Lives of Girls and Women (11 page)

If it was a Wednesday afternoon my mother’s boarder, Fern Dogherty, would be at home, drinking tea, smoking, talking with my mother in the dining room. Fern’s talk was low, she would ramble and groan and laugh against my mother’s sharper, more economical commentary. They told stories about people in the town, about themselves; their talk was a river that never dried up. It was the drama, the ferment of life just beyond my reach. I would go to the deep mirror in the built-in sideboard and look at the reflection of the room—all dark wainscoting, dark beams, the brass lighting fixture like a little formal tree growing the wrong way, with five branches stiffly curved, ending in glass flowers. By getting them into a certain spot in the mirror I could make my mother and Fern Dogherty pull out like rubber bands, all wavering and hysterical, and I could make my own face droop disastrously down one side, as if I had had a stroke.

I said to my mother, “Why didn’t you bring that picture in?”

“What picture?
What picture?
”

“The one over the couch.”

Because I had been thinking—every so often I had to think—of our kitchen out on the farm, where my father and Uncle Benny were at that moment probably frying potatoes for their supper, in an unwashed pan (why wash away good grease?), with mitts and scarves steaming dry on top of the stove. Major our dog—not allowed into the house during my mother’s reign—asleep on the dirty linoleum in front of the door. Newspapers spread on the table in place of a cloth, dog-haired blanket on the couch, guns and snowshoes and washtubs hung along the walls. Smelly bachelor comfort. Over the couch there was a picture actually painted by my mother, in the far-off early days—the possibly leisured, sunny, loving days—of her marriage. It showed a stony road and a river between mountains, and sheep driven along the road by a little girl in a red shawl. The mountains and the sheep looked alike, lumpy, woolly, purplish-grey. Long ago I had believed that the little girl was really my mother and that this was the desolate country of her early life. Then I learned that she had copied the scene from the
National Geographic
.

“That one? Do you want that in here?”

I didn’t really. As often in our conversations I was trying to lead her on, to get the answer, or the revelation, I particularly wanted. I wanted her to say she had left it for my father. I remembered she had said once that she had painted it for him, he was the one who had liked that scene.

“I don’t want it hanging where people would see,” she said. “I’m no artist. I only painted it because I had nothing to do.”

She gave a ladies’ party, to which she asked Mrs. Coutts, sometimes called Mrs. Lawyer Coutts, Mrs. Best whose husband was the manager of the Bank of Commerce, various other ladies she only knew to speak to on the street, as well as neighbours, Fern Dogherty’s coworkers from the Post Office, and of course Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace. (She asked them to make creamed chicken tarts and lemon tarts and matrimonial cake, which they did.) The party was all planned in advance. As soon as the ladies came into the front hall they had to guess how many beans in a jar, writing their guess on a slip of paper. The evening proceeded with guessing games, quizzes made up with the help of the encyclopedia, charades which never got going properly because many ladies could not be made to understand how to play, and were too shy anyway, and a pencil and paper game where you write a man’s name, fold it down and pass it on, write a verb, fold it down, write a lady’s name, and so on, and at the end all the papers are unfolded and read out. In a pink wool skirt and bolero, I joyfully passed peanuts.

Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace kept busy in the kitchen, smiling and affronted. My mother was wearing a red dress, semitransparent, covered with little black and blue pansies, like embroidery. “We thought it was beetles she had on that dress,” whispered Aunt Elspeth to me. “It gave us a start!” After that it did seem to me the party was less beautiful than I had supposed; I noticed some ladies were not playing any games, that my mother’s face was feverish with excitement and her voice full of organizing fervour, that when she played the piano, and Fern Dogherty—who had studied to be a singer—sang, “What is Life without my Lover?” ladies contained themselves, and clapped from some kind distance, as if this might be showing-off.

Auntie Grace and Aunt Elspeth would in fact say to me, off and on for the next year, “How is that ladyboarder of yours? How is she finding life without her lover?” I would explain to them that it was a song from an opera, a translation, and they would cry, “Oh, is
that
it? And we were all the time feeling so sorry for her!”

