Lives of Girls and Women (21 page)

Fern Dogherty and my mother were friends in spite of differences. My mother valued in people experience of the world, contact with any life of learning or culture, and finally any suggestion of being dubiously received in Jubilee. And Fern had not always worked for the Post Office. No; at one time she had studied singing, she had studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Now she sang in the United Church choir, sang “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” on Easter Sunday, and at weddings she sang “Because” and “O Promise Me” and “The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden.” On Saturday afternoons, the Post Office being closed, she and my mother would listen to the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. My mother had a book of operas. She would get it out and follow the story, identifying the arias, for which translations were provided. She had questions for Fern, but Fern did not know as much about operas as you would think she might; she would even get mixed up about which one it was they were listening to. But sometimes she would lean forward with her elbows on the table, not now relaxed, but alertly supported, and sing, scorning the foreign words. “
Do
—daa—do, da,
do,
da do-do—” The force, the seriousness of her singing voice always came as a surprise. It didn’t embarrass her, letting loose those grand, inflated emotions she paid no attention to, in life.

“Did you plan to be an opera singer?” I asked.

“No. I just planned to be the lady working in the Post Office. Well, I did and I didn’t. The work, the
training
. I just didn’t have the ambition for it, I guess that was my trouble. I always preferred having a good time.” She wore slacks on Saturday afternoons, and sandals that showed her pudgy, painted toes. She was dropping ashes on her stomach, which, ungirdled, popped out in a pregnant curve. “Smoking is ruining my voice,” she said meditatively.

Fern’s style of singing, though admired, was regarded in Jubilee as being just a hair’s-breadth from showing-off, and sometimes children did screech or warble after her, in the street. My mother could take this for persecution. She would construct such cases out of the flimsiest evidence, seeking out the Jewish couple who ran the Army Surplus Store, or the shrunken silent Chinese in the Laundry, with bewildering compassion, loud slow-spoken overtures of friendship. They did not know what to make of her. Fern was not persecuted, that I could see. Though my old aunts, my father’s aunts, would say her name in a peculiar way, as if it had a stone in it, that they would have to suck, and spit out. And Naomi did tell me, “That Fern Dogherty had a baby.”

“She never did,” I said, automatically defensive.

“She did so. She had it when she was nineteen years old. That’s why she got kicked out of the Conservatory.”

“How do you know?”

“My mother knows.”

Naomi’s mother had spies everywhere, old childbed cases, deathbed companions, keeping her informed. In her nursing job, going from one house to another, she was able to operate like an underwater vacuum tube, sucking up what nobody else could get at. I felt I had to argue with Naomi about it because Fern was our boarder, and Naomi was always saying things about people in our house. (“Your mother’s an atheist,” she would say with black relish, and I would say, “No she isn’t, she’s an agnostic,” and all through my reasoned hopeful explanation Naomi would chant,
Same difference, same difference
.) I was not able to retaliate, either out of delicacy or cowardice, though Naomi’s own father belonged to some odd and discredited religious sect, and wandered all over town talking prophecies without putting his false teeth in.

I took to noticing pictures of babies in the paper, or in magazines, when Fern was around, saying, “Aw, isn’t it
cute
?” and then watching her closely for a flicker of remorse, maternal longing, as if someday she might actually be persuaded to burst into tears, fling out her empty arms, struck to the heart by an ad for talcum powder or strained meat.

Furthermore Naomi said Fern did everything with Mr. Chamberlain, just the same as if they were married.

It was Mr. Chamberlain who got Fern boarding with us in the first place. We rented the house from his mother, now in her third year blind and bedridden in the Wawanash County Hospital. Fern’s mother was in the same place; it was there, in fact, on a visiting day, that they had met. She was working in the Blue River Post Office at that time. Mr. Chamberlain worked at the Jubilee Radio Station and lived in a small apartment in the same building, not wanting the trouble of a house. My mother spoke of him as “Fern’s friend,” in a clarifying tone of voice, as if to insist that the word friend in this case meant not more than it was supposed to mean.

“They enjoy each other’s company,” she said. “They don’t bother about any nonsense.”

