Clara Callan (34 page)

It was strange to hear all this from Mr. Bryden, this lawyer and neighbour whom I have known (and not known) all these years. I believe he has been carrying all this feeling for Mother and now was glad to reveal it. As I was getting out of the car, however, he placed a hand on my arm and said, “Of course, I’m sure you understand that all this happened many years ago and I’m very fond of Mrs. Bryden and always have been. Just so you’re clear about that.”

The Bell people have just installed the telephone. I don’t like the looks of the thing on the kitchen wall, but I suppose I will get used to it. It
startled me so when it first rang though they were only checking the line. I thought of reaching Frank, but I expect he has now gone for the day. I have decided to wait until Sunday to surprise Nora. In a way, this is a ridiculous expense because aside from Frank and Nora, I can’t think of anyone else to telephone.

What I don’t like about this telephone is the constant ringing. What a nuisance when you are settling down to read or listen to the gramophone! I could not get a private line, and so I am sharing with the Macfarlanes and the Caldwells. The man explained that my ring is two short and one long whereas Cora Macfarlane’s is two short and two long and the Caldwells is something or other. I suppose I will get on to it in time, but I don’t much like the idea of others listening in on my conversation. The telephone man said that most people are polite about that, but I have to wonder.

Yesterday was unsettling. I met Frank as usual at the station and he was affectionate, delighted to see me. We touched and kissed in his car, and then we took some back roads southward towards the lake. I asked about Patrick and he said that he was okay though he still has terrible headaches. He also told me that his oldest daughter is giving him trouble though he didn’t elaborate. I gather she is a high-strung and difficult young woman. Listening to him, I realized how free I am from the vicissitudes of family life.

After an hour or so, we pulled into a tourist court near Port Hope: a dozen white cabins overlooking the lake. It was just before noon and we were the only car. Frank looked across at me and smiled. “We can go into town for dinner afterwards,” he said. I felt so miserable then
because I had to tell him that we couldn’t rent one of the cabins; it was not the right time for me. This put him into a sulk. “You might have told me this,” he said.

“Well, I have told you,” I said, “and there is nothing that can be done about it. Nature will have its way.” I don’t know why I added that. It sounded so foolish and pretentious. Neither of us wanted to talk about it, and so we sat watching the sunlight on the lake. I could feel the heat of the sun through the glass. Frank was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and I looked at the hair on his arm and I wanted him to hold me, but he seemed too much within himself, irritable with disappointment.

Then a woman with a mop and pail came out of one of the cabins and looked our way before going up a lane towards a house.

“We better go,” Frank said. And so we went into Port Hope and had our dinner in a restaurant. I felt the day was ruined and it was all my fault. I should have told him before and so in the restaurant I said I was sorry. He brightened a little after that and at the station we parted with some kisses. It seems that we will not be able to see one another for two weeks. Frank must take his family up to their cottage next Saturday. They spend the entire summer in Muskoka and Frank goes up most weekends. I wondered how we would find time to see one another.

“We’ll find time,” he said, but he sounded unhappy about it all. I gave him my telephone number and he said, “Well, that at least is something.” It was not a good day for us.

This evening I telephoned Nora and how she went on! “Is that really you, Clara? I can’t believe I’m speaking to my sister on the telephone.” And on and on she went. I couldn’t shut her up. The call must have cost me the earth. She told me that she and Evelyn will be here on the ninth of next month.

This telephone rings all the time. I wondered if the members of the other two households had nothing better to do than talk at all hours of the day and night. Then a half-hour ago (10:15), as I lay cursing the
endless rings, willing both families into perdition, I realized that it was my ring, two short and a long. Rushed downstairs to hear Frank’s voice. He told me how sorry he was for the way he behaved yesterday. It was so wonderful to hear his voice. He promised to make things up for me, and we agreed to meet a week from next Saturday, the third of July, at Union Station. His wife and youngest son will be up at the cottage that weekend.

“We can go some place where we can be completely by ourselves,” he said.

And I said, “Yes, let’s do that, Frank.”

After I hung up, I wondered if someone had been listening.

School is over for another year and Milton and I had games and treats for the children. The entrance class have been writing their examinations at the town hall and this afternoon, on my way home, I met Ella Myles and asked her how the examinations were going. She gave me a wry crooked little grin. “I’m not writing the exams,” she said.

“Oh, Ella,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that. You should have tried at least.”

A moue of disdain from the painted mouth. I feel the child is lost.

This afternoon Mr. Bryden told me of a motor car for sale. I had almost forgotten that on a Wednesday drive to Linden, I had mentioned my interest in buying a car. He told me of a widow on the twelfth concession, a Mrs. Creeley, who is selling the farm and moving into Linden to be with her married daughter. She wants to sell her late husband’s car, and Mr. Bryden thinks it is in good condition, and that Joe Morrow would be willing to take me out tomorrow
afternoon to look at it. The widow is asking three hundred dollars, which is a great deal of money, but an automobile would make things so much easier. I would no longer have to depend on that train.

I bought the car, perhaps as a present to myself, for today is my thirty-fourth birthday. This afternoon Joe drove me out to the Creeley farm. The widow is a big woman with a large red face and a friendly manner. She allowed us to take the car for a drive. It’s a black Chevrolet coupe, only three years old. “She’s a good little car, Clara,” Joe said. “She’s worth the money, but if it was me, I’d offer her two hundred and you’d probably get it for two fifty.” But the suggestion made me feel vaguely guilty. It would be like taking bread from a widow’s mouth although Mrs. Creeley looked well off enough. So I asked Joe, “Is it worth the three hundred?”

“Oh hang, yes,” he said. “She’s worth every nickel of that.”

“Then I’ll give her the three hundred,” I said.

“Suit yourself, but if it was me, I’d try to beat her down.”

But I was not interested in “beating her down,” and so Mrs. Creeley and I agreed on things and Joe will go out tomorrow to pick up the car. He is going to give me lessons in operating it, and I told him I would give him fifty cents for each lesson. He didn’t want to be paid, but I’m using his time, so I feel I owe him for that.

Nora phoned this evening to wish me happy birthday. She had been trying to reach me all afternoon, but couldn’t get through. “You’ll have to tell those people to stop hogging the line,” she said. It’s interesting that after nearly three years in New York, Nora still uses old-fashioned expressions from her childhood. Perhaps we never entirely abandon these locutions from our past. But I can’t see myself telling Cora Macfarlane “to stop hogging the line.” Then I told Nora that I had just bought a car and that flummoxed her.

“You bought a car?”

“Yes, I did. A Chevrolet coupe. Three years old.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. What has got into you lately, Clara? A telephone and now a car? It’s too early for the change of life, isn’t it?”

“Much too early,” I said.

My first lesson! After supper, Joe and I went out along the township roads and he showed me how to shift the gears. As many times as I used to watch Father moving the gear lever, I never paid much attention to how it was actually done. For an hour or so, Joe and I bucked and stalled our way along the roads. Had anyone been around, it would have been comical to witness; as it was, only a few cows raised their big homely faces to study this mechanical ineptitude. Joe is wonderfully good-natured about it all.

“Don’t worry, Clara,” he keeps saying. “You’ll get the hang of her before long.”

Another driving lesson and this evening I managed to get the car into third gear and actually drove some distance along the township road, almost as far as Linden. I was so proud of myself and Joe was pleased too. When I got home, it was still light and I was standing in the kitchen feeling utterly triumphant when suddenly it all vanished and I was overtaken by nerves. It was like the shadow of a cloud crossing a field. I sat down at the table and very nearly wept. This was an hour ago, and I have been trying to think of a reason for all this. I now believe that, without realizing it, I have been worrying about tomorrow and how things will go between Frank and me. We are going to “sleep together” tomorrow and I have had no experience in that. I am afraid that I will be tentative and uninviting and he will be disappointed, perhaps even repelled by me.

This is what I was thinking yesterday in the room of the tourist court as I stood in my new wrap behind the venetian blinds and looked out onto Lakeshore Boulevard. I could hear faintly the cries of the bathers at Sunnyside. It was so hot in that room. The little fan on the bedside table hardly helped at all. And standing there I thought this: I am in a motor court with Frank on a Saturday afternoon. We have been intimate and now I am standing in this hideous wrapper. I bought it hurriedly in a store on Queen Street while Frank waited in the car. I hadn’t thought to bring anything and so I needed something to cover myself with or walk around in. The wrapper is absurdly vulgar, yellow with large mauve flowers. If I had said to the salesgirl, “Give me something to cover myself with after I go to bed with a married man this afternoon,” she could not have chosen a more appropriate garment. My emblem of illicit happiness. In it, I feel like one of those women in the detective magazines who leave a
husband and run off with a boyfriend to rob banks and live in cabins on the edge of highways. But I have another woman’s husband, and so I wondered what Edith Quinlan was doing at that moment. Was she washing the lunch dishes and looking out the cottage window at her youngest child as he played in the water? Was she worrying about his headaches? Frank was sleeping. He had dropped off as if plunging down a cliffside into unconsciousness. At first I was awkward about it all; I know I was, though he said I was fine. Yet I wonder. It is something to take off all your clothes in front of another person. It takes some getting used to. But he kissed me all over and I felt a kind of deep longing within, though I was nervous too, remembering the tramp in the grass by the railway tracks. But Frank covered me with kisses and I remember saying, “I don’t want to become pregnant, Frank,” and he said, “Don’t worry, darling, I have something,” and he reached over and put a rubber on himself.
He made me watch him and asked me to touch him and I did. And what an odd-looking thing it is! Stupid, yet playful. As if it possessed a life of its own, as in a way, I suppose, it does.

Then Frank said, “We must get used to one another, darling,” and he touched me. After a while he entered me and I watched his eyes widen. It hurt me a bit until I felt him whole within me and so he began to kiss my breasts and throat. That was lovely. How I enjoyed those kisses! Then he told me to put my legs around him and I did and he again began to move and so perhaps did I. And always he was whispering endearments which I enjoyed as much as anything. It was the closeness that I loved and the endearments. I felt utterly overwhelmed by it all and then he began to move more quickly, and I sensed that I was losing him. Yet I held him fast and watched and felt my racing heart. Our bodies were so slippery and I thought this: Human life begins with a woman’s legs around a man’s body. She receives his seed and this too is how I became. Mother and Father once lay like this on some long-ago September night in 1902. My brother was sleeping in a crib in a corner of the room, and perhaps they tried
not to awaken him as they moved within one another. And so I became.

After Frank released himself, he seemed to shudder and grow youthful. When he opened his eyes, I thought I could see him at sixteen, callow and filled with yearning. He kissed my shoulder and called me his darling and loved one and I felt a deep happiness holding him like that. When he fell asleep, I placed my hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat subsiding. That was as good as anything because I was as close as I would ever get to this man whom I met outside a movie house thirteen weeks ago. This Catholic coal merchant and father of four. What would his daughters think if they could see us like this? I wondered. Yet I was happy enough to assume the role of trollop, for like the Englishwoman in Rome, I too now had a lover and on my lips the very word itself was enkindling.
I have a lover
. Like poor Emma Bovary looking in the mirror after her first encounter with Rodolphe.

Later in the afternoon we went out to a roadside diner and had hamburgers and coffee, and then we hurried back to our room and made love again and it was better than the first time. In the night,
Frank put quarters into the radio, and we listened to dance band music and then a news announcer talking about the woman flyer who crashed in Hawaii. She was trying to go around the world in an airplane. What a thing to undertake!

Before we fell asleep, we made love again. Then this morning Frank told me that he had to go to Mass. He wanted to catch “the ten o’clock at St. Michael’s.” It left us a bit rushed, and I had so wanted to lie in bed with him longer.