My mother had hoped that her party would encourage other ladies to give parties of this sort, but it did not, or if it did we never heard of them; they continued giving bridge parties, which my mother said were silly and snobbish. She gave up on social life, gradually. She said that Mrs. Coutts was a stupid woman who in one of the quizzes had been uncertain who Julius Caesar was—she thought he was Greek—and who also made mistakes in grammar, saying things like “he told her and I” instead of “her and me”—a common mistake of people who thought they were being genteel.

She joined the Great Books discussion group which was meeting every second Thursday during the winter in the Council Chambers in the Town Hall. There were five other people in the group, including a retired doctor, Dr. Comber, who was very frail, courteous, and as it turned out, dictatorial. He had pure white, silky hair and wore an ascot scarf. His wife had lived in Jubilee over thirty years and still knew hardly anybody’s name, or where the streets were. She was Hungarian. She had a magnificent name she would serve up to people sometimes, like a fish on a platter, all its silvery, scaly syllables intact, but it was no use, nobody in Jubilee could pronounce or remember it. At first my mother was delighted with this couple, whom she had always wanted to know. She was overjoyed to be invited to their house where she looked at photographs of their honeymoon in Greece and drank red wine so as not to offend them— though she did not drink—and listened to funny and dreadful stories of things that had happened to them in Jubilee because they were atheists and intellectuals. Her admiration persisted through
Antigone,
dampened a bit in
Hamlet,
grew dimmer and dimmer through
The Republic
and
Das Kapital
. Nobody could have any opinions, it appeared, but the Combers; the Combers knew more, they had seen Greece, they had attended lectures by H. G. Wells, they were always right. Mrs. Comber and my mother had a disagreement and Mrs. Comber brought up the fact that my mother had not gone to university and only to a—my mother imitated her accent—
backvoods
high school. My mother reviewed some of the stories they had told her and decided they had a persecution complex (“what is that?” said Fern, for such terms were just coming into fashion at the time) and that they were even possibly a little crazy. Also there had been an unpleasant smell in their house which she had not mentioned to us at the time, and the toilet, which she had to use after drinking that red wine, was hideous, scummy yellow. What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.

She did not go back to Great Books the second year. She signed up for a correspondence course called Great Thinkers of History, from the University of Western Ontario, and she wrote letters to the newspapers.

M
Y MOTHER HAD NOT
let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.

In the beginning, the very beginning of everything, there was that house. It stood at the end of a long lane, with wire fences, sagging windowpanes of wire on either side, in the middle of fields where the rocks—part of the Pre-Cambrian Shield—were poking through the soil like bones through flesh. The house which I had never seen in a photograph—perhaps none had ever been taken—and which I had never heard my mother describe except in an impatient, matter-of-fact way (“it was just an old frame house—it never had been painted”) nevertheless appeared in my mind as plainly as if I had seen it in a newspaper—the barest, darkest, tallest of all old frame houses, simple and familiar yet with something terrible about it, enclosing evil, like a house where a murder has been committed.

And my mother, just a little girl then named Addie Morrison, spindly I should think, with cropped hair because her mother guarded her against vanity, would walk home from school up the long anxious lane, banging against her legs the lard pail that had held her lunch. Wasn’t it always November, the ground hard, ice splintered on the puddles, dead grass floating from the wires? Yes, and the bush near and spooky, with the curious unconnected winds that lift the branches one by one. She would go into the house and find the fire out, the stove cold, the grease from the men’s dinner thickened on the plates and pans.

No sign of her father, or her brothers who were older and through with school. They did not linger around the house. She would go through the front room into her parents’ bedroom and there, more often than not, she would find her mother on her knees, bent down on the bed, praying. Far more clearly than her mother’s face she could picture now that bent back, narrow shoulders in some grey or tan sweater over a dirty kimona or housedress, the back of the head with the thin hair pulled tight from the middle parting, the scalp unhealthily white. It was white as marble, white as soap.

“She was a religious fanatic,” says my mother of this kneeling woman, who at other times is discovered flat on her back and weeping—for reasons my mother does not go into—with a damp cloth pressed to her forehead. Once in the last demented stages of Christianity she wandered down to the barn and tried to hide a little bull calf in the hay, when the butchers’ men were coming. My mother’s voice, telling these things, is hard with her certainty of having been cheated, her undiminished feelings of anger and loss.

