Runaway (33 page)

Shame, terrible shame, was what she felt. A more confident, a more experienced, woman would have felt anger and walked away in a fine fury.
Piss on him
. Robin had heard a woman at work talk about a man who had abandoned her.
You can’t trust anything in trousers
. That woman had acted as if she was not surprised. And deep down, Robin now was not surprised, either, but the blame was for herself. She should have understood those words of last summer, the promise and farewell at the station, as a piece of folly, unnecessary kindness to a lonely female who had lost her purse and came to plays by herself. He would have regretted that before he got home, and prayed that she wouldn’t take him seriously.

It was quite possible that he had brought back a wife from Montenegro, a wife upstairs—that would explain the alarm in his face, the shudder of dismay. If he had thought of Robin it would be in fear of her doing just what she had been doing—dreaming her dreary virginal dreams, fabricating her silly plans. Women had probably made fools of themselves over him before now, and he would have found ways to get rid of them. This was a way. Better cruel than kind. No apologies, no explanations, no hope. Pretend you don’t recognize her, and if that doesn’t work, slam a door in her face. The sooner you can get her to hate you, the better.

Though with some of them it’s uphill work.

Exactly. And here she was, weeping. She had managed to hold it back along the street, but on the path by the river, she was weeping. The same black swan swimming alone, the same families of ducklings and their quacking parents, the sun on the water. It was better not to try to escape, better not to ignore this blow. If you did that for a moment, you had to put up with its hitting you again, a great crippling whack in the chest.

“Better timing this year,” Joanne said. “How was your play?”

“I didn’t see all of it. Just when I was going into the theater some bug flew into my eye. I blinked and blinked but I couldn’t get rid of it and I had to get up and go to the Ladies and try to wash it out. And then I must’ve got part of it on the towel and rubbed it into the other eye too.”

“You look as if you’d been bawling your eyes out. When you came in I thought that must’ve been a whale of a sad play. You better wash your face in salt water.”

“I was going to.”

There were other things she was going to do, or not do. Never go to Stratford, never walk on those streets, never see another play. Never wear the green dresses, neither the lime nor the avocado. Avoid hearing any news of Montenegro, which should not be too difficult.

Now the real winter has set in and the lake is frozen over almost all the way to the breakwater. The ice is rough, in some places it looks as if big waves had been frozen in place. Workmen are out taking down the Christmas lights. Flu is reported. People’s eyes water from walking against the wind. Most women are into their winter uniform of sweatpants and ski jackets.

But not Robin. When she steps off the elevator to visit the third and top floor of the hospital, she is wearing a long black coat, gray wool skirt, and a lilac-gray silk blouse. Her thick, straight, charcoal-gray hair is cut shoulder-length, and she has tiny diamonds in her ears. (It is still noted, just as it used to be, that some of the best-looking, best-turned-out women in town are those who did not marry.) She does not have to dress like a nurse now, because she works part-time and only on this floor.

You can take the elevator up to the third floor in the usual
way, but it’s more difficult to get down. The nurse behind the desk has to push a hidden button to release you. This is the Psychiatric Ward, though it is seldom called that. It looks west over the lake, like Robin’s apartment, and so it is often called Sunset Hotel. And some older people refer to it as the Royal York. The patients there are short-term, though with some of them the short terms keep recurring. Those whose delusions or withdrawals or miseries become permanent are housed elsewhere, in the County Home, properly called the Long Term Care Facility, just outside of town.

In forty years the town has not grown a great deal, but it has changed. There are two shopping malls, though the stores on the square struggle on. There are new houses—an adult community—out on the bluffs, and two of the big old houses overlooking the lake have been converted to apartments. Robin has been lucky enough to get one of these. The house on Isaac Street where she and Joanne used to live has been smartened up with vinyl and turned into a real estate office. Willard’s house is still the same, more or less. He had a stroke a few years ago but made a good recovery, though he has to walk with two canes. When he was in the hospital Robin saw quite a lot of him. He talked about what good neighbors she and Joanne had been, and what fun they had playing cards.

Joanne has been dead for eighteen years, and after selling the house Robin has moved away from old associations. She doesn’t go to church anymore, and except for those who become patients in the hospital, she hardly ever sees the people she knew when she was young, the people she went to school with.

The prospects of marriage have opened up again, in a limited way, at her time of life. There are widowers looking around, men left on their own. Usually they want a woman experienced at marriage—though a good job doesn’t come amiss either. But Robin has made it clear that she isn’t interested. The people she
has known since she was young say she never has been interested, that’s just the way she is. Some of the people she knows now think she must be a lesbian, but that she has been brought up in an environment so primitive and crippling that she can’t acknowledge it.

There are different sorts of people in town now, and these are the people she has made friends with. Some of them live together without being married. Some of them were born in India and Egypt and the Philippines and Korea. The old patterns of life, the rules of earlier days, persist to some extent, but a lot of people go their own way without even knowing about such things. You can buy almost any kind of food you want, and on a fine Sunday morning you can sit at a sidewalk table drinking fancy coffee and enjoying the sound of church bells, without any thought of worship. The beach is no longer surrounded by railway sheds and warehouses—you can walk on a boardwalk for a mile along the lake. There is a Choral Society and a Players Society. Robin is still very active in the Players Society, though not onstage so much as she once was. Several years ago she played Hedda Gabler. The general response was that it was an unpleasant play but that she played Hedda splendidly. An especially good job as the character—so people said—was so much the opposite of herself in real life.

Quite a number of people from here go to Stratford these days. She goes instead to see plays at Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Robin notes the three cots lined up against the opposite wall.

“What’s up?” she says to Coral, the nurse at the desk.

“Temporary,” says Coral, in a dubious tone. “It’s the redistribution.”

Robin goes to hang her coat and bag up in the closet behind the desk, and Coral tells her that these cases are from Perth
County. It’s some kind of switch on account of overcrowding there, she says. Only somebody got their wires crossed and the county facility here isn’t ready for them yet, so it’s been decided to park them here for the time being.

“Should I go over and say hello?”

“Up to you. Last I looked they were all out of it.”

The three cots have their sides up, the patients lying flat. And Coral was right, they all seem to be sleeping. Two old women and one old man. Robin turns away, and then turns back. She stands looking down at the old man. His mouth is open and his false teeth, if he has any, have been removed. He has his hair yet, white and cropped short. Flesh fallen away, cheeks sunken, but still a face broad at the temples, retaining some look of authority and—as when she last saw it—of perturbation. Patches of shrivelled, pale, almost silvery skin, probably where cancerous spots have been cut away. His body worn down, legs almost disappearing under the covers, but still some breadth in the chest and shoulders, very much as she remembers.

She reads the card attached to the foot of his bed.

Alexander Adzic
.

Danilo. Daniel.

Perhaps that is his second name. Alexander. Or else he has lied, taken the precaution of telling a lie or half a lie, right from the start and nearly to the end.

She goes back to the desk and speaks to Coral.

“Any info on that man?”

“Why? Do you know him?”

“I think I might.”

“I’ll see what there is. I can call it up.”

“No hurry,” Robin says. “Just when you have time. It’s only curiosity. I better go now and see my people.”

It is Robin’s job to talk to these patients twice a week, to write
reports on them, as to how their delusions or depressions are clearing up, whether the pills are working, and how their moods are affected by the visits they have had from their relatives or their partners. She has worked on this floor for years, ever since the practice of keeping psychiatric patients close to home was introduced back in the seventies, and she knows many of the people who keep coming back. She took some extra courses to qualify herself for treating psychiatric cases, but it’s something she had a feeling for anyway. Sometime after she came back from Stratford, not having seen
As You Like It
, she had begun to be drawn to this work. Something—though not what she was expecting—
had
changed her life.

She saves Mr. Wray till the last, because he generally wants the most time. She isn’t always able to give him as much as he would like—it depends on the problems of the others. Today the rest of them are generally on the mend, thanks to their pills, and all they do is apologize about the fuss they have caused. But Mr. Wray, who believes that his contributions to the discovery of DNA have never been rewarded or acknowledged, is on the rampage about a letter to James Watson. Jim, he calls him.

“That letter I sent Jim,” he says. “I know enough not to send a letter like that and not keep a copy. But yesterday I went looking through my files and guess what? You tell me what.”

“You better tell me,” says Robin.

“Not there. Not there. Stolen.”

“It could be misplaced. I’ll have a look around.”

“I’m not surprised. I should have given up long ago. I’m fighting the Big Boys and who ever wins when you fight Them? Tell me the truth. Tell me. Should I give up?”

“You have to decide. Only you.”

He begins to recite to her, once more, the particulars of his misfortune. He has not been a scientist, he has worked as a surveyor, but he must have followed scientific progress all his life.
The information he has given her, and even the drawings he has managed with a dull pencil, are no doubt correct. Only the story of his being cheated is clumsy and predictable, and probably owes a lot to the movies or television.

But she always loves the part of the story where he describes how the spiral unzips and the two strands float apart. He shows her how, with such grace, such appreciative hands. Each strand setting out on its appointed journey to double itself according to its own instructions.

He loves that too, he marvels at it, with tears in his eyes. She always thanks him for his explanation, and wishes that he could stop there, but of course he can’t.

Nevertheless, she believes he’s getting better. When he begins to root around in the byways of the injustice, to concentrate on something like the stolen letter, it means he’s probably getting better.

With a little encouragement, a little shift in his attention, he could perhaps fall in love with her. This has happened with a couple of patients, before now. Both were married. But that did not keep her from sleeping with them, after they were discharged. By that time, however, feelings were altered. The men felt gratitude, she felt goodwill, both of them felt some sort of misplaced nostalgia.

Not that she regrets it. There’s very little now that she regrets. Certainly not her sexual life, which has been sporadic and secret but, on the whole, comforting. The effort she put into keeping it secret was perhaps hardly necessary, seeing how people had made up their minds about her—the people she knew now had done that just as thoroughly and mistakenly as the people she knew long ago.