A Good House Read online

  Twice Crystal called down for two pots of tea and Murray found her sitting in a negligee talking to Mr. Crystal, who was always, at least any time Murray saw him, dressed in his classy white suit.

  One night she opened the door wrapped in a peach see-through nightie thing with a thick ridge of fluffy feathers at the cuffs, the kind of thing Doris Day might wear to seduce Gordon MacRae. She sat down on the bed to watch Murray put the tray down and when he turned to look at her, not expecting a tip or anything, just looking, she patted the bed with her stubby fingers. He could see her jewellery on the bedside table, a watch surrounded with a heavy circle of diamonds and several large rings that looked cheap but likely weren’t. When she asked, clearly making it a question, “Take a load off?” he could feel quarts of blood rushing up through his neck to fill his face. Then she said, “I guess not,” and smiled a coy, almost kind smile. He saw when she smiled that she might be older than she looked.

  They checked out a few days after her offer, moving on to Windsor or Toronto or some other city on their circuit. Mr. Crystal paid the bill with cash and handed Murray a crisp ten for all his trouble.

  When they returned for another week at the end of the summer, and Crystal patted the bed again, Murray set the tray down on the small table by the window, locked all the doors, and climbed in beside her fully dressed, leaving the front desk unprotected and soon entirely forgotten. Unbuttoning his shirt, Crystal told him this one was on the house, because he had been such a sweetheart, such a darling. When he was naked, and shivering, she laughed a little and called him very fine, a fine specimen indeed. If she guessed it was his first real time, she didn’t let that spoil things. Halfway through, he decided that she most certainly was older than she looked and that this was not a bad thing but a good thing. She didn’t always wait for him to think of things to do and when she was finished with him he was almost laughing too, because now he knew, oh yeah, now he had the inside information.

  * * *

  IN JULY, DAPHNE got a job cooking at the drive-in restaurant out near the golf course and soon she couldn’t eat much of anything, couldn’t stand the smell of meat especially. At home Margaret fixed her cold plates, devilled eggs and cottage cheese and jellied fruit salads and marshmallows rolled in toasted coconut. Already feeling puffed up and clumsy with her pregnancy, she made the same plate for herself and by the end of the summer she said she felt much better.

  Daphne had been briefly embarrassed about Margaret’s condition, mainly because at forty-two her eggs would probably be stale or at least no longer in their prime, which was exactly the reason not many women that old had babies. Not many women that old even got married. But she didn’t say anything because it wasn’t really her business and anyway what could she say? Have a nice baby?

  After a month of Margaret’s cold plates, she dropped down to just over a hundred pounds and stayed there so the next time she drove over the Bluewater Bridge to Port Huron on a shopping trip with her friend Catharine she bought a black two-piece bathing suit, black to show off her tan, two-piece to show off her small midriff.

  Climbing up after her onto the raft that was always anchored in front of Doc Cooper’s cottage, Roger Cooper told Daphne that he really liked the bathing suit but missed her old breasts. When she stretched out to sunbathe and didn’t laugh or even smile he said of course it didn’t matter, he understood, he understood completely.

  Daphne had started to go out with Roger, who was a grandson to Doctor Cooper, in October of grade eleven. Roger was someone to want, someone to be pleased about getting. She had no idea why he’d asked her out, but if she’d had to guess she would have guessed that Doc Cooper, who had been at their house so often that spring, must have mentioned her name somehow.

  Roger wasn’t tall but he was on the hockey team and the basketball team anyway because he was muscular and fast and accurate under pressure. He was handsome in a Montgomery Clift kind of way, dark, slick, very blue eyes. And he had nice square shoulders. If anyone had been asked to name just five guys in grade thirteen, Roger would have got named.

  Daphne was not one of the grade-eleven girls who would have got named. But now she knew about some of the things she thought her mother likely couldn’t make herself say that night in the living room. She assumed that Patrick and Paul and Murray would be the same as Roger, anxious with their hands, eager with their tongues, quiet when they wanted something. Why wouldn’t they be?

