The Beggar Maid (24 page)

They tried to count it, but kept getting confused. They played with it instead, dropping coins ostentatiously through their fingers. That was a giddy time late at night in the rented kitchen on the mountainside. Bounty where you’d never look for it; streaks of loss and luck. One of the few times, one of the few hours, when Rose could truly say she was not at the mercy of past or future, or love, or anybody. She hoped it was the same for Anna.

Tom wrote her a long letter, a loving, humorous letter, mentioning fate. A grieved, relieved renunciation, before he set off for England. Rose didn’t have any address for him, there, or she might have written asking him to give them another chance. That was her nature.

This last snow of the winter was quickly gone, causing some flooding in the valleys. Patrick wrote that he would drive up in June, when school was out, and take Anna back with him for the summer. He said he wanted to start the divorce, because he had met a girl he wanted to marry. Her name was Elizabeth. He said she was a fine and stable person.

And did Rose not think, said Patrick, that it might be better for Anna to be settled in her old home next year, in the home she had always known, to be back at her old school with her old friends (Jeremy
kept asking about her) rather than traipsing around with Rose in her new independent existence? Might it not be true—and here Rose thought she heard the voice of the stable girl friend—that she was using Anna to give herself some stability, rather than face up to the consequences of the path she had chosen? Of course, he said, Anna must be given her choice.

Rose wanted to reply that she was making a home for Anna here, but she could not do that, truthfully. She no longer wanted to stay. The charm, the transparency, of this town was gone for her. The pay was poor. She would never be able to afford anything but this cheap apartment. She might never get a better job, or another lover. She was thinking of going east, going to Toronto, trying to get a job there, with a radio or television station, perhaps even some acting jobs. She wanted to take Anna with her, set them up again in some temporary shelter. It was just as Patrick said. She wanted to come home to Anna, to fill her life with Anna. She didn’t think Anna would choose that life. Poor, picturesque, gypsying childhoods are not much favored by children, though they will claim to value them, for all sorts of reasons, later on.

The spotted fish died first, then the orange one. Neither Anna nor Rose suggested another trip to Woolworth’s, so that the black one could have company. It didn’t look as if it wanted company. Swollen, bug-eyed, baleful and at ease, it commanded the whole fishbowl for its own.

Anna made Rose promise not to flush it down the toilet after she was gone. Rose promised, and before she left for Toronto she walked over to Dorothy’s house, carrying the fishbowl, to make her this unwelcome present. Dorothy accepted it decently, said she would name it after the man in Seattle, and congratulated Rose on leaving.

A
nna went to live with Patrick and Elizabeth. She began to take drama and ballet lessons. Elizabeth believed that children should have accomplishments, and keep busy. They gave her the four-poster bed. Elizabeth made a canopy and coverlet for it, and she made Anna a nightdress and cap to match.

They got Anna a kitten, and they sent Rose a picture of her sitting with the kitten on the bed, looking demure and satisfied in the midst of all that flowered cloth.

Simon’s Luck

R
ose gets lonely in new places; she wishes she had invitations. She goes out and walks the streets and looks in the lighted windows at all the Saturday-night parties, the Sunday-night family suppers. It’s no good telling herself she wouldn’t be long inside there, chattering and getting drunk, or spooning up the gravy, before she’d wish she was walking the streets. She thinks she could take on any hospitality. She could go to parties in rooms hung with posters, lit by lamps with Coca-Cola shades, everything crumbly and askew; or else in warm professional rooms with lots of books, and brass rubbings, and maybe a skull or two; even in the recreation rooms she can just see the tops of, through the basement windows: rows of beer steins, hunting horns, drinking horns, guns. She could go and sit on Lurex-threaded sofas under hangings of black velvet displaying mountains, galleons, polar bears executed in brushed wool. She would like very much to be dishing up a costly
cabinet de diplomate
out of a cut-glass bowl in a rich dining room with a big gleaming belly of sideboard behind her, and a dim picture of horses feeding, cows feeding, sheep feeding, on badly painted purple grass. Or she could do as well with batter pudding in the eating nook of a kitchen in a little stucco house by the bus stop, plaster pears and peaches decorating the wall, ivy curling out of little brass pots. Rose is an actress; she can fit in anywhere.

She does get asked to parties. About two years ago, she was at a party in a high-rise apartment building in Kingston. The windows looked out on Lake Ontario and Wolfe Island. Rose didn’t live in Kingston. She lived up-country; she had been teaching drama for two
years at a community college. Some people were surprised that she would do this. They did not know how little money an actress might make; they thought that being well-known automatically meant being well-off.

She had driven down to Kingston just for this party, a fact which slightly shamed her. She had not met the hostess before. She had known the host last year, when he was teaching at the community college and living with another girl.

The hostess, whose name was Shelley, took Rose into the bedroom to put down her coat. Shelley was a thin, solemn-looking girl, a true blonde, with nearly white eyebrows, hair long and thick and straight as if cut from a block of wood. It seemed that she took her waif style seriously. Her voice was low and mournful, making Rose’s own voice, her greeting of a moment ago, sound altogether too sprightly in her own ears.

In a basket at the foot of the bed a tortoiseshell cat was suckling four tiny, blind kittens.

“That’s Tasha,” the hostess said. “We can look at her kittens but we can’t touch them, else she wouldn’t feed them anymore.”

She knelt down by the basket, crooning, talking to the mother cat with an intense devotion that Rose thought affected. The shawl around her shoulders was black, rimmed with jet beads. Some beads were crooked, some were missing. It was a genuine old shawl, not an imitation. Her limp, slightly yellowed, eyelet-embroidered dress was genuine too, though probably a petticoat in the first place. Such clothes took looking for.

On the other side of the spool bed was a large mirror, hung suspiciously high, and tilted. Rose tried to get a look at herself when the girl was bent over the basket. It is very hard to look in the mirror when there is another, and particularly a younger, woman in the room. Rose was wearing a flowered cotton dress, a long dress with a tucked bodice and puffed sleeves, which was too short in the waist and too tight in the bust to be comfortable. There was something wrongly youthful or theatrical about it; perhaps she was not slim enough to wear that style. Her reddish-brown hair was dyed at home. Lines ran both ways under her eyes, trapping little diamonds of darkened skin.

Rose knew by now that when she found people affected, as she did
this girl, and their rooms coyly decorated, their manner of living irritating (that mirror, the patchwork quilt, the Japanese erotic drawings over the bed, the African music coming from the living room), it was usually because she, Rose, hadn’t received and was afraid she wouldn’t receive the attention she wanted, hadn’t penetrated the party, felt that she might be doomed to hang around on the fringes of things, making judgments.

She felt better in the living room, where there were some people she knew, and some faces as old as her own. She drank quickly at first, and before long was using the newborn kittens as a springboard for her own story. She said that something dreadful had happened to her cat that very day.

“And the worst of it is,” she said, “I never liked my cat much. It wasn’t my idea to have a cat. It was his. He followed me home one day and insisted on being taken in. He was just like some big sneering hulk of an unemployable, set on convincing me I owed him a living. Well, he always had a fondness for the clothes dryer. He liked to jump in when it was warm, as soon as I’d taken the clothes out. Usually I just have one load but today I had two, and when I reached in to take the second load out, I thought I felt something. I thought, what do I have that’s fur?”

People moaned or laughed, in a sympathetically horrified way. Rose looked around at them appealingly. She felt much better. The living room, with its lake view, its careful decor (a jukebox, barbershop mirrors, turn-of-the-century advertisements—
Smoke, for your throat’s sake
—old silk lampshades, farmhouse bowls and jugs, primitive masks and sculptures), no longer seemed so hostile. She took another drink of her gin and knew there was a limited time coming now when she would feel light and welcome as a hummingbird, convinced that many people in the room were witty and many were kind, and some were both together.

“Oh,
no
, I thought. But it was. It was. Death in the dryer.”

“A warning to all pleasure seekers,” said a little sharp-faced man at her elbow, a man she had known slightly for years. He taught in the English department of the university, where the host taught now, and the hostess was a graduate student.

“That’s terrible,” said the hostess, with her cold, fixed look of sensitivity.
Those who had laughed looked a bit abashed, as if they thought they might have seemed heartless. “Your cat. That’s terrible. How could you come tonight?”

As a matter of fact the incident had not happened today at all; it had happened last week. Rose wondered if the girl meant to put her at a disadvantage. She said sincerely and regretfully that she hadn’t been very fond of the cat and that had made it seem worse, somehow. That’s what she was trying to explain, she said.

“I felt as if maybe it was my fault. Maybe if I’d been fonder, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Of course it wouldn’t,” said the man beside her. “It was warmth he was seeking in the dryer. It was love. Ah, Rose!”

“Now you won’t be able to fuck the cat anymore,” said a tall boy Rose hadn’t noticed before. He seemed to have sprung up, right in front of her. “Fuck the dog, fuck the cat, I don’t know what you do, Rose.”

She was searching for his name. She had recognized him as a student, or former student.

“David,” she said. “Hello, David.” She was so pleased at coming up with the name that she was slow in registering what he had said.

“Fuck the dog, fuck the cat,” he repeated, swaying over her.

“I beg your pardon,” Rose said, and put on a quizzical, indulgent, charming expression. The people around her were finding it as hard to adjust to what the boy said as she was. The mood of sociability, sympathy, expectation of goodwill was not easy to halt; it rolled on in spite of signs that there was plenty here it wasn’t going to be able to absorb. Almost everyone was still smiling, as if the boy was telling an anecdote or playing a part, the point of which would be made clear in a moment. The hostess cast down her eyes and slipped away.

“Beg yours,” said the boy in a very ugly tone. “Up yours, Rose.” He was white and brittle-looking, desperately drunk. He had probably been brought up in a gentle home, where people talked about answering Nature’s call and blessed each other for sneezing.

A short, strong man with black curly hair took hold of the boy’s arm just below the shoulder.

“Move it along,” he said, almost maternally. He spoke with a muddled European accent, mostly French, Rose thought, though she was
not good about accents. She did tend to think, in spite of knowing better, that such accents spring from a richer and more complicated masculinity than the masculinity to be found in North America and in places like Hanratty, where she had grown up. Such an accent promised masculinity tinged with suffering, tenderness, and guile.

The host appeared in a velvet jumpsuit and took hold of the other arm, more or less symbolically, at the same time kissing Rose’s cheek, because he hadn’t seen her when she came in. “Must talk to you,” he murmured, meaning he hoped he wouldn’t have to, because there was so much tricky territory; the girl he had lived with last year, for one thing, and a night he had spent with Rose toward the end of term, when there had been a lot of drinking and bragging and lamenting about faithlessness, as well as some curiously insulting though pleasurable sex. He was looking very brushed and tended, thinner but softened, with his flowing hair and suit of bottle-green velvet. Only three years younger than Rose, but look at him. He had shed a wife, a family, a house, a discouraging future, set himself up with new clothes and new furniture and a succession of student mistresses. Men can do it.

“My, my,” Rose said and leaned against the wall. “What was that all about?”

The man beside her, who had smiled all the time and looked into his glass, said, “Ah, the sensitive youth of our time! Their grace of language, their depth of feeling! We must bow before them.”

The man with the black curly hair came back, didn’t say a word, but handed Rose a fresh drink and took her glass.

The host came back too.

“Rose baby. I don’t know how he got in. I said no bloody students. There’s got to be some place safe from them.”

“He was in one of my classes last year,” Rose said. That really was all she could remember. She supposed they were thinking there must be more to it.

“Did he want to be an actor?” said the man beside her. “I’ll bet he did. Remember the good old days when they all wanted to be lawyers and engineers and business executives? They tell me that’s coming back. I hope so. I devoutly hope so. Rose, I bet you listened to his problems. You must never do that. I bet that’s what you did.”

“Oh, I suppose.”

“They come along looking for a parent-substitute. It’s banal as can be. They trail around worshiping you and bothering you and then bam! It’s parent-substitute rejecting time!”