Selected Stories (12 page)

All the same it would have suited her better to have found one of those ladies beautiful, not Char. It would have been more appropriate. More suitable than Char in her wet apron with her cross expression, bent over the starch basin. Et was a person who didn’t like contradictions, didn’t like things out of place, didn’t like mysteries or extremes.

She didn’t like the bleak notoriety of having Sandy’s drowning attached to her, didn’t like the memory people kept of her father carrying the body up from the beach. She could be seen at twilight, in her gym bloomers, turning cartwheels on the lawn of the stricken house. She made a wry mouth, which nobody saw, one day in the park when Char said, “That was my little brother who was drowned.”

T
HE PARK
overlooked the beach. They were standing there with Blaikie Noble, the hotel owner’s son, who said, “Those waves can be dangerous. Three or four years ago there was a kid drowned.”

And Char said—to give her credit, she didn’t say it tragically, but almost with amusement, that he should know so little about Mock Hill people—“That was my little brother who was drowned.”

Blaikie Noble was not any older than Char—if he had been, he would have been fighting in France—but he had not had to live all his life in Mock Hill. He did not know the real people there as well as he knew the regular guests at his father’s hotel. Every winter he went with his parents to California, on the train. He had seen the! Pacific surf. He had pledged allegiance to their flag. His manners were democratic, his skin was tanned. This was at a time when people were not usually tanned as a result of leisure, only work. His hair was bleached by the sun. His good looks were almost as notable as Char’s but his were corrupted by charm, as hers were not.

It was the heyday of Mock Hill and all the other towns around the lakes, of all the hotels which in later years would become Sunshine Camps for city children, t.b. sanitoriums, barracks for R.A.F. training pilots in World War II. The white paint on the hotel was renewed every spring, hollowed-out logs filled with flowers were set on the railings, pots of flowers swung on chains above them. Croquet sets and wooden swings were set out on the lawns, the tennis court rolled. People who could not afford the hotel, young workingmen, shop clerks, and factory girls from the city, stayed in a row of tiny cottages, joined by latticework that hid their garbage pails and communal outhouses, stretching far up the beach. Girls from Mock Hill, if they had mothers to tell them what to do, were told not to walk out there. Nobody told Char what to do, so she walked along the boardwalk in front of them in the glaring afternoon, taking Et with her for company. The cottages had no glass in their windows; they had only propped-up wooden shutters that were closed at night. From the dark holes came one or two indistinct sad or drunk invitations, that was all. Char’s looks and style did not attract men, perhaps intimidated them. All through high school in Mock Hill she had not one boyfriend. Blaikie Noble was her first, if that was what he was.

What did this affair of Char’s and Blaikie Noble’s amount to, in the summer of 1918? Et was never sure. He did not call at the house, at least not more than once or twice. He was kept busy working at the hotel. Every afternoon he drove an open excursion wagon, with an awning on top of it, up the lakeshore road, taking people to look at the Indian graves and the limestone garden and to glimpse through the trees the Gothic stone mansion, built by a Toronto distiller and known locally as Grog Castle. He was also in charge of the variety show the hotel put on once a week, with a mixture of local talent, recruited guests, and singers and comedians brought in especially for the performance.

Late mornings seemed to be the time he and Char had. “Come on,” Char would say, “I have to go downtown,” and she would in fact pick up the mail and walk partway round the Square before veering off into the park. Soon, Blaikie Noble would appear from the side door of the hotel and come bounding up the steep path. Sometimes he would not even bother with the path but jump over the back fence, to amaze them. None of this, the bounding or jumping, was done the way some boy from Mock Hill High School might have done it, awkwardly yet naturally. Blaikie Noble behaved like a man imitating a boy; he mocked himself but was graceful, like an actor.

“Isn’t he stuck on himself?” said Et to Char, watching. The position she had taken up right away on Blaikie was that she didn’t like him.

“Of course he is,” said Char.

She told Blaikie. “Et says you’re stuck on yourself.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her you had to be, nobody else is.”

Blaikie didn’t mind. He had taken the position that he liked Et. He would with a quick tug loosen and destroy the arrangement of looped-up braids she wore. He told them things about the concert artists. He told them the Scottish ballad singer was a drunk and wore corsets, that the female impersonator even in his hotel room donned a blue nightgown with feathers, that the lady ventriloquist talked to her dolls—they were named Alphonse and Alicia—as if they were real people, and had them sitting up in bed one on each side of her.

