Lives of Girls and Women (34 page)

I looked at these lovers lying on the graveyard grass without envy or curiosity. As I walked on into Jubilee I repossessed the world. Trees, houses, fences, streets, came back to me, in their own sober and familiar shapes. Unconnected to the life of love, uncoloured by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self— my old devious, ironic, isolated self—beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

My mother was already in bed. When I had failed to win the scholarship something she had never questioned—her hopes of the future, through her children—had collapsed. She was faced with the possibility that Owen and I would do nothing and become nothing after all, that we were mediocre, or infected with the dreaded, proud, scared perversity of my father’s family. There was Owen, living out on the Flats Road, saying “turrible” and “drownded” and using Uncle Benny’s grammar, saying he wanted to quit school. There was I going out with Garnet French and refusing to talk about it, and not getting the scholarship.

“You will have to do what you want,” she said bitterly.

But was that so easy to know? I went out to the kitchen, turned on the light, and made myself a big mixture of fried potatoes and onions and tomatoes and eggs, which I ate greedily and sombrely out of the pan, standing up. I was free and I was not free. I was relieved and I was desolate. Suppose, then, I had never wakened up? Suppose I had let myself lie down and be baptized in the Wawanash river?

I entertained this possibility off and on, as if it still existed—along with the leafy shade and waterstains in his house, and the bounty of my lover’s body—for many years.

He did not come on Monday. I waited to see if he would. I combed my hair and waited, classically, behind the curtains in our front room. I did not know what I would do if he came; the ache of wanting to see his truck, his face, swallowed up everything else. I thought of walking past the Baptist Church, to see if the truck was there. If I had done that, if it had been there, I might have walked on inside, rigid as a sleepwalker. I did get as far as our verandah. I was crying, I noticed, whimpering in a monotonous rhythm the way children do to celebrate a hurt. I turned around, went back into the hall to look in the dim mirror at my twisted wet face. Without diminishment of pain I observed myself; I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all; I was watching. I was watching, I was suffering. I said into the mirror a line from Tennyson, from my mother’s
Complete Tennyson
that was a present from her old teacher, Miss Rush. I said it with absolute sincerity, absolute irony.

He cometh not, she said.

From “Mariana,” one of the silliest poems I had ever read. It made my tears flow harder. Watching myself still, I went back to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee and brought it into the dining room where the city paper was still lying on the table. My mother had torn the crossword out and taken it up to bed. I opened it up at the want ads, and got a pencil, so I could circle any job that seemed possible. I made myself understand what I was reading, and after some time I felt a mild, sensible gratitude for these printed words, these strange possibilities. Cities existed; telephone operators were wanted; the future could be furnished without love or scholarships. Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life.

Garnet French, Garnet French, Garnet French. Real Life.

Epilogue: The Photographer

“This town is rife with suicides,” was one of the things my mother would say, and for a long time I carried this mysterious, dogmatic statement around with me, believing it to be true—that is, believing that Jubilee had many more suicides than other places, just as Porterfield had fights and drunks, that its suicides distinguished the town like the cupola on the Town Hall. Later on my attitude towards everything my mother said became one of skepticism and disdain, and I argued that there were, in fact, very few suicides in Jubilee, that certainly their number could not exceed the statistical average, and I would challenge my mother to name them. She would go methodically along the various streets of the town, in her mind, saying, “—hanged himself, while his wife and family were at church—went out of the room after breakfast and shot himself in the head—” but there were not really so many; I was probably closer to the truth than she was.

There were two suicides by drowning, if you counted Miss Farris my old teacher. The other one was Marion Sherriff, on whose family my mother, and others, would linger with a touch of pride, saying, “Well, there is a family that has had its share of Tragedy!” One brother had died an alcoholic, one was in the Asylum at Tupperton, and Marion had walked into the Wawanash River. People always said she
walked into
it, though in the case of Miss Farris they said she
threw herself into
it. Since nobody had seen either of them do it, the difference must have come from the difference in the women themselves, Miss Farris being impulsive and dramatic in all she did, and Marion Sherriff deliberate and take-your-time.