Nonsense meant romance; it meant vulgarity; it meant sex.

I tried out on my mother what Naomi said.

“Fern and Mr. Chamberlain might just as well be married.”

“What? What do you mean? Who said that?”

“Everybody knows it.”

“I don’t. Everybody does not. Nobody ever said such a thing in my hearing. It’s that Naomi said it, isn’t?”

Naomi was not popular in my house, nor I in hers. Each of us was suspected of carrying the seeds of contamination—in my case, of atheism, in Naomi’s, of sexual preoccupation.

“It’s dirty-mindedness that is just rampant in this town, and will never let people alone.”

“If Fern Dogherty was not a good woman,” my mother concluded, with a spacious air of logic, “do you think I would have her living in my house?”

This year, our first year in high school, Naomi and I held almost daily discussions on the subject of sex, but took one tone, so that there were degrees of candour we could never reach. This tone was ribald, scornful, fanatically curious. A year ago we had liked to imagine ourselves victims of passion; now we were established as onlookers, or at most cold and gleeful experimenters. We had a book Naomi had found in her mother’s old hopechest, under the moth-balled best blankets.

Care should be taken during the initial connection,
we read aloud,
particularly if the male organ is of an unusual size. Vaseline may prove a helpful lubricant
.

“I prefer butter myself. Tastier.”

Intercourse between the thighs is often resorted to in the final stages of pregnancy.

“You mean they still do it
then
?”

The rear-entry position is sometimes indicated in cases where the
female is considerably obese.

“Fern,” Naomi said. “That’s how he does it to Fern. She’s considerably obese.”

“Aggh! This book makes me sick.”

The male sexual organ in erection, we read, had been known to reach a length of fourteen inches. Naomi spat out her chewing gum and rolled it between her palms, stretching it longer and longer, then picked it up by one end and dangled it in the air.

“Mr. Chamberlain the record-breaker!”

Thereafter whenever she came to my place, and Mr. Chamberlain was there, one of us, or both, if we were chewing gum, would take in out and roll it this way and dangle it innocently, till even the adults noticed and Mr. Chamberlain said, “That’s quite a game you got there,” and my mother said, “Stop that, its filthy.” (She meant the gum.) We watched Mr. Chamberlain and Fern for signs of passion, wantonness, lustful looks or hands up the skirt. We were not rewarded, my defence of them turning out to be truer than I wished it to be. For I as much as Naomi liked to entertain myself with thoughts of their grunting indecencies, their wallowing in jingly beds (in tourist cabins, Naomi said, every time they drove to Tupperton
to have a look at the lake
). Disgust did not rule out enjoyment, in my thoughts; indeed they were inseparable.

Mr. Chamberlain, Art Chamberlain, read the news on the Jubilee radio. He also did all the more serious and careful announcing. He had a fine professional voice, welcome as dark chocolate flowing in and out of the organ music on the Sunday afternoon program “In Memoriam,” sponsored by a local funeral parlour. He sometimes got Fern singing on this program, sacred songs—“I Wonder as I Wander”—and non-sacred but mournful songs—“The End of a Perfect Day.” It was not hard to get on the Jubilee radio; I myself had recited a comic poem, on the Saturday Morning Young Folks Party, and Naomi had played “The Bells of St. Mary’s” on the piano. Every time you turned it on there was a good chance of hearing someone you knew, or at least of hearing the names of people you knew mentioned in the dedications. (“We are going to play this piece also for Mr. and Mrs. Carl Otis on the occasion of their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, requested by their son George and wife Etta, and their three grandchildren Lorraine, Mark and Lois also by Mrs. Otis’s sister Mrs. Bill Townley of the Porterfield Road.”) I had phoned up myself and dedicated a song to Uncle Benny on his fortieth birthday; my mother would not have her name mentioned. She preferred listening to the Toronto station, which brought us the Metropolitan Opera, and news with no commercials, and a quiz program in which she competed with four gentlemen who, to judge from their voices, would all have little, pointed, beards.

