Home Schooling (11 page)

“I am not unfamiliar with catastrophe,” Nolan said. He asked Sherry to pass him the bread rolls. “Every generation thinks the
earth is coming to an end,” he said, splitting a roll apart and reaching for the butter dish. “That's the nature of human life. We are born knowing death is inevitable. That's what separates us from the animals.”

“This will be a catastrophic event, Mr. Ganz. This will be outside of human history. That's the hard thing to understand, but it's true. There won't be anyone left even to think the word ‘catastrophe.'”

“If this is what you sincerely believe, why do you bother to keep breathing?” Nolan said.

“Daddy,” Marni said. “Please. We're trying to eat. Don't argue with Gavin right now.”

“I'm not arguing,” Nolan said. “I would just like Gavin to answer my question.”

“Well, Mr. Ganz, the answer is that right now there's still a little time. I guess that's why I keep breathing.” Gavin smiled. “I guess I do have a little hope.”

Marni leaned her head briefly on Gavin's shoulder. She smiled at Nolan. “That's why we're going to Belize,” she said. “We're going to do something while there's still time.”

“I would like everyone to please change the subject,” Sherry said. “Please. We can talk later. Right now I would like a little more wine, Nolan.”

They were in the living room, with all the windows open. They'd tried sitting outside on the patio, but it was a muggy, humid evening and they'd got chased inside by mosquitoes. Nadia sat in a chair in the corner and when Sherry came in she took a chair nearby. Marni and Gavin were on the far side of the room, on the sofa, holding hands.

One night, Nolan was saying, when he was out at his company's operations in the Nitinat Valley, his crew had left him behind. It wasn't intentional, he hastened to add. One of the fallers had injured his hand, not too badly, but they were taking him to a doctor. The
rest of the crew had decided to leave a few hours early and go along, while the crummy was there. It was Friday. They were heading into a weekend of warm baths and dry socks. Who could blame them for being in a hurry?

Nolan had driven off in a truck to pick up some equipment, a couple of chainsaws, axes, ropes. Before he went, he mentioned to someone what he was doing and had said he wouldn't be long. Maybe he spoke too casually. Maybe he wasn't clear enough. Whatever, he got several miles down a cut-line when his truck's engine stalled on him. The truck was an International Harvester model, with a six-volt electrical system notorious for failing to start up again if the engine stalled, which it had a tendency to do. It was late October and the nights got cold fast. He thought about walking back, but he was sure his men would have left. He decided he might as well stay with the truck. He had a thermos of coffee and half a sandwich. He was dressed warmly. As night fell, though, it began to snow. He tried the engine. No luck.

Why worry? he thought. He was where he was.

The hours went by slowly. He got out of the truck and stamped his feet, trying to get warm. He walked around in a tight little circle, staying close to the truck. He brushed the snow off his hair and his face. Something, a small sound, alerted him. He looked up and there, not twenty feet away, was a mule deer, a magnificent buck with a full set of antlers. Its eyes glittered. Its ears twitched. Good, he'd thought: a creature to share his lonely vigil. Well, all right, his first thought was, too bad he didn't have his rifle. Not that this would have qualified as hunting: the deer was like a statue. Then he began to think how strange, to see a deer in the night. It began to seem like a bad omen. His situation was kind of grim. He knew that even if he got the truck started, the snow might have made the rudimentary road out impassable. If they sent a search party, would anyone think to look in this spot? He doubted it, at that moment. The effect of the snow falling was hypnotic, mesmerizing.

He was about to clap his hands or shout, to scare the deer away. Then he saw that he and the deer were not alone in the clearing. Two people stood beneath the snowy branches of a Douglas fir. He knew who they were. His mother and father. They were as real as he was. As real as anyone in this room, Nolan said. His mother wore a coat with a velvet collar, a snug waist, a little flared skirt, like this. Nolan spread his hands. His father, now, had a big warm scarf wrapped around his neck. His head was bare. It was night, but Nolan saw the two in colour. His mother's blue velvet collar, her brown gloves. His father's close-cropped brown hair. His heart was full of love for them. You didn't forget, he said. His mother, very polite, asked him how he was, her voice soft and clear. He told her he was doing well. He said he had two little boys. He had a nice home, a business. They stood there, in the winter's cold blue-white. This, he thought, was what he had always dreamed of: to be even for one moment with his parents. When they vanished, as suddenly as they'd appeared, he felt bereft. He watched as the deer picked its way through the snow to the edge of the forest and then bounded into the trees. He went and sat in the truck and after a moment he cranked the ignition and — guess what? — the engine fired up at once. He had known it would. He drove back to the camp without incident. He stumbled into the dark, empty bunkhouse. He lit a kerosene lamp. He ate his one-half of a sandwich and tried to drink the coffee, which had gone cold and tasted disgusting — but he drank it anyway, because, after all, he was alive and he knew who he was. He knew who he was. That was, to him, an amazing thing.