“How would you know that?” Char said.

“I took her up her breakfast.”

“I thought you had maids to do that.”

“The morning after the show I do it. That’s when I hand them their pay envelope and give them their walking papers. Some of them would stay all week if you didn’t inform them. She sits up in bed trying to feed them bits of bacon and talking to them and doing them answering back, you’d have a fit if you could see.”

“She’s cracked, I guess,” Char said peacefully.

O
NE NIGHT
that summer Et woke up and remembered she had left her pink organdie dress on the line, after hand-washing it. She thought she heard rain, just the first few drops. She didn’t, it was just leaves rustling, but she was confused, waking up like that. She thought it was far on in the night too, but thinking about it later she decided it might have been only around midnight. She got up and went downstairs, turned on the back kitchen light, and let herself out the back door, and standing on the stoop pulled the clothesline towards her. Then almost under her feet, from the grass right beside the stoop, where there was a big lilac bush that had grown and spread, untended, to the size of a tree, two figures lifted themselves, didn’t stand or even sit up, just roused their heads as if from bed, still tangled together some way. The back kitchen light didn’t shine directly out but lit the yard enough for her to see their faces. Blaikie and Char.

She never did get a look at what state their clothes were in, to see how far they had gone or were going. She wouldn’t have wanted to. To see their faces was enough for her. Their mouths were big and swollen, their cheeks flattened, coarsened, their eyes holes. Et left her dress, she fled into the house and into her bed where she surprised herself by falling asleep. Char never said a word about it to her next day. All she said was
“I
brought your dress in, Et. I thought it might rain.” As if she had never seen Et out there pulling on the clothesline. Et wondered. She knew if she said, “You saw me,” Char would probably tell her it had been a dream. She let Char think she had been fooled into believing that, if that was what Char was thinking. That way, Et was
left knowing more; she was left knowing what Char looked like when she lost her powers, abdicated. Sandy drowned, with green stuff clogging his nostrils, couldn’t look more lost than that.

B
EFORE
C
HRISTMAS
the news came to Mock Hill that Blaikie Noble was married. He had married the lady ventriloquist, the one with Alphonse and Alicia. Those dolls, who wore evening dress and had sleek hairdos in the style of Vernon and Irene Castle, were more clearly remembered than the lady herself. The only thing people recalled for sure about her was that she could not have been under forty. A nineteen-year-old boy. It was because he had not been brought up like other boys, had been allowed the run of the hotel, taken to California, let mix with all sorts of people. The result was depravity, and could have been predicted.

Char swallowed poison. Or what she thought was poison. It was laundry blueing. The first thing she could reach down from the shelf in the back kitchen. Et came home after school—she had heard the news at noon, from Char herself, in fact, who had laughed and said, “Wouldn’t that kill you?”—and she found Char vomiting into the toilet. “Go get the Medical Book,” Char said to her. A terrible involuntary groan came out of her. “Read what it says about poison.” Et went instead to phone the doctor. Char came staggering out of the bathroom holding the bottle of bleach they kept behind the tub. “If you don’t put up the phone I’ll drink the whole bottle,” she said in a harsh whisper. Their mother was presumably asleep behind her closed door.

Et had to hang up the phone and look in the ugly old book where she had read long ago about childbirth and signs of death, and had learned about holding a mirror to the mouth. She was under the mistaken impression that Char had been drinking from the bleach bottle already, so she read all about that. Then she found it was the blueing. Blueing was not in the book, but it seemed the best thing to do would be to induce vomiting, as the book advised for most poisons—Char was at it already, didn’t need to have it induced—and then drink a quart of milk. When Char got the milk down she was sick again.

“I didn’t do this on account of Blaikie Noble,” she said between spasms. “Don’t you ever think that. I wouldn’t be such a fool. A pervert like him. I did it because I’m sick of living.”

“What are you sick of about living?” said Et sensibly when Char had wiped her face.

“I’m sick of this town and all the stupid people in it and Mother and her dropsy and keeping house and washing sheets every day. I don’t think I’m going to vomit anymore. I think I could drink some coffee. It says coffee.”

Et made a pot and Char got out two of the best cups. They began to giggle as they drank.

“I’m sick of Latin,” Et said. “I’m sick of Algebra. I think I’ll take blueing.”

“Life is a burden,” Char said. “O Life, where is thy sting?”

“O Death. O Death, where is thy sting?”

“Did I say Life? I meant Death. O Death, where is thy sting? Pardon me.”

O
NE AFTERNOON
Et was staying with Arthur while Char shopped and changed books at the library. She wanted to make him an eggnog, and she went searching in Char’s cupboard for the nutmeg. In with the vanilla and the almond extract and the artificial rum she found a small bottle of a strange liquid,
ZINC PHOSPHIDE
. She read the label and turned it around in her hands. A rodenticide. Rat poison, that must mean. She had not known Char and Arthur were troubled with rats. They kept a cat, old Tom, asleep now around Arthur’s feet. She unscrewed the top and sniffed at it, to know what it smelled like. Like nothing. Of course. It must taste like nothing too, or it wouldn’t fool the rats.

She put it back where she had found it. She made Arthur his eggnog and took it in and watched him drink it. A slow poison. She remembered that from Blaikie’s foolish story. Arthur drank with an eager noise, like a child, more to please her, she thought, than because he was so pleased himself. He would drink anything you handed him. Naturally.

“How are you these days, Arthur?”

“Oh, Et. Some days a bit stronger, and then I seem to slip back. It takes time.”

But there was none gone, the bottle seemed full. What awful nonsense. Like something you read about, Agatha Christie. She would mention it to Char and Char would tell her the reason.

“Do you want me to read to you?” she asked Arthur, and he said yes. She sat by the bed and read to him from a book about the Duke of Wellington. He had been reading it by himself but his arms got tired holding it. All those battles, and wars, and terrible things, what did Arthur know about such affairs, why was he so interested? He knew nothing. He did not know why things happened, why people could not behave sensibly. He was too good. He knew about history but not about what went on, in front of his eyes, in his house, anywhere. Et differed from Arthur in knowing that something went on, even if she could not understand why; she differed from him in knowing there were those you could not trust.

She did not say anything to Char after all. Every time she was in the house she tried to make some excuse to be alone in the kitchen, so that she could open the cupboard and stand on tiptoe and look in, to see it over the tops of the other bottles, to see that the level had not gone down. She did think maybe she was going a little strange, as old maids did; this fear of hers was like the absurd and harmless fears young girls sometimes have, that they will jump out a window, or strangle a baby sitting in its buggy. Though it was not her own acts she was frightened of.

E
T LOOKED
at Char and Blaikie and Arthur, sitting on the porch, trying to decide if they wanted to go in and put the light on and play cards. She wanted to convince herself of her silliness. Char’s hair, and Blaikie’s too, shone in the dark. Arthur was almost bald now and Et’s own hair was thin and dark. Char and Blaikie seemed to her the same kind of animal—tall, light, powerful, with a dangerous luxuriance. They sat apart but shone out together.
Lovers
. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing. There was Arthur in the rocker with a quilt over his knees, foolish as something that hasn’t grown its
final, most necessary, skin. Yet in a way the people like Arthur were the most troublemaking of all.

“I love my love with an R, because he is ruthless. His name is Rex, and he lives in a—restaurant.”

“I love my love with an A, because he is absentminded. His name is Arthur, and he lives in an ash can.”

“Why, Et,” Arthur said. “I never suspected. But I don’t know if I like about the ash can.”

“You would think we were all twelve years old,” said Char.

A
FTER THE BLUEING
episode Char became popular. She became involved in the productions of the Amateur Dramatic Society and the Oratorio Society, although she was never much of an actress or a singer. She was always the cold and beautiful heroine in the plays, or the brittle exquisite young society woman. She learned to smoke, because of having to do it onstage. In one play Et never forgot, she was a statue. Or rather, she played a girl who had to pretend to be a statue, so that a young man fell in love with her and later discovered, to his confusion and perhaps disappointment, that she was only human. Char had to stand for eight minutes perfectly still onstage, draped in white crêpe and showing the audience her fine indifferent profile. Everybody marvelled at how she did it.