A Good House (38 page)

It was an open bar. Murray had asked Patrick to cut a cheque for the liquor. There was still some money left in the girls’ account, the bulk of it held there to cover Jill’s tuition. Most of the guests had danced this floor many times before, most of them had no memory at all of a time when they couldn’t dance and they thoroughly enjoyed a night of nothing else but. When things were well under way, some of the outsiders who had been claiming that no, they couldn’t really dance, were being pulled reluctantly to the floor to confess that well, maybe they could, and when some of them started to sing as they danced, Crank tried to play songs they might know.

Late in the evening, Patrick and Murray excused themselves from Stephanie and Kate, freshened their drinks at the bar, and left the dance to walk out through the lobby and then through the big double doors that led to the rink. They found it all in empty darkness, hot with summer heat and full of the threat of echo, and after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light they stood together at the boards and saw that where there used to be a summertime grid of water pipes laid on a bed of sand, there was now only an expanse of dull cement.

They turned and found the balcony stairs and climbed up in the dark, sat down together front and centre. “Best seats in the house,” Murray said.

Patrick leaned forward. “I have to say that it is small,” he said. “Even if that’s what people usually say coming back to something, it’s nevertheless true.”

“It was, my friend,” Murray said, “always small.”

Patrick was looking out over the ice and up to the scoreboard, which even in the darkness he could see was new and much larger, much more elaborate than it had been in his day. “You would have seen that,” he said, “sitting up here watching. We didn’t. We thought we were the cat’s ass and then some.”
“That I remember,” Murray said.

“It felt so damned big. Although that sheet of ice was a good deal smaller for guys like Paul.” He stopped for a minute, looked down at his drink. “Every coach likes a long stride. Guys like Paul could get the puck from anywhere.”

“It’s been eleven years this summer,” Murray said. “And I have not yet found a way to think about him being gone.”

Patrick drained his Scotch. “Andy our travelling lady seems to be doing all right,” he said. “It’s much better for her with Meg in London. There was never any other way to go with that.”

“She should remarry,” Murray said. “She shouldn’t be on her own now. There’s no reason that I can see.”

“Well,” Patrick said. “People marry and people don’t marry. You’ve likely noticed.” He stood up quickly to start down the dark stairs. “Although looking at Andy tonight makes me suspect she’s not entirely on her own. Daphne mentioned something to Stephanie about a guy from Toronto, some stud in his forties, no less.”

“I hope he hasn’t got his eye on her money,” Murray said.

“I hope not too,” Patrick said. “Because he won’t be seeing much of it. Andy is extremely close with her money. Instinctive and careful and firm. In that respect, she’s quite a bit like your mother.”

Murray laughed quietly at the memory of his mother’s financial acumen, and as he got up to follow Patrick back to the dance he finished his own drink and crushed the plastic cup in his hand, tossing it behind him into the darkness. He was perhaps a little drunk, something he had not intended. Just before he took the first step he put a question to Patrick’s descending shoulders. “How’s the cummerbund now?”

Patrick didn’t stop or hesitate. “It seems to have got itself straightened around,” he said. “Although I’ll be glad to take the damned thing off. I always am.” He continued down the steps. “In case you’re wondering, this afternoon was understood to be just a simple screw-up,” he said. “That’s what people think. And more to the point, it’s what Maggie and Jill believe.”

“Is it?” Murray said, beginning his own descent. “Then maybe you would be kind enough to tell me what Daphne believes.” He
had to raise his voice because Patrick was almost at the bottom of the balcony steps. He could hardly see him down there and what he saw wasn’t so much a man as the probable shape of a man. “And what Kate believes.”

A
T
Daphne’s the next day, after the rest of the gifts had been unwrapped and lunch was being served by the Presbyterian women, this time on card tables set up on the wraparound porch, Bill arrived. He was unexpected because he had told everyone he wasn’t going to be there. He’d walked over, had got himself dressed in his suit pants and a fresh white shirt, which he’d buttoned wrong down near his belt. He had even remembered his tie, although he hadn’t knotted it. He wore the tie draped over his small hunched shoulders the way you would wear a harmless carnival snake. The old camera he’d dug out of Margaret’s kitchen junk drawer swung down heavy from his neck and as he approached the porch it bounced against his sunken chest.

It was not his intention to go inside Daphne’s house, so he stopped to talk to the Presbyterian women for a minute and one of them soon fixed him a plate of food he said he didn’t want, bits of strange cheese, slices of lukewarm spiced-up chicken, cold chopped broccoli that was supposed to be some kind of salad. He stood waiting, holding his paper plate and eating what he could manage to get down. The women were right there hovering over him, he could hardly refuse to eat. And Patrick’s Stephen had that godforsaken video thing pointed in his direction again.

He was waiting until word got to Maggie that he was on the porch. He knew she’d come out to him. He was here to insist on his picture. Maggie and her new husband and himself and whoever else wanted to be in it. He was not going to listen to any talk today about who arranged for things, who paid for what. He’d paid for enough things in his life to get a picture out of it. If no one would drive them uptown, they could walk. It wasn’t that bad a day.

When Maggie came out through the wide open doors, he was annoyed to see that she wasn’t in her beautiful white gown and when she got close enough he said so. “Where’s your dress?” he asked, squirming in her strong arms.

“Oh, Grandpa,” she said, giving him her biggest bride smile. “Silly Grandpa.” Maggie had not seen much of Margaret and Bill since she had started her doctoral work and soon, after she and Josh got packed up for the big move to California, she wouldn’t be seeing them at all, although she would be closer to Aunt Sarah in Vancouver. She did realize that there was every chance that one or both of them would die while she was gone. Unlike her mother, and unlike Jill who argued loudly with her grandfather, and because she was not required to exercise it very often, Maggie had been able to adjust herself to Bill’s condition with a firm, one-time-only decision. If he said something offensive, she simply didn’t hear it. It did not compute. Today she was just happy to have a flesh-and-blood grandfather to tease. Some of her friends didn’t. “That was for yesterday,” she told him. “The bride dress was only for yesterday.”

By this time Daphne and Margaret had come out to the porch to see what was going on. They were standing outside the open doors at the head of a bunched-up pile of the rest of them, Josh, Jill, Patrick, Murray, Andy, Sarah, Meg, all of them together in a cosy little group holding their plates of food, their forks hanging in midair as they listened. Margaret noticed the unknotted tie immediately. “Oh, sweet man,” she said quietly, meaning it to be only to herself. “So this is what you’ve forgotten today.”

“Go get your dress back on,” Bill told Maggie. He set his plate of food down, balanced it gingerly on the porch rail. “We’re going up to the Town Hall for my picture.” He lifted the camera in his hand to show everyone that he meant business.

No one stepped forward to try to tell Maggie what she should do. They stood just where they were, waiting to see what might happen, quiet and wary and ready, one way or the other, for things to proceed.

Standing at the edge of the steps, Stephen lifted the video camera and began to record again. He focused first on the weird old camera trembling in Bill’s hand and then he panned to Maggie and Josh, who was beside her now with his arm around her bare back, and then he swept across the tables of food and some of the Presbyterian women and back again to a medium shot of Daphne, who seemed to be close to laughter, and then over to Margaret and Sarah, who
was still in her peach dress, and to Stephanie and Kate, who were leaning side by side against the railing, their arms touching as they talked quietly between themselves.

And then he zoomed in on wild and crazy Jill who, after she’d grinned and pulled him up to dance last night, had responded to his first, hesitant, hopeful telling of his news, which was not news of course to the people in his real life, the young men who would never be grooms, whose lives would never provide an excuse for family celebration, with an immediate and brutally confident equanimity, as if she’d been waiting and ready to be told, as if he had flattered her with his trust. As if she believed it would be helpful, would be best just to throw him over her shoulder and carry him through whatever was to come. He could imagine this, his own body gone slack, Jill pushing forward undaunted by the extra weight and singing at the top of her lungs, yelling fierce obscenities to intimidate the enemy. And wasn’t that the risk with rescue? If you allowed it, you could find yourself in someone else’s hands? Although Jill’s hands, of all these beautiful hands, were perhaps the most beautiful.

