The Freedom in American Songs (3 page)

Mrs. Halloran took herself back so easily to happier times that in a minute she was no longer depressed but laughing like a girl. Marianne wanted to hug her. Someone had always looked after her. Now she had no one, and she was getting old, and she wasn't used to it. She needed someone she could depend on, and Marianne knew she was not the right person, and felt inadequate. But Mrs. Halloran seemed to consider Marianne sufficient as a friend all the same, and she trusted her. The sea was sucking the beach; Marianne could see it out Mrs. Halloran's new white window with the twelve small panes. Maybe the sea was the insatiable beast responsible for all the wallpaper and floor canvas and sparkly stucco ceilings. But you couldn't even blame the sea, really, thought Marianne. What hunger made the sea need to suck? Greed wasn't a thing that had a human origin. Hunger and need were in the air. The bees would gorge sweetness out of the red and white clover until their bellies distended. Everything urged its need, need, need, like the song of the wedding-bird in spring. The secret, Marianne wondered, the secret had something to do with not fearing the need. Because the fear was, you wouldn't be able to feed the need, and because you did not have food for it, it would devour you.

“Feed the need, feed the need, feed the need, don't fear it,” Marianne could hear the wedding-bird singing. And she thought of Mrs. Ruby down the road, and knew Mrs. Ruby fed everything that asked her to, and always had enough, and put new paint and paper on her walls once a year in time for Christmas, no fooling around, and that need was fed and that was the end of it. Marianne wondered what was the difference between Mrs. Ruby and Mrs. Halloran, because she knew Mrs. Ruby was fearless though Walter Ruby had died, and Mrs. Halloran had always been afraid, even before Leonard had died. There were the rooms, and the wallpaper, and the sea, sucking and needing, and beyond that were storms and piles of clouds and the sun and moon. Mrs. Ruby had told Marianne she admired how smart God must be to know exactly when to send down the first snow every year, and from the way she said it, Marianne could see Mrs. Ruby imagined God's snow all stockpiled in a special area up among certain clouds in the highest parts of the sky. God. Maybe Mrs. Ruby had made a bargain with God. I'll feed everything that comes here hungry, God, and you make sure there's enough. I won't worry if you send the supplies. Maybe the need had grown so insistent that Mrs. Ruby had made that bargain, since she could meet the need in no other way. And maybe Mrs. Halloran still thought she had to meet the need personally herself, out of storehouses of food and supplies that she knew she did not possess. Marianne wished she could tell Mrs. Halloran to lay all her troubles at God's feet, but of course she could not do that, because in her own soul the great maw of the sea, the open beak of the wedding-bird, and her own empty womb were crying, “Need, need, need,” with a din and a clatter that Marianne couldn't quiet down long enough to get a message through to the one with whom all things were possible for those who believed. The most she could do was invite Mrs. Halloran to come to mass with her. She did not normally go to mass herself, and was not even Roman Catholic, but liked to sit under the great rose window and let the green saints and their lambs and lilies descend in a sunbeam and float across the skin of her arms, and she liked the hum and drone of the women of the cove saying their rosary like bees among the cove's roses.

“No, I won't go today.” Mrs. Halloran held up a strip of dripping orangeblossom paper. “I've got to get this one wall finished. You should bring me a bulletin. Jody always forgets to bring me one.”

The bulletin was green. It had the bingo times on it. When Marianne brought it to Mrs. Halloran she found Laura and Jody and Mrs. Halloran arguing how to measure carpet for the pantry floor. The carpet was thick and dusty—someone had given them it. She had to step over rolls of it piled in the kitchen. The pantry floor was cold, since they had ripped its canvas off. Mrs. Halloran thanked Marianne for the bulletin. Before Marianne left she saw that a green bulletin lay on top of the television in the living room, because this time Jody had remembered to bring one home. It was like that with everything Marianne tried to do to help. She was not needed, not really, not in any way that might last.

The next morning a horrendous clattering woke her before 7:30. She looked out her bedroom window and saw a man riding some sort of tractor over Mrs. Halloran's meadow, slicing lengths of sod off it, and in some mysterious way rolling as it sliced, so the entire meadow was stripped and littered with what looked like the cakes Marianne's mother used to call Swiss rolls. But they were not made of sponge cake and jam, but of the beautiful grass of the field, and the man, Junior Etcheverry, had a helper hoisting them onto a flatbed truck to be taken to some housing development that was probably not far from where Leonard Halloran had suffered his heart attack.

Now Mrs. Halloran could pay, Marianne remembered, for Jody's snowsuit. Or could she? There were so many things Mrs. Halloran wanted. Maybe the sods would metamorphose into a big new TV, or an exercise bike, or a microwave for Jody to heat up Pizza Pockets after school. There was Mrs. Halloran now, waving up at Marianne's window, lifting four triumphant fingers and shouting something. Marianne opened her window.

“Four hundred dollars!” Marianne barely heard this over the racket of Junior's sod cutter. “I'll be able to rip down all that old wallpaper and put in brand new wallboard!”

There was something unbearable, Marianne felt, about bartering the earth's green coverlet for boards to line Mrs. Halloran's Christmas room. Yet she knew Mrs. Halloran might never again have to worry about layers of wallpaper that peeled and deteriorated, or grew out of fashion, or reminded her of the years when her husband had called all the shots, and what was wrong with that? Marianne wished she could flee in her bathrobe across the road to Mary's or Margaret's house, to get them on the meadow's side, to fight for the outdoors they'd loved before they married and had children and changed the wallpaper over and over again to make up for the purple daisies, red clover, buttercups and Queen Anne's lace on which they had turned their backs, but would they know what she was on about?

Marianne had not lived her whole life in the cove as they had done. She had not galloped to school with them on a horse, had not devoured cake with them by the trout pond while Mrs. Halloran climbed overhead searching for lost lures. Marianne murmured no rosary in blessed light from a rose window. Her well had shrews drowned in it and she was foolish enough to strain them out and drink the water. She threw sallysuckers in her soup, and one day she would take off with that weekend boyfriend of hers with the silken hands, and would resume the life she had left in the city for this borrowed bit of cove life. She sensed her mourning for the torn and sold meadow marked her every bit as lost as Mrs. Halloran would appear once the sod money was spent, caught in a stranger's headlights in the snow, beseeching him to drive her to bingo, and she shut her bedroom window and did not try to save anything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every Waking Moment

 

 

“The Worship Centre welcomes
you downtown.” Black letters on mango-coloured poster paper. They were up all along Duckworth Street, on telephone poles and in store windows. Marianne ripped one off the green wooden doors of Tom Callahan: Novelties, Gifts, Tobacconist, which had closed down three years ago.

 

“TO HEAR: TO ENJOY: TO CONSIDER: TO RECEIVE: God's Word of Love—Special Music & Congregational Singing—Living Testimonies—Fellowship. SUNDAY EVENINGS 6:30pm January 24, 31. February 7, 14. FREE ADMISSION. At Belle Isle “B” Ballroom Rubicon Plaza Hotel 160 New Spencer
Street. IF YOU NEED—Transportation—Prayer/Counselling—Information CALL 268-1883, 765-4708, 592-3397. Pastors Kevin Woolridge, Don Maynard.”

 

At the top of the poster had been drawn a stylized dove and cross. At the bottom was an ornate R in a circle, the logo of the Rubicon Hotel. The Rubicon was new. Reflected in its shining walls were the brine-worn facades of saddleries, warehouses and pubs across New Spencer Street. Marianne had never been in there, but she had hitched a ride once from Aspel Harbour to town with Rose, who had a new job there as a room service maid. Rose had been looking forward to meeting the important guests who would, the management told her, be coming. They would tip well. Before the place opened there had been a dinner for the staff and local dignitaries like the premier. There had been a gelatin salmon with a real salmon suspended in it, with mint leaves down the middle and devilled eggs with blue food colouring in the yolks down the sides. There had been rehearsals for staff members before the hotel opened. Rose had had to take trays of tea and coffee and baskets of fruit and steaming tureens up the elevator and along the corridors without taking too long and without spilling anything. She told Marianne there hadn't been enough rehearsals and she was nervous. The hotel had been opening the day Marianne hitched the ride.

The poster had the initials P.A.O.N. in fine print at the bottom. Marianne knew that meant it came from the Pentecostals. Her family was not Pentecostal. Her brother, the one like Burt Reynolds, had gone out with Pentecostal girls. They had been clean and pretty, and they had studied French and been intelligent. Marianne's brother was too wild for them, and they had each married someone else.

The Pentecostals were pretty crazy. Everyone knew that. But Marianne wanted to go. She wanted TO HEAR: TO ENJOY: TO CONSIDER: TO RECEIVE: God's Word of Love, the special music and singing, and the fellowship. She could do without the living testimonies, but she was hungry for the rest, because all her searching through sacred teachings of the east and the west had led her to this street, and to this orange poster. The Anglican Cathedral up the road had a museum in it. In the museum was the skeleton of a church mouse from Westminster Abbey. The skeleton was dark brown with holes in it, and to Marianne that skeleton was the same as the cathedral: dark, with holes, dead, and scary. When she went in one day to sit and be quiet, the vicar came up and asked her if anything was the matter, then some cleaners came in and plugged in an industrial vacuum cleaner that made a great noise. Sometimes the cathedral door was locked and you had to ring the bell. On Sundays the services were attended by one or two dozen ancient immigrants from Gloucester and Kent. The sermons were about church hierarchy and points of order, and there were prayers for the continued glory of the Queen.

The doors of the Roman Catholic basilica were always open. But she couldn't get inside that place either, not like people born and steeped in it. She visited its altar and ate the body of Christ fraudulently, and wondered if anyone spied her. Mrs. Ruby from Aspel Harbour and her daughter, Sister Jean, sometimes came here. Imagine if they saw Marianne eating the body of Christ. She had eaten it once in Aspel Harbour when her friend Tim came to visit and brought her to the service with him—he'd broken his host and sneaked half of it back to their pew, and had given it to her to eat. The Catholics did not give you wine—the priest drank it all.

She folded the mango-coloured poster and slid it between her driver's permit and her library card. She told Tim and Lloyd she was going, but didn't tell Lloyd it was the Pentecostals. Lloyd had been her lover for four years and this was the last thing he needed to know. He was tolerant of all her yogis and books about Zen, her Hindu scriptures and her vegetarianism that began one day after she'd devoured a whole chicken for lunch.

He had not liked the appearance of the Bible or the table with candles and flowers on it. “It looks like an altar,” he said. “It makes me sick … I've had enough of plastic Jesus and Hail Mary and Jesuit fathers being hauled in for gross indecency.” But he loved Marianne. He'd find a way to put up with this.

Lloyd lived on a long street in town. The street had a vanishing point. It had telephone poles and wires that converged. It had cats on doorsteps, ragamuffin children, and sunshine spilling over the roofs. It had chimneys. It had St. Hilda's Hospital at the end, looking, at sunset, like an adobe palace washed in rose and gold light. The Rubicon Hotel was beyond St. Hilda's. Marianne walked toward it on January 24
th
after the supper of halibut and roast potatoes with red skins and corn. Lloyd was a good cook. She'd made a salad with olive oil and garlic and lemon. The street was dark. It was raining. The streetlamps had silver lines streaming down to the dead flowerbeds at their bases. A sleek, wet German shepherd walked with Marianne, his fur soaking through her skirt to her leg, then he turned up Colonial Street, his claws clicking the pavement. Through Wing Garden Take-out's lit windows she saw two youths in jeans and red lumbershirts leaning on the counter waiting for their #2 combination plates. One was using the phone.

The houses were right on the sidewalk. Someone's curtains were open. Unused candlesticks on the mantelpiece; wallboard, photographs of people standing in front of artificial skies, a woman and man sitting in chairs in the light from their television. The man blowing blue smoke rings and knitting an Icelandic sweater. The woman sliding her fingers round a bowl on her chair-arm to get the last crumbs. The six o'clock news anchorman trapped in her spectacles.

The foghorn was lowing. Halley's Comet was somewhere up there but she had no chance of seeing it on a night like this. Through alleys downhill Marianne could see the harbour and all the lights. Whiffs of seaweed and whores'-egg scent blew uphill and caught her in the face.

The Rubicon had many entrances. Marianne followed her nose. The towers rose in black glass cubes into the sky. They were really part of Florida.

“Welcome to the worship centre,” said a short, fat man in the doorway. Marianne kept moving as if she was on wheels. People filled rows of folding tin chairs; women sheathed in sheer dresses with glossy belts, pantyhose, makeup and perfume, their husbands in suits. They'd driven from the suburbs. But the back five rows held a few men who had straggled in from downtown alleys in wet coats and unlaced workboots. On a stage hung a banner bearing a dove and cross, and there was an overhead projector.

Someone sounded cymbals.

A man announced, “Greet your neighbour,” and there was a swell of rising bodies shaking hands, coming too close. A woman, brittle and coiffed, hugged Marianne. The woman's dress was yellow with white snippets all over it in the shape of fingernail clippings. “You look familiar … you're?”

“Marianne Cullen.”

“You're from Poplar Dam.”

“… A long time ago, yes.”

“Well, I'm Doris Keys. I used to teach you skating when you were in grade five! You were
this
high. I thought you looked familiar …
Dianne
…” she called to her friend, “this is Marianne Cullen. I taught her skating when she was a child.” Marianne thought Doris Keys looked too young to have done this, though she did look a bit embalmed. “Oh—the music—Marianne, we're all going to sing a few hymns of praise …”

Words appeared on the screen. The hymns were not symmetrical. She liked their rhythm. She could get enthusiastic about singing them. The people at this meeting could harmonize and counterpoint. Some people hummed or clapped, and Marianne realized Doris Keys had begun whistling like a bird. There was passion in the music; voices escaped their owners and turned wild. The voices left the manicured, conventional bodies and flew all over the room until the entire place had cracked open.

Marianne was all in favour of breaking into song. She wondered why people did not do it every day, in ordinary situations, when something touched or moved them. Why did we all have voices if not to sing? Why not be exuberant, sometimes, and rejoice? Lloyd had chastised her about this just the other day, in Shelley's Diner: the tomato juice had shocked Marianne with its refreshing jolt; tart, red and cold.

“I love it,” she'd enthused. “Who would have thought this little glass of red, almost brown, really … could be … it's so—
revitalizing
.”

Maybe she had said the word revitalizing a bit loud and maybe it was not the right kind of word to let people in Shelley's hear you utter, but Lloyd had glowered. “For god's sake, Marianne—it's only a glass of tomato juice.” He hadn't understood. But these people, well, they understood something about bursting into song over some sort of glory, even if it was an unseen glory and had not come out of a Heinz tin.

Pastor Kevin Woolridge disentangled a snake of microphone wire with a flip of his hand. Cities, he said, and movies and lines of traffic and traffic lights and television sitcoms were not fulfilling the deep hunger in North America today: only Jesus could fill it.

Rosemary Stratton approached the microphone with her testimony, in a red dress. She had seen Billy Graham on television and this warm feeling had flowed through her whole body. “Yes, I'm here,” said God. But her kidneys had hurt for years. She was afraid she would have to get hooked up to a machine. Then a revival crusade came to the stadium. There were tents up and everything. “Lord,” said the evangelist. Not Billy Graham himself, but did that really matter? “There is someone here who has pain in the lower back. Make them whole, in the name of Jesus.” And the warm feeling had burned into her kidneys, and when the heat drained away the pain was gone. “And only Jesus can do that,” said Rosemary. Only Jesus has the power to get right in there and heal those tissues.”

Chris Warren came to the microphone. He reminded her of Lloyd, his neat moustache and ten extra pounds, which on Lloyd were irresistible. Three years ago, Chris Warren said, his life was an endless round of late-night drinking, smoking dope and doing things he didn't even want to mention here tonight. Then a friend invited him to church, and gradually …

The difference between Chris Warren and Lloyd, Marianne thought, besides the fact that Chris's flesh looked deadened while Lloyd's was clear and scattered with freckles that struck her as stars in the sky—she looked for constellations in Lloyd, and had found Orion and even the Seven Sisters, and some other constellations to be found nowhere in the real sky—the difference was what she might call a divide. There was a divide between these church people—if you could call this a church—and the glory they proclaimed. It was not in their bodies at all, but confined to what Pastor Kevin Woolridge was now calling the Holy Spirit, which did not appear to Marianne to have imbued these people with the life their pastor claimed it had. They all looked hammered and dulled to Marianne: someone had sprinkled a thin layer of dust on them. Many appeared to be dental hygienists or real estate agents during those hours when they were not raising their arms and singing in harmony about the risen lord. There was a divide in Lloyd as well, but Lloyd's was different. Of course she had never told him about the constellations she had found, or that she thought of his skin as a kind of sky. They had made love under a tree hung with apples in the moonlight on his parents' farm, and he'd kept his leather jacket on and she would always, she knew, remember the smell of that leather and the way the apples hung. The divide in Lloyd was not separation from an unseen glory, but simply his failure to be conscious of any ordinary loveliness in which he might be steeped at all times, in every waking moment …

The pastor was saying something about loneliness, and tears started running down Marianne's face and made her furious with herself, especially when Doris Keys the skating teacher came over and slipped her arm around Marianne's shoulder.

People raised their arms in the air and were swaying like trees. And some were murmuring things which were incomprehensible and which Marianne guessed were either in tongues or supposed to be in tongues.

Doris Keys' friend Dianne and another woman in a sea-green dress jittered over like bees. Doris bent and hugged Marianne. Marianne hugged her back. It felt like hugging a bag of crab shells.

Doris said, “I just knew when you came in tonight that you were hurting.”

“You did?”

“Oh, honey, yes,” said Doris Keys. “I looked at you and I just knew you really needed the Lord.” Throughout the service, Marianne had heard Doris Keys sing in a clear-belled voice, harmony not melody, as she played with the hair of her husband, tall and handsome, his dark curls just beginning to turn grey. Their little girl, about seven, had clutched Doris's other hand.

“You need fellowship,” said the woman in the sea-green dress. She scribbled on the back of her business card and gave it to Marianne. The card's front read;

 

HALCYON

Stephanie B. Munden

Life Underwriter

The Halcyon Assurance Company Limited

44 Haines Division Blvd., St. John's, Newfoundland A1C 4B9