“Do you know what she did? I told you what she did? I told you about the money?” She draws a breath to steady herself. “Yes. Well. She inherited some money. Some of her people had money, they lived in New York State. She came into two hundred and fifty dollars, not a lot of money, but more then than now and you know we were poor. You think this is poor. This is
nothing
to how we were poor. The oilcloth on our table, I remember it, it was worn through so you could see the bare boards. It was hanging in shreds. It was a rag, not an oilcloth. If I ever wore shoes I wore boys’ shoes, hand-downs of my brothers. It was the kind of farm you couldn’t raise chickweed on. For Christmas I got a pair of navy blue bloomers. And let me tell you, I was
glad
. I knew what it was to be cold.”

“Well. My mother took her money and she ordered a great box of Bibles. They came by express. They were the most expensive kind, maps of the Holy Land and gilt-edged pages and the words of Christ were all marked in red.
Blessed are the poor in spirit
. What is so remarkable about being poor in spirit? She spent every cent.”

“So then, we had to go out and give them away. She had bought them for distribution to the heathen. I think my brothers hid some in the granary. I know they did. But I was too much of a fool to think of that. I was tramping all over the country at the age of eight, in boys’ shoes and not owning a pair of mittens, giving away Bibles.”

“One thing, it cured me of religion for life.”

Once she ate cucumbers and drank milk because she had heard that this combination was poisonous and she wished to die. She was more curious than depressed. She lay down and hoped to wake in heaven, which she had heard so much about, but opened her eyes instead on another morning. That too had its effect on her faith. She told nobody at the time.

The older brother sometimes brought her candy, from Town. He shaved at the kitchen table, a mirror propped against the lamp. He was vain, she thought, he had a moustache, and he got letters from girls which he never answered, but left lying around where anybody could read them. My mother appeared to hold this against him. “I have no illusions about him,” she said, “though I guess he was no different from most.” He lived in New Westminster now, and worked on a ferryboat. The other brother lived in the States. At Christmas they sent cards, and she sent cards to them. They never wrote letters, nor did she.

It was the younger brother she hated. What did he do? Her answers were not wholly satisfactory. He was evil, bloated, cruel. A cruel fat boy. He fed firecrackers to cats. He tied up a toad and chopped it to pieces. He drowned my mother’s kitten, named Misty, in the cow trough, though he afterwards denied it. Also he caught my mother and tied her up in the barn and tormented her. Tormented her? He
tortured
her.

What with? But my mother would never go beyond that that word,
tortured,
which she spat out like blood. So I was left to imagine her tied up in the barn, as at a stake, while her brother a fat Indian yelped and pranced about her. But she had escaped, after all, unscalped, unburnt. Nothing really accounted for her darkened face at this point in the story, for her way of saying
tortured
. I had not yet learned to recognize the gloom that overcame her in the vicinity of sex.

Her mother died. She went away for an operation but she had large lumps in both breasts and she died, my mother always said, on the table. On the
operating
table. When I was younger I used to imagine her stretched out dead on an ordinary table among the teacups and ketchup and jam.

“Were you sad?” I said hopefully and my mother said yes, of course she was sad. But she did not linger round this scene. Important things were coming. Soon she was through school, she had passed her Entrance Exams and she wanted to go to High School, in Town. But her father said no, she was to stay home and keep house until she got married. (“Who would I marry in God’s name?” cried my mother angrily every time at this point in the story, “out there at the end of the world with everybody cross-eyed from inbreeding?”) After two years at home, miserable, learning some things on her own from old high school textbooks that had belonged to her mother (a schoolteacher herself before marriage and religion overtook her), she defied her father, she walked a distance of nine miles to Town, hiding in the bushes by the road every time she heard a horse coming, for fear it would be them, with the old wagon, come to take her back home. She knocked on the door of a boarding house she knew from the egg business and asked if she could have her room and board in return for kitchen work and waiting on table. And the woman who ran the house took her in—she was a rough-talking decent old woman that everybody called Grandma Seeley—and kept her from her father till time had passed, even gave her a plaid dress, scratchy wool, too long, which she wore to school that first morning when she stood up in front of a class all two years younger than she was and read Latin, pronouncing it just the way she had taught herself, at home. Naturally, they all laughed.