Nadia felt as if she'd been there, too, in the snowy clearing. She suspected that Nolan at least partly intended the story as reprimand to Gavin, an irresistible lesson on how to convey a convincing and authentic message, which was, in this case, that Nolan Ganz understood life better than Gavin did. Gavin looked, for a moment, stunned. Nolan clasped his hands over his midriff and grinned insolently at him. Nadia would have felt sorry for Gavin, if he
weren't lounging in that blatant way against Marni's bare legs. She stared at him, secretly. She did like his straight nose, his rather large and stubborn chin, the luxuriance of his hair. Gavin could, she thought, be underestimated.

“Why, Nolan, what a beautiful story,” Sherry said. “Is it true?”

“Of course it is,” Nolan said. “I honour the truth, Sherry, you know that.”

Car lights shone in the window. A car door slammed and a moment later the doorbell rang. No one else got up, so Nadia went into the hall and opened the door. Maurice walked in. He was wearing a white open-necked shirt and beige pants and Birkenstocks.

“I was driving around,” he said. “It's too damned hot to do anything else. Do you know how depressing that is, driving around at night alone?”

“Come in,” Nadia said, stupidly, because he was already in the hall. “Everyone's in the living room.”

He leaned against the far wall, beside a table with a Tiffany lamp on it. He folded his arms. “How is Nadia?” he said.

“I'm fine. Thank you,” she said. Maurice had brought the scent of sun-warmed pine needles in with him, from the tree beside the driveway. As she'd opened the door, she'd glimpsed the tree's bulk against the night sky. It seemed to have inched closer, as if drawn to Nolan's voice.

“Nolan was telling us a story,” she said to Maurice.

“Well, I am here to rescue you,” he said.

The light in the hall was dim, the lamp set low. The hall was wide, almost as large as a room. On the other side of the wall behind Maurice was the room with Eleanor's portrait. In the warm night the gold of her hair and the gold of the frame would pulse weakly, like a decaying element. Nadia had seen a cloud chamber once, on a school field trip. She remembered the delicate tracings of cosmic particles, like a malfunctioning Etch-a-Sketch. Or the mind, the way the mind worked, stray thoughts.

Maurice pushed himself away from the wall. He came over to her. “Nadia, you are lovely,” he said. “Already you've attained a very fine control over your life, haven't you? That's not a bad thing.” He brushed her face very lightly, very slowly, with the back of his hand. A tremor passed through her. She breathed very quietly. She wanted to touch his scarred face. She wanted to know what the scars felt like, what they would feel like to him. She felt as if something inside him, in his mind, had burned them into his skin.

Marni and Gavin came into the hall. Maurice had moved away from Nadia a second earlier. He went and kissed Marni. He shook hands with Gavin. Marni took a set of keys from a bowl on the hall table, as if plucking a grape. “I'm taking your car, Sherry,” she called. “Is that okay?”

Sherry called back. “Drive carefully.”

Marni grimaced. She and Gavin left. Nadia noticed they didn't invite her along. She followed Maurice into the living room. He said what an uncomfortably humid night it was and Sherry said, yes, indeed. “August can be like this,” she said. Maurice said there would be a storm. Nadia thought perhaps there already had been a storm and this was its aftermath. She thought of the ending of
Rebecca,
the sun rising, the air filled with the bitterest of ashes.

