvia didn’t want to eat anything and then she began to fall into an extremely deep sleep that could last the night and through the next day and overnight and halfway through the day again. Cooper said this was the blessing of her brain’s own morphine, better than man-made.

  When she came out of these sleeps she could speak only a few necessary words, could hardly take a drink, could only breathe and listen and watch. Bill stayed home and the kids got some time off from their summer jobs and someone stayed with her in the living room every minute, often two at a time. On the last of these sleeping days and nights Bill was with her and, exhausted beyond discipline, beyond even his time overseas, he crawled in and slept beside her. He woke from a dream of rolling fingers and knew without looking.

  He took a few minutes for himself, stayed mute on his side of the bed, resisting full consciousness, making it wait. As was his sleepy habit, he reached to smooth her eyebrows, to try to smooth the lines from her forehead. Then he sat up, stood up in his pyjamas. He tidied her hair the best he could and straightened the pillow and then he made himself search beneath the quilts to find her hands, to bring them out over the quilts because she looked so strange lying there without her hands.

  He manoeuvred through the hall and up the stairs to wake the kids, sitting for a few minutes on the top step to listen to the memory of Sylvia’s voice telling him what to say to them when this day came, but by the time he reached the first warm bed he had nothing in him but silence. He couldn’t help them when they opened their eyes.

  When their first wretched grief, loud and clumsy beyond remembering, was almost spent, when the July sun, which was nothing more to him now than the blunt instrument, the mindless impulse of an emptied day, was fully risen, Bill went into the kitchen to phone Cooper and they all stayed in the living room until they heard the Cadillac pull into the driveway. Cooper brought fresh morning air in with him and turn by turn he put one warm arm around their shoulders, which quieted them and brought them back to their separate, independent selves, to the floating, airless absence that each of them had already begun to define as differently as they might have defined Sylvia’s full life, given the chance. Then he asked that they go out to the kitchen.

  Bill poured himself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table, and because he couldn’t bear the quiet now, because it was making him sick to his stomach and dizzy, he began to walk his kids step by step through their mother’s funeral. He’d done nothing about it before, had been repulsed by the thought of anticipating it.

  Paul and Daphne sat down with their father but Patrick opened the fridge door wide and slammed it shut, twice and hard. When he asked, “What the hell difference does it make what happens now?” Bill nodded yes and yes again, told him, “This is what we do.”

  After Bill finished outlining his plans for the funeral, Paul went outside to stand in the gravel driveway and Daphne went after him. The sun was over the garage now. It was promising to be a very hot day. They stood together for a few minutes and then she pulled on his arm to bring him b
ack to the cool of the kitchen.

  Cooper had called the undertaker and he must have called Margaret too because she was soon there, standing at the counter with her long back to them, opening a can of salmon, buttering a double row of bread. Bill went upstairs to get dressed and when he came back down he made the call to the grandparents.

  Murray came in the kitchen door just after the undertaker. He sat down at the table and cried on his arms like a child, which caused Daphne to move across the room to stand close behind him.

  Then Bill told the kids they might as well go and get dressed, so they went upstairs. After they had their clothes on, Daphne sat with Paul on his bed, her own tears mysteriously stopped by the racked renewal of his. Murray was slumped on the floor, leaning against the other bed with his back to Patrick, who was silent. They stayed that way until they heard Margaret come up the stairs to look through Sylvia’s closet. Soon after she went back down they heard the unmistakable sound of the hearse on the gravel, backing carefully out of the driveway.

  * * *

  A WEEK AFTER Sylvia’s funeral Margaret came through the kitchen door on a Sunday afternoon with a mostly roasted chicken. They had been given so many meals that week, scalloped potatoes and baked ham, meat loaves, baked beans, angel food cakes and butter tarts and fruit pies. A dozen empty casserole dishes, good sturdy ovenproof bowls taped with names to identify the owners, sat piled biggest to smallest on the counter. These were the dishes that moved around from one house to the next, following the need.

  Margaret told Daphne as she opened the oven door that the chicken wanted only another quick half hour at three-fifty. She said she’d do up a few potatoes to go along with it and did Daphne think peas or corn or what? As they moved around the kitchen together, Margaret was careful to keep a respectful distance between them, careful not to touch Daphne even by accident. At the funeral and at the lunch in the church basement after the funeral she had noticed that Daphne pulled back slightly when anyone threatened to lay a hand on her. And people did try. People did assume you wanted it. She could sympathize with that, she knew what that felt like.

  After they’d peeled the potatoes and got them started, she took off her apron, mixed a rye and water for herself and a rye and Coke for Bill, and went into the living room to sit with him. They talked about nothing in particular for a few minutes and then she asked if maybe Patrick and Paul and Murray should take the bed back upstairs. Bill called the boys into the living room and asked them to do it, please, and he and Margaret watched them take the bed apart and carry it back up to their parents’ bedroom, where they would reassemble it.

  Margaret didn’t mention Sylvia’s side of the closet because Bill’s mother had said that she and her friend Phyllis would attend to that. She’d said Phyllis had a sister in Toronto who was close to Sylvia’s size.

  Margaret had intended to stay just long enough to clean every inch of the emptied living room but when she was half finished Daphne led her to the table where a place had been set for her. After supper the boys returned the foldaway cot to the McKellars, and when Margaret was finished in the living room, they emptied the hall and put the furniture back where they thought it had always been.

  * * *

  IN SEPTEMBER, PATRICK and Murray left for university. The previous spring, just before Patrick truly believed that his mother was going to die, when Murray and everyone else were sending in their applications, he had sent in his own, on the sly, consulting no one. His grade-thirteen year hadn’t been his best, he knew that, but he didn’t expect to fail anything either. They had written their exams, nine subjects for everyone, in the sweating heat of the June gym, and then they’d had to wait out the summer because the marking was not done by their own teachers but by anonymous markers in Toronto. In August when he got his results, and they were just high enough, he told Murray what he’d done. They had driven out to the lake. They were sitting in Murray’s new hardtop Chev on the Casino hill with their transcripts open in their laps. Patrick said he must have been something less than human to be making plans for his future when his mother was dying.

  Murray had got straight A’s and this meant a substantial government scholarship to start him off. The next evening at his parents’ dining-room table he directed the conversation in such a way that his mother was prompted to ask how Patrick Chambers had done and where was he planning to go?

  A few days later Alex McFarlane came to Bill at the hardware store to say that he and Mrs. McFarlane would like to help Patrick out with some of the money they had put aside years ago for Murray. His little remaining hair was snow white and he had put on a suit to make his proposal. He said they had always regarded their university fund as money to be invested in the next generation, and now that Murray would be needing less of it, they didn’t really want to waste it on anything else. He said they’d been south once for a winter holiday and hadn’t found it all that appealing, the traffic, the humidity, the exorbitant cost of a hotel room. He said, “You’ve had a hard time here and I wish you would accept this as a gesture of our respect for Patrick and for you, and particularly, of course, for Sylvia.”

  Bill accepted the money on Patrick’s behalf. Since Sylvia’s death, one of the hardest questions he had been asking himself was how could he make sure the kids established themselves the way she would have wanted. That night when he sat Patrick down to tell him about Alex McFarlane’s visit, he explained to him that such money didn’t come freely. He said the onus would be on him some time later in his life to give over an equivalent amount to some other young person, someone whose potential was not matched by his circumstances. He said that was the way these things worked and that it was a private matter, not to be bandied about. He said Patrick might want to think about a small gift, a token of appreciation, likely something for Mrs. McFarlane. He said maybe Margaret could help with that.

  After Patrick got his next paycheque from the feed mill, he went up to Margaret’s apartment to tell her what his father had advised him to do and to hand her a twenty-dollar bill. The next day on her lunch hour she went over to Taylor’s Fine China and found a lovely crystal rose bowl. She told Patrick she thought it would be appropriate because Mrs. McFarlane had a large garden and people said she was especially proud of her roses. She wrapped the bowl for him at the kitchen table in muted, all-occasion paper and when he asked her if he should get dressed up to take it over she told him, “No, you’re fine as you are.”

  Even after getting the answer he wanted and borrowing Margaret’s Pontiac to drive over to McFarlane’s, Patrick wished he hadn’t asked her for help. He had no idea how this consulting Margaret business had got started. Before their mother died they hardly even knew her and now she was supposed to be the one to ask. It wasn’t that she was around too much, she only did what they wanted her to do and they appreciated it, it was that she was always ready to be around. Just sitting somewhere, ready.

  Mrs. McFarlane came to the front door. She told Patrick that Mr. McFarlane had decided that morning to make a trip into Toronto, so he wasn’t home. But because she knew what this was about, she invited him in and sat him down on the brocade sofa in her living room and brought him a bottle of Coke. She asked if maybe she should unwrap the present on her own. Patrick told her sure, why not.

  She was very careful with the paper and the ribbon, and when she had the bowl unwrapped she held it in both hands up to the light coming in from the wide hall. She was very pleased. He had never seen a woman so pleased. “I saw this up there,” she said, “and you know I almost bought it. Imagine.” She set it carefully on the table in front of her. “I bet this is Margaret’s doing,” she said. “Your father has such a friend in Margaret.”

  The first week of September Patrick and Murray loaded up the hardtop Chev to make the move into London. Bill and Daphne and Paul followed in Bill’s car, which was equally loaded. The university campus, thought to be one of the country’s most beautiful, was spread with casual grace across fifty rolling acres at the e
dge of the city and set off from the city by high stone gates. The large sandstone college buildings with their bell towers, costly replications of British institutional architecture, had been distributed with precision, set carefully on the green hills like medieval jewels.

  The boys soon found their separate residences and Bill and Daphne and Paul helped them carry their belongings up the stairs to their rooms. Both buildings were crawling with parents and boys hauling suitcases and boxes, the boys eager to be left on their own, the parents not very anxious to go. Some of the most reluctant parents had to be patiently shoved out of rooms and guided down the stairs to their cars.

  Just before he started down, Bill turned to face Patrick. “This is an opportunity I myself didn’t have,” he said. “You be sure to make the best of it.”

  * * *

  AT HOME, DAPHNE and Paul learned to cook. They could each do a good omelette and sausages and chops, although they never risked a roast and there were always potatoes, mashed or warmed-up mashed or fried, and pale green peas from a can or string beans or creamed corn. Paul, unaccountably, taught himself how to make pastry, went up to Clarke’s for cans of cherry pie filling. They discovered him more than once rolling out pastry on Sylvia’s marble board, his damp face smeared with flour.

  The pages of Sylvia’s cookbook, a large standard volume stuffed with all kinds of loose recipes in all manner of strange handwriting, were interspersed with a dozen black-and-white pictures of trim, energetic housewives. All of the housewives smiled big smiles and had short, tidy hair with crisp, crimped waves and narrow, belted waists and open-toed shoes and, flowing from their mouths, dialogue bubbles filled with handy household tips, their tried-and-true solutions for the persistent problem of small, unwanted visitors in the flour and the oatmeal, for mildew in basements, and for those noisy cupboard doors that can disturb a peaceful household.