  She had not needed Murray’s help with grade eleven. He’d started her off with some useful habits when she was in grade nine, how to set logical priorities, when to bluff it through, when to dig deeper, when to quit. Occasionally, if he was home for the weekend, he still sat down with her at the dining-room table after Sunday lunch, leafing through her notebooks the way a teacher would. She told him twice that she didn’t appreciate this and when she finally told him please don’t do it any more, that she was getting first-class honours on her own, thank you, he quickly lifted his hands up and away from her work and pushed back his chair. He said he knew she didn’t need him, he was just curious.

  In March, she did go into London with Murray’s parents for dinner at the Iroquois. The McFarlanes picked her up at home in their Buick, Mr. McFarlane knocking gently on the kitchen door, Mrs. McFarlane sitting patiently in the driveway. She had agreed to go partly because she had always thought they must be lonely, just the three of them, and partly because Margaret said what reason did she have to refuse? She wore the deep green wool dress that Margaret had given her for Christmas and she had to wear her duffel jacket over it because she had no good coat but Margaret said it wouldn’t matter, there would be a coat check any place the McFarlanes ate and she would leave her jacket there, before she went into the restaurant.

  Murray’s parents seemed really pleased to have her along. Mrs. McFarlane talked a bit formally but quite easily, pausing to include her husband, explaining things to him as necessary, calling him dear. Daphne got the impression that they always talked like that, Mrs. McFarlane leading, directing the conversation toward some topics, away from others.

  They met Murray in the lobby at the Iroquois Hotel and Patrick was there too, both of them in a shirt and tie and sports coat. After they checked their coats, walking into the restaurant beside Daphne, Mrs. McFarlane looked her up and down and then quietly told her that the dress suited her perfectly, because of her skin, which was like alabaster, and because she was so tiny. When Daphne told her it had been Margaret’s Christmas gift, Mrs. McFarlane nodded deeply as if she wasn’t the least surprised. She said that Margaret’s taste had always been pretty trustworthy.

  Then, almost at their table, she turned to look directly at Daphne’s face and said how pleased they must be that her jaw had healed so remarkably well after that awful fall when she was a child. Daphne had to concentrate to keep walking. She knew what her jaw looked like. No one ever said anything to her about her jaw. It was a rule, a way to give her a chance to forget about it. But Mrs. McFarlane apparently made her own rules about what could get mentioned. Only when she turned to her husband to say how very unappetizing the lobsters looked in their tank did Daphne realize that she wasn’t expected to say anything back, that no answer was required. Mrs. McFarlane had just wanted to say it.

  They were not offered drinks but Murray’s father consulted each of them and ordered some of the most expensive things on the menu: smoked salmon from the coast to start, T-bone steak and fries for the boys, Chicken Kiev for Daphne, Chateaubriand for himself and Mrs. McFarlane. The conversation started out a bit stilted but Mrs. McFarlane ploughed on through, including everyone on every topic at least briefly.

  After dinner Mr. and Mrs. McFarlane went into the bar on their own for a drink, and when Patrick left to go to the washroom, Murray said to Daphne out of the blue that he’d decided he liked university so much because it was substance, it was something you could get your hands on. He nodded toward the bar and said it had always been this way with his parents, all surface,
no substance. Daphne was fiddling with the pecan pie that Mr. McFarlane had recommended and insisted on ordering for her, telling the waiter it might put some meat on her bones. Looking up from the pie she told Murray that maybe substance was overrated anyway. Who could say?

  In June she had a huge fight with Roger about his pushing her, even pleading with her sometimes, which made her cringe, so she’d had to ask Murray to come home to be her date for the spring formal. Margaret had already taken her over to Port Huron where they’d found a pale green organza dress with tiny, almost invisible sprigs of flowers, which Margaret said was the finest dress she had ever seen, and they’d bought a stiff, pale green fifty-yard crinoline to go with it and a pair of elegant satin spike heels, dyed to match. She couldn’t see any reason to miss the formal and she certainly wasn’t going to turn up with a brother.