In the morning Nadia went back to the island. She didn't see Sherry and Nolan again until just before classes started in September, after she'd spent a day at the university campus, paying the balance of her housing fees, searching the bookstore for her textbooks. When she got to Sherry and Nolan's, they were in the backyard, where Nolan was cooking salmon steaks on the barbecue. He greeted her affectionately. He even gave her an awkward, moist kiss on the cheek. She kissed the air beside his face. She had brought flowers for Sherry, and Sherry went into the kitchen to put them in water. When she came back to the patio, she told Nadia how nice she looked. Nadia laughed, because they were all wearing black. She was wearing the blouse Sherry had brought her back from France.
Sherry was wearing a black shift. Nolan was wearing a black golf shirt with khaki shorts. How suitable, Nadia thought: the family in black. She thought that she, like Nolan, had at last learned who she was. Not that the knowledge was all that edifying, but still it was there. This was her family. This was one part of it, anyway. Jonah and Laurel. Marjory. Eleanor. Samantha, of course. The sons, James and Simon. A broken, patchily reassembled family in the early years of a century no one had yet learned to trust or had any reason to trust. Gavin was right, Nadia thought. She, too, believed history had moved beyond human control. She hoped not. But everyone she knew agreed something was wrong: the summers too hot, the clouds strange, the sun too intense. She thought of the red-tailed hawks evicted from their forest, their panicked shadows passing over her, as ominous and misplaced as Nolan's deer in the snowy night. It wasn't easy to achieve a balance. She remembered, at the wedding, listening to “American Pie.” She remembered the part about music saving the immortal soul. Could it be done, the song had asked.

She thought of Sherry at the wedding in her beautiful dress, flowers in her hair. If only, Nadia thought, it really was possible to spin straw into gold. She would give the gold away. She would dress in black exclusively, as a sign, a sign of her seriousness and devotion to an elusive dream. She'd give everyone gold from a vast, inexhaustible storehouse. She'd do it out of love, like the miller's daughter.

O
NLY ONCE THAT SEMESTER
did Lydia feel happy, and that was when it snowed and everything got quiet and acquired a sense of gravitas and beauty that made her think it must have been like this in the nineteenth century or at an enclosed monastery somewhere, where no one spoke or raised their eyes and all thoughts remained secret and hidden. But the snow quickly turned to incessant rain, and many little things began to go wrong. She lost her only pair of gloves. She woke at night, thinking she heard her grandmother's voice. During the day, as well, she heard the same voice, always goading her, telling her: Lydia, this is what happened in our family, we have this shame we can't get rid of. In her direct, bossy tone, she blamed the unspeakable event in their family's past for Lydia's present unhappiness. What can you expect? she said. It was their heritage. It was in their genes. Which Lydia did not, frankly, disbelieve. Something made her different. She was twenty years old. She
was the recipient of a small scholarship. She had no friends, apart from Declan, another outcast. The only other people she ever spoke to were her parents, when she called home on Saturday mornings from the pay phone at the end of the hall. They didn't want to hear that she was lonely or hated the food or couldn't concentrate on her work. They said, Ah, student life! Her father said she must refrain from burning her candle at both ends, as Elinor Wylie advised.

You mean Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lydia said.

Oh, my, yes, of course, her father said. St. Vincent Millay it is! Something about oh my friends, oh my foes, and the candle giving a lovely light as it burns. Isn't that it? Lydia, how I envy your supple young mind! Oh, dear, he said, he had a call on the other line, from a parishioner. Take care, my love, he shouted, and then he was gone.

Her father was an Anglican priest. Her mother was a secretary at the same elementary school Lydia had gone to. She sent Lydia parcels of cookies and sweaters she'd knitted in strange nubbly wool. In the communal washroom on the third floor of the residence, girls whose names Lydia didn't know, their shoulders pink and moist from the shower, would pluck at her sleeves and say, Oh, cute sweater, when what they really meant was: That sweater is ugly as hell! In the steamed-up mirror Lydia could see for herself: the sweaters made her breasts look heavy, her waist thick, nothing like as supple as her mind was supposed to be. Even her hands looked pudgy, like her mother's stodgy dumplings in a stew pot. In class she kept her coat on and tucked her hands inside her sleeves. She tried to concentrate on Dr. Julian Schelling's lecture on Matthew Arnold, how the poet had considered the English church a civilizing influence, how he'd insisted the Bible should be approached as if it were an epic poem, full of blood and lust and infamy.