Hearing the girl behind him, hearing them come, he turned the camera toward the street to get two guys flying past on Rollerblades, pulling between them a long-legged girl who was squealing in either terror or joy, and when they were gone he got all the cars parked at the curb, the Jag and Patrick’s new Lexus in particular, and from the cars he lifted the camera up to the dappled light in the just-quivering leaves of the front-yard maples and to the bright blue Ontario sky exposed between the leaves. Finished with the sky, he came back to the wraparound porch, to the far corner of the porch where the kids were climbing over and under and around the overturned Muskoka chairs, to Patrick and Murray, grey-haired men in cut-offs and stupid hats who had moved to stand one on either side of Bill, and then to Andy and awkward, hesitant Meg, who was the only one looking directly at the camera, the only one on the porch who seemed to realize she was being captured. And then he began to move down the steps, thinking if he stood far enough away, maybe as far away as the sidewalk, he might be able
to get a full, wide-angled shot of everyone, the whole mess of them, together.

“Come on, people,” he said, moving carefully backwards. “Strut your stuff.”

A
FEW
days later, after three carloads had driven down to Sarnia for Uncle Gerry’s funeral and then most of them had gone their way, those left behind would sit around Margaret and Bill’s living room to watch Stephen’s wedding videos, to see themselves in action. They would watch Jill as she came down the aisle ahead of her sister, grinning at Josh and Mark, and wasn’t she an incorrigible flirt, and they would once again admire Maggie’s beautiful gown as she walked slowly forward, followed by her unanticipated crowd of escorts. They would see themselves standing up from their chairs after it was done, after all the promises had been made. They would laugh watching the bridal party fool around down at Stonebrook Creek while the still photographer worked so hard to pose them, first on the wide footbridge for several shots and then down at the water. They would see Josh reach back to help Maggie, their hands lifted and extended to each other like dancers from another century as she tried to get a foothold beside him on a large, flat rock that had been placed deliberately and probably with some difficulty at the edge of the current.

Then, as Stephen’s camera work was softly praised, they would move with him away from the bridal party, away from the bridge. They would follow for a few minutes along the bank of the creek, the water moving fast and churned to mud in the middle of the current but much cleaner, almost crystal clear, in the pools along the edge, the surface of the water there held calm by clusters of rocks and stones and bright with reflected sun, with the slow, reflected swaying of trees. They would watch Sailor run ahead along the water and then turn back at Stephen’s call. And from a perfectly focused, extreme close-up of a Scotch thistle, so sharply, delicately barbed, its small, spiny flowers so perfectly mauve in the sunlight, they would be quickly lifted back to a long view of Stonebrook Creek turning through town on its way to the lake, its movement
like a muscle twisting and their perspectives briefly jolted, just as Stephen intended.

Near the end of the second video, which was partly the dance and partly all of them at the house the next day, they would watch the scene on the wraparound porch and Stephen’s brief, unintended narration, his overheard command that they strut their stuff, would prompt a round of easy laughter. Pleasure would pass among them not because they knew Stephen well, they didn’t get to see him very much any more, but because what little they knew of him they quite liked, because even when it hardly mattered he had taken the trouble to choose his words.

Bill’s pictures, snapped by Cheryl and Tara, young curly-haired twin sisters who just happened to be walking past the Town Hall with their arms full of groceries, would be ready a week later. Although it was tight, there had been enough steps to hold all thirty-seven of them, Maggie and Josh and Margaret and Bill front and centre, Maggie in her beautiful gown with Sailor stretched out at her feet, panting, and all of them, except for Bill, looking perhaps a little too serious, Daphne and Jill perched on the step above, and the others standing not in their natural groupings but scattered, a husband separated from his wife, a sister nowhere near her brother, little kids content in the wrong arms.

Studying the pictures with a cup of tea at the kitchen table, Margaret would almost regret her insistence on knotting Bill’s tie for him. He likely would have been all right as he was. And she would decide that before too much time passed, someone with a fine hand should write all their names on the back of the pictures, in full, the placement of the names replicating the placement of the bodies, like a key, or maybe it was more properly called a legend.