At least that was how she looked in her picture, which was hanging in the main hall of the High School, above the case containing the

Marion A. Sherriff Girls Athletic Trophy, a silver cup taken out each year and presented to the best girl athlete in the school, then put back in, after having that girl’s name engraved on it. In the picture Marion Sherriff was holding a tennis racket and wearing a white pleated skirt and a white sweater with two dark stripes around the V of the neck. She had her hair parted in the middle, pinned unbecomingly back from the temples; she was stocky and unsmiling.

“Pregnant, naturally,” Fern Dogherty used to say, and Naomi said, everybody said, except my mother.

“That was never established. Why blacken her name?”

“Some fellow got her in trouble and walked out on her,” said Fern positively. “Otherwise why drown herself, a girl seventeen?”

A time came when all the books in the Library in the Town Hall were not enough for me, I had to have my own. I saw that the only thing to do with my life was to write a novel. I picked on the Sherriff family to write it about; what had happened to them isolated them, splendidly, doomed them to fiction. I changed the family name from Sherriff to Halloway, and the dead father from a storekeeper to a judge. I knew from my reading that in the families of judges, as of great landowners, degeneracy and madness were things to be counted on. The mother I could keep just as she was, just as I used to see her in the days when I went to the Anglican Church, and she was always there, gaunt and superb, with her grand trumpeting supplications. I moved them out of their house, though, transported them from the mustard-coloured stucco bungalow behind the
Herald-Advance
building, where they had always lived and where even now Mrs. Sheriff kept a tidy lawn and picked-clean flowerbeds, and into a house of my own invention, a towered brick house with long narrow windows and a porte-cochère and a great deal of surrounding shrubbery perversely cut to look like roosters, dogs and foxes.

Nobody knew about this novel. I had no need to tell anybody. I wrote out a few bits of it and put them away, but soon I saw that it was a mistake to try to write anything down; what I wrote down might flaw the beauty and wholeness of the novel in my mind.

I carried it—the idea of it—everywhere with me, as if it were one of those magic boxes a favoured character gets hold of in a fairy story: touch it and his troubles disappear. I carried it along when Jerry Storey and I walked out on the railway tracks and he told me that some day, if the world lasted, newborn babies could be stimulated with waves of electricity and would be able to compose music like Beethoven’s, or like Verdi’s, whatever was wanted. He explained how people could have their intelligence and their talents and preferences and desires built into them, in judicious amounts; why not?

“Like
Brave New World
?” I asked him, and he said, what was that? I told him, and he answered chastely, “I don’t know, I never read fiction.”

I just kept hold of the idea of the novel, and felt better; it seemed to make what he said unimportant even if true. He began to sing sentimental songs with a German accent and tried goose-stepping along the rails, falling off as I knew he would.

“Be-
lieff
me if all those en-dearing jung tcharms—”

In my novel I had got rid of the older brother, the alcoholic; three tragic destinies were too much even for a book, and certainly more than I could handle. The younger brother I saw as gentle and loving, with an offensive innocence about him; pink freckled face, defenceless fattish body. Bullied at school, unable to learn arithmetic or geography, he would be happy once a year, when he was allowed to ride round and round on the merry-go-round at the Kinsmen’s Fair, beatifically smiling. (I got this of course from Frankie Hall, that grown idiot who used to live out on the Flats Road, and was dead by now; he was always let ride free, all day long, and would wave at people with a royal negligence, though he never acknowledged anybody at any other time.) Boys would taunt him about his sister, about—
Caroline!
Her name was Caroline. She came ready-made into my mind, taunting and secretive, blotting out altogether that pudgy Marion, the tennis-player. Was she a witch? Was she a nymphomaniac? Nothing so simple!

She was wayward and light as a leaf and she slipped along the streets of Jubilee as if she was trying to get through a crack in an invisible wall, sideways. She had long black hair. She bestowed her gifts capriciously on men—not on good-looking young men who thought they had a right to her, not on sullen high school heroes, athletes, with habits of conquest written on their warm-blooded faces, but on middle-aged weary husbands, defeated salesmen passing through town, even, occasionally, on the deformed and mildly deranged. But her generosity mocked them, her
bittersweet flesh, the colour of peeled almonds,
burned men down quickly and left a taste of death. She was the sacrifice, spread for sex on mouldy uncomfortable tombstones, pushed against the cruel bark of trees, her frail body squashed into the mud and hen-dirt of barnyards, supporting the killing weight of men, but it was she, more than they, who survived.

One day a man came to take photographs at the High School. She saw him first shrouded in his photographer’s black cloth, a hump of grey-black, shabby cloth behind the tripod, the big eye, the black accordion pleating of the old-fashioned camera. When he came out, what did he look like? Black hair parted in the middle, combed back in two wings, dandruff, rather narrow chest and shoulders and a pasty, flaky skin—and in spite of his look of scruffiness and ill health, a wicked fluid energy about him, a bright unpitying smile.

He had no name in the book. He was always called
The Photographer
. He drove around the country in a high square car whose top was of flapping black cloth. The pictures he took turned out to be unusual, even frightening. People saw that in his pictures they had aged twenty or thirty years. Middle-aged people saw in their own features the terrible, growing, inescapable likeness of their dead parents; young fresh girls and men showed what gaunt or dulled or stupid faces they would have when they were fifty. Brides looked pregnant, children adenoidal. So he was not a popular photographer, though cheap. However no one liked to refuse him business; everybody was afraid of him. Children dropped into the ditches when his car was coming along the road. But Caroline ran after him, she tramped the hot roads looking for him, she waited and waylaid him and offered herself to him without the tender contempt, indifferent readiness she showed to other men, but with straining eagerness and hope and cries. And one day (when she could already feel her womb swollen
like a hard yellow gourd in her belly
), she found the car overturned beside a bridge, overturned in a ditch beside a dry creek. It was empty. He was gone. That night she walked into the Wawanash River.

That was all. Except that after she died her poor brother, looking at the picture the Photographer had taken of his sister’s high school class, saw that in this picture
Caroline’s eyes were white
.

I had not worked out all the implications of this myself, but felt they were varied and powerful.

For this novel I had changed Jubilee, too, or picked out some features of it and ignored others. It became an older, darker, more decaying town, full of unpainted board fences covered with tattered posters advertising circuses, fall fairs, elections, that had long since come and gone. People in it were very thin, like Caroline, or fat as bubbles. Their speech was subtle and evasive and bizarrely stupid; their platitudes crackled with madness. The season was always the height of summer—white, brutal heat, dogs lying as if dead on the sidewalks, waves of air shuddering, jelly-like, over the empty highway. (But how, then—for niggling considerations of fact would pop up, occasionally, to worry me—how then was there going to be enough water in the Wawanash River? Instead of moving, head bowed, moonlight-naked, acquiescent, into its depths, Caroline would have to lie down on her face as if she was drowning herself in the bathtub.)

All pictures. The reasons for things happening I seemed vaguely to know, but could not explain; I expected all that would come clear later. The main thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story, as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day.

I did not pay much attention to the real Sherriffs, once I had transformed them for fictional purposes. Bobby Sherriff, the son who had been in the Asylum, came home for a while—it seemed this was something that had happened before—and was to be seen walking around Jubilee chatting with people. I had been close enough to him to hear his soft, deferential, leisurely voice, I had observed that he always looked freshly barbered, talcumed, wore clothes of good quality, was short, stout, and walked with that carefree air of enjoyment affected by those who have nothing to do. I hardly connected him with my mad Halloway brother.