Mr. Chamberlain had to read commercials too, and he did it with ripe concern, recommending Vick’s Nose Drops from Cross’s Drugstore, and Sunday dinner at the Brunswick Hotel, and Lee Wickert and sons for dead livestock removal. “How’s the dead livestock, soldier?” Fern would greet him, and he might slap her lightly on the rump. “I’ll tell them you need their services!” “Looks to me more like you do,” said Fern without much malice, and he would drop into a chair and smile at my mother for pouring him tea. His light blue-green eyes had no expression, just that colour, so pretty you would want to make a dress out of it. He was always tired.

Mr. Chamberlain’s white hands, his nails cut straight across, his greying, thinning, nicely combed hair, his body that did not in any way disturb his clothes but seemed to be made of the same material as they were, so that he might have been shirt and tie and suit all the way through, were strange to me in a man. Even Uncle Benny, so skinny and narrow-chested, with his damaged bronchial tubes, had some look or way of moving that predicted chance or intended violence, something that would make disorder; my father had this too, though he was so moderate in his ways. Yet it was Mr. Chamberlain, tapping his ready-made cigarette in the ashtray, Mr. Chamberlain who had been in the war, he had been in the Tank Corps. If my father was there when he came to see us—to see Fern, really, but he did not quickly make that apparent—my father would ask him questions about the war. But it was clear that they saw the war in different ways. My father saw it as an overall design, marked off in campaigns, which had a purpose, which failed or succeeded. Mr. Chamberlain saw it as a conglomeration of stories, leading nowhere in particular. He made his stories to be laughed at.

For instance he told us about the first time he went into action, what confusion there was. Some tanks had gone into a wood, got turned around, were coming out the wrong way, where they expected the Germans to come from. So the first shots they fired were at one of their own tanks.

“Blew it up!” said Mr. Chamberlain blithely, unapologetically.

“Were there soldiers in that tank?”

He looked at me in mocking surprise as he always did when I said anything; you would think I had just stood on my head for him. “Well, I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were!”

“Were they—killed, then?”

“Something happened to them. I certainly never saw them around again. Poof!”

“Shot by their own side, what a terrible thing,” said my mother, scandalized but less than ordinarily sure of herself.

“Things like that happen in a war,” said my father quietly but with some severity, as if to object to any of this showed a certain female naiveté. Mr. Chamberlain just laughed. He went on to tell about what they did on the last day of the war. They blew up the cookhouse, turned all the guns on it in the last jolly blaze they would get.

“Sounds like a bunch of kids,” said Fern. “Sounds like you weren’t grown-up enough to fight a
war
. It just sounds like you had one big idiotic good time.”

“What I always try to have, isn’t it? A good time.”

Once it came out that he had been in Florence, which was not surprising, since he had fought the war in Italy. But my mother sat up, she jumped a little in her chair, she quivered with attention.

“Were
you
in Florence?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mr. Chamberlain without enthusiasm.

“In Florence, you were in Florence,” repeated my mother, confused and joyful. I had an inkling of what she felt, but hoped she would not reveal too much. “I never thought,” she said. “Well, of course I knew it was Italy but it seems so strange—” She meant that this Italy we had been talking about, where the war was fought, was the same place history happened in, the very place, where the old Popes were, and the Medici, and Leonardo. The Cenci. The cypresses. Dante Alighieri.

Rather oddly, in view of her enthusiasm for the future, she was excited by the past. She hurried into the front room and came back with the Art and Architecture Supplement to the encyclopedia, full of statues, paintings, buildings, mostly photographed in a cloudy, cool, museum-grey light.

“There!” she opened it up on the table in front of him. “There’s your Florence. Michelangelo’s statue of David. Did you see that?”

A naked man. His marble thing hanging on him for everybody to look at; like a drooping lily petal. Who but my mother in her staunch and dreadful innocence would show a man, would show us all, a picture like that? Fern’s mouth was swollen, with the effort to contain her smile.

“I never got to see it, no. That place is full of statues. Famous this and famous that. You can’t turn around for them.”

I could see he was not a person to talk to, about things like this. But my mother kept on.

“Well surely you saw the bronze doors? The magnificent bronze doors? It took the artist his whole life to do them. Look at them, they’re here. What was his name—Ghiberti. Ghiberti. His whole life.”