  Murray was a gallant escort. He made a game of being a gallant escort. He brought her a wrist corsage of white sweetheart roses and stood tall while Margaret pinned a carnation to his lapel. After the dance he kissed Daphne’s hand at the door as if he was going to turn and leave and then he came in with her to have a grilled cheese sandwich and to help her tell Margaret about the dance, although he had taken no notice of what girl was with what guy, and of course he had nothing of interest to say about any of the dresses.

  Roger was back on the doorstep a week after the formal, his assumption being that if his replacement had to be good old Murray, he and Daphne were not really what you’d call history.

  Roger was getting ready to go to Guelph to study veterinary medicine. His grandfather had carefully explained the difference in income between veterinary and ordinary practice, he had even estimated the difference in the two lifetime incomes to show him what his decision was really costing, but Roger ignored the numbers. He told Daphne they had all watched his grandfather go through years of deaths and sickness, always getting up in the middle of the night to drive over to see someone he couldn’t save anyway. He said he didn’t think he had what it took to live a normal life doing what doctors had to do, that his mother had told him when he was a kid that it was a lot worse than people imagined, that his grandparents knew things, miserable, ugly things, and of course they had to pretend they didn’t know anything at all when they met people on the street. He said he couldn’t see caring much if a cow died, although he understood full well the economic importance of keeping cows alive and kicking.

  Saying all this, using the words couldn’t and save and normal and miserable and ugly and pretend, Roger had not stopped to think that he might be fouling Daphne’s memory of his lame, soft-spoken grandfather leaning over her mother’s bedside, and listening to him, she decided that his instincts were correct. He was wise to decide to stay away from people.

  Daphne had realized by the end of June just how badly Roger wanted to leave, to get out of town, and through the summer she began to understand exactly how far away he was going, that it wasn’t just to Guelph. He had never once said a word about her jaw, about the off-centre look of her face, so she didn’t really believe that would be it but she could see her own absence in his future clear as day.

  He had been telling her that he loved her and she believed he did in the sense that she was fine for now but she knew he said it only because he thought it was required. It was the thing guys said all the time. He could have put it lots of other ways but he would have been saying the same thing. Some nights out at the lake, lying on a blanket on the soft sand under the stars, listening to the lapping water, she would watch him fall alone into what he described as normal human passion. He insisted that she really loved him and then begged her, ordered her, to prove it. Sometimes he squeezed her arms so hard they were bruised when she woke up the next morning.

  None of it was doing him much good. She had been holding the line and she was going to keep holding it. She wouldn’t let him take himself out of his khaki pants, would only touch him on the outside, her hand kissed and then directed by his own.

  All through the summer they drove out to the lake to the Casino dance every Saturday night, sometimes double-dating with Paul and Andrea or some other couple, sometimes alone. Everybody went to the Casino. To amuse themselves, Daphne and Andrea pretended to have a crush on the lead singer, a young guy with a dreamy voice and a nondescript wife, and they wasted a lot of time trying to catch his eye, which annoyed Roger. Daphne danced with Murray and once in a while with Patrick and occasionally with some of the older guys from town who worked at the mill or the factory or the foundry, who she just sort of knew from working at the drive-in restaurant, who ribbed her and told her she was getting to be too hot to handle. She danced with her father if he and Margaret were there because Margaret usually spent most of the night standing out on the balcony talking to some of the other women and cooling off, pulling at her maternity top until the breeze caught it and sent it billowing out around her.

  Roger told Daphne he didn’t care who she danced with. He wandered around talking to people or went out to the parking lot or down to the shore for a beer with some of the guys, and on one of the many nights he came back to her at the end of the dance a little drunk, he called her the thing he believed to be the worst possible thing a girl could be. Lying on the soft beach sand, staring up at the stars and thinking about the words cock and tease and about the men she had just danced with, Daphne told him she thought his brand of passion was just another word for lack of control.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.” And then, trying as he always did for another way in, he finally hung himself with, “What if this is our only chance?”

  Daphne was content to make Roger pay in advance. She didn’t want, had no desire to create a heartsick parting at the end of the summer. She hated weak, blubbering movie-star tears and the idea of allowing him to see her shameful loneliness was as nauseating as the smell of the pukey meat she sometimes had to pitch into the garbage behind the drive-in.

  When it was time, maybe after a few fall dates when he was home from Guelph for the weekend, if that’s what he thought he wanted, she would let him leave without any fuss at all. He wasn’t going to be hurting her. Hurting her, and then after he was gone, thinking about her that way, hurt.

  * * *

  PAUL WAS THE first one to be told outright that Margaret was pregnant. He listened to her throw up one Thursday morning in early June and, tensed up but afraid to even think about her being sick, he asked if maybe she shouldn’t go see Doc Cooper. She was sitting in a kitchen chair, clutching a cup of tea, holding a cold cloth to her forehead, groaning. She looked at him and tried to smile to ease his mind and then she laughed and said, “Not for about seven more months.”

  He caught on fast, although it was the last thing he was expecting. “Holy shit,” he said.

  She gave this right back to him, “Holy shit,” and laughed again.

  When he said he wouldn’t let on, she told him, “Go ahead. Let on. Your father isn’t sure just how to do it and it’s likely time. It will be time soon.”

  Paul had been taken on at McFarlane’s mill too, a few hours a week, not driving but loading sacks of feed on the trucks for delivery and hanging around the office wasting the bookkeeper’s time with jokes. One day the woman stopped Margaret on the street to tell her that she thought Paul was just wonderful, he was so funny, that he was becoming more and more like Sylvia in that way. But Paul told Margaret the bookkeeper thought everything was wonderful, she was one of those.

  He had struggled in grade ten. Margaret had not been able to help him with his French or his Latin but under her eye his geometry marks had improved significantly and after Andrea Sparling materialized it looked as if he might pass.

  In January, only five months after his mother’s death, he had taken Andrea home from the New Year’s Eve dance at the arena. He had always thought he wanted a tall girl, that he would look stupid with anything else, but Andrea Sparling wasn’t even five feet high. At first when they were dancing they tried to talk but she soon g
ot tired of leaning back to look up at him and finally she just rested her face on his chest. Holding her, he thought, She has such a small back, how could anyone have such a small back.

  The New Year’s dance was the big one. You could hardly move around the floor. People had house parties first, then they came over to the arena in laughing carloads. At eleven-thirty the band stopped and everyone got their coats and poured out into the cold night to walk uptown to the main intersection, where Front Street met George, to dance in circles around the lit-up Christmas tree, a twenty-five-foot spruce that had been set in a big tub of sand and secured by guy wires to the highest corners of the two banks. At midnight, the Town Hall siren went off to wail in the new year, 1956. Everyone was supposed to kiss everyone else but Paul lifted Andrea off her feet and held her buried in his arms so no one else could touch her.

  Andrea lived out in the country, in the middle of eight hundred acres of corn, and her father kept one of his several old half-tons tuned up so she could come and go without bothering him. Like other farm fathers, he expected his kids to grow up a little quicker than town kids might, mostly because he didn’t have the time or the patience to wait around for it. Paul knew Andrea’s sister’s boyfriend Don, who was in grade twelve. They played on the same hockey team, Paul still a star forward because of his long legs, his long reach, Don a squat brute with a scarred face who played defence, who would take anyone on, who lived to throw his gloves off and get serious. Andrea came to all their games although she didn’t humiliate Paul, didn’t yell at the referee like some of the other girls, or squeal at his accomplishments, or cry into her angora mitts if he got slammed hard into the boards or sliced by some thug’s high stick.