The Progress of Love (12 page)

“Why don’t we stand Ross out in the lights?” the constable said. “Then we can turn them off and let the boy climb down.

“Okay, Colin,” the constable called out. “We’re going to show you Ross standing here—he isn’t hurt or anything!”

Sylvia pushed Ross into the light.

“Open your mouth, for crying out loud,” she said. “Tell your brother you’re alive.”

Colin was helping Glenna clean up. He thought about what his mother had said, about plastic dishes and tablecloths that you could just scoop up and throw in the garbage. There was not a chance in a million that Glenna would ever do that. His mother understood nothing about Glenna, nothing at all.

Now Glenna was exhausted, having created a dinner party
more elaborate than necessary that nobody but herself could appreciate.

No, that was wrong. He appreciated, even if he didn’t understand the necessity. Every step she took him away from his mother’s confusion, he appreciated.

“I don’t know what to say to Ross,” he said.

“What about?” said Glenna.

She was so tired, he thought, that she had forgotten what Nancy told her. He found himself thinking of the night before their wedding. Glenna had five bridesmaids, chosen for their size and coloring rather than particular friendship, and she had made all their dresses to a design of her own. She made her wedding dress as well, and all the gloves and headdresses. The gloves had sixteen little covered buttons each. She finished them at nine-thirty the night before the wedding. Then she went upstairs, looking very white. Colin, who was staying in the house, went up to see how she was and found her weeping, still holding some scraps of colored cloth. He couldn’t get her to stop, and called her mother, who said, “That’s just the way she is, Colin. She overdoes things.”

Glenna sobbed and said, among other things, that she saw no use in being alive. The next day, she was angelically pretty, showing no ravages, drinking in praise and wishes for her happiness.

This dinner wasn’t likely to have worn her out as much as the bridesmaids’ outfits, but she had reached the stage where she had a forbidding look, a harsh pallor, as if there were a lot of things that she might call in question.

“He is not going to want to go hunting for another engine,” Colin said. “How can he afford one? He owes Sylvia for that one. Anyway, he wants a big engine. He wants the power.”

Glenna said, “Does it make that much difference?”

“It makes a difference. In the pickups and the power. Sure. An engine like that makes a difference.”

Then he saw that she might not have meant that. She might not have meant “Does the engine make a difference?” She might have meant “If it’s not this, it’ll be something else.”

(She sat on the grass; she polished the caps. She sniffed at the door panels. She said, “Let Lynnette choose the color.”)

She might have meant “Why don’t we just let it go?”

Colin shook the garbage down in the plastic bag and tied it at the neck. “I don’t want you and Lynnette riding around with him, if there’s anything like that.”

“Colin, I wouldn’t,” said Glenna, in a gentle, amazed voice. “Do you think I ever would ride with him in that car or let Lynnette ride with him? I never would.”

He took the garbage out and she began to sweep the floor. When he came back, she said, “I just thought of something. I thought, Soon I’ll be sweeping the black and white tiles and I won’t even be able to picture what these old boards look like. We won’t be able to remember. We should take some pictures so we can remember what we’ve done.”

Then she said, “I think Nancy sort of dramatizes sometimes. I mean it about me and Lynnette. But I think she overdramatizes.”

Glenna had surprised him, in fact, with the way she could picture things. The house, each of its rooms, in its finished state. She had placed the furniture they hadn’t yet bought; she had chosen the colors in accordance with a northern or southern exposure, morning or evening light. Glenna could hold in her mind an orderly succession of rooms, an arrangement that was ordained, harmonious, and, by her, completely understood.

A problem wouldn’t just thrust itself on Glenna, and throw her into doubts and agonies. Solutions were waiting like a succession of rooms. There was a way she would see of dealing with things without talking or thinking about them. And all her daily patience and sweetness wouldn’t alter that way, or touch it.

At first, with the lights and the hollering, his only idea was that they had come to blame him. That didn’t interest him. He knew what he had done. He hadn’t run away and cut down here and climbed the bridge in the dark so that they couldn’t punish him. He was not afraid; he wasn’t shivering with the shock. He sat on the narrow girders and felt how cold the iron was, even on a summer night, and he himself was cold, but still calm, with all the jumble of his life, and other people’s lives in this town, rolled back, just like a photograph split and rolled back, so it shows what was
underneath all along. Nothing. Ross lying on the ground with a pool around his head. Ross silenced, himself a murderer. Still nothing. He wasn’t glad or sorry. Such feelings were too puny and personal; they did not apply. Later on, he found out that most people, and apparently his mother, believed he had climbed up here because he was in a frenzy of remorse and was contemplating throwing himself into the Tiplady River. That never occurred to him. In a way, he had forgotten the river was there. He had forgotten that a bridge was a structure over a river and that his mother was a person who could order him to do things.

No, he hadn’t forgotten those things so much as grasped how silly they were. How silly it was that he should have a name and it should be Colin, and that people should be shouting it. It was silly, in a way, even to think that he had shot Ross, though he knew he had. What was silly was to think in these chunks of words. Colin. Shot. Ross. To see it as an action, something sharp and separate, an event, a
difference
.

He wasn’t thinking of throwing himself into the river or of anything else he might do next, or of how his life would progress from this moment. Such progress seemed not only unnecessary but impossible. His life had split open, and nothing had to be figured out anymore.

They were telling him Ross wasn’t dead.

He isn’t dead, Colin.

You never shot him.

It was a hoax.

It was Ross playing a joke.

Ross’s joke.

You never shot anybody, Colin. Gun went off but nobody was hurt.

See, Colin. Here he is.

Here’s Ross. He ain’t dead.

“I ain’t dead, Colin!”

“Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said? He said he ain’t dead!”

So now you can come on down.

Now you can come down.

Colin. Come on down.

That was when everything started to go back to being itself again. He saw Ross unwounded, unmistakably himself, lit up by car lights. Ross risen up, looking cheerful and slightly apprehensive, but not really apologetic. Ross, who seemed to caper even when he was standing still, and to laugh out loud even when he was working hard at keeping his mouth shut.

The same.

Colin felt dizzy, and sick with the force of things coming back to life, the chaos and emotion. It was as painful as fiery blood pushing into frozen parts of your body. Doing as he was told, he started to climb down. Some people clapped and cheered. He had to concentrate to keep from slipping. He was weak and cramped from sitting up there. And he had to keep himself from thinking, too suddenly, about what had just missed happening.

He knew that to watch out for something like that happening—to Ross, and to himself—was going to be his job in life from then on.

My father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who had been drowned. There were several men together, returning from the search, but he was the one carrying the body. The men were muddy and exhausted, and walked with their heads down, as if they were ashamed. Even the dogs were dispirited, dripping from the cold river. When they all set out, hours before, the dogs were nervy and yelping, the men tense and determined, and there was a constrained, unspeakable excitement about the whole scene. It was understood that they might find something horrible.

The boy’s name was Steve Gauley. He was eight years old. His hair and clothes were mud-colored now and carried some bits of dead leaves, twigs, and grass. He was like a heap of refuse that had been left out all winter. His face was turned in to my father’s chest, but I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud.

I don’t think so. I don’t think I really saw all this. Perhaps I saw my father carrying him, and the other men following along, and the dogs, but I would not have been allowed to get close enough to see something like mud in his nostril. I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it. I see his face unaltered except for the mud—Steve Gauley’s familiar, sharp-honed, sneaky-looking face—and it wouldn’t have been like that; it would have
been bloated and changed and perhaps muddied all over after so many hours in the water.

To have to bring back such news, such evidence, to a waiting family, particularly a mother, would have made searchers move heavily, but what was happening here was worse. It seemed a worse shame (to hear people talk) that there was no mother, no woman at all—no grandmother or aunt, or even a sister—to receive Steve Gauley and give him his due of grief. His father was a hired man, a drinker but not a drunk, an erratic man without being entertaining, not friendly but not exactly a troublemaker. His fatherhood seemed accidental, and the fact that the child had been left with him when the mother went away, and that they continued living together, seemed accidental. They lived in a steep-roofed, gray-shingled hillbilly sort of house that was just a bit better than a shack—the father fixed the roof and put supports under the porch, just enough and just in time—and their life was held together in a similar manner; that is, just well enough to keep the Children’s Aid at bay. They didn’t eat meals together or cook for each other, but there was food. Sometimes the father would give Steve money to buy food at the store, and Steve was seen to buy quite sensible things, such as pancake mix and macaroni dinner.

I had known Steve Gauley fairly well. I had not liked him more often than I had liked him. He was two years older than I was. He would hang around our place on Saturdays, scornful of whatever I was doing but unable to leave me alone. I couldn’t be on the swing without him wanting to try it, and if I wouldn’t give it up he came and pushed me so that I went crooked. He teased the dog. He got me into trouble—deliberately and maliciously, it seemed to me afterward—by daring me to do things I wouldn’t have thought of on my own: digging up the potatoes to see how big they were when they were still only the size of marbles, and pushing over the stacked firewood to make a pile we could jump off. At school, we never spoke to each other. He was solitary, though not tormented. But on Saturday mornings, when I saw his thin, self-possessed figure sliding through the cedar hedge, I knew I was in for something and he would decide what. Sometimes it was all
right. We pretended we were cowboys who had to tame wild horses. We played in the pasture by the river, not far from the place where Steve drowned. We were horses and riders both, screaming and neighing and bucking and waving whips of tree branches beside a little nameless river that flows into the Saugeen in southern Ontario.

The funeral was held in our house. There was not enough room at Steve’s father’s place for the large crowd that was expected because of the circumstances. I have a memory of the crowded room but no picture of Steve in his coffin, or of the minister, or of wreaths of flowers. I remember that I was holding one flower, a white narcissus, which must have come from a pot somebody forced indoors, because it was too early for even the forsythia bush or the miliums and marsh marigolds in the woods. I stood in a row of children; each of us holding a narcissus. We sang a children’s hymn, which somebody played on our piano: “When He Cometh, When He Cometh, to Make Up His Jewels.” I was wearing white ribbed stockings, which were disgustingly itchy, and wrinkled at the knees and ankles. The feeling of these stockings on my legs is mixed up with another feeling in my memory. It is hard to describe. It had to do with my parents. Adults in general but my parents in particular. My father, who had carried Steve’s body from the river, and my mother, who must have done most of the arranging of this funeral. My father in his dark-blue suit and my mother in her brown velvet dress with the creamy satin collar. They stood side by side opening and closing their mouths for the hymn, and I stood removed from them, in the row of children, watching. I felt a furious and sickening disgust. Children sometimes have an access of disgust concerning adults. The size, the lumpy shapes, the bloated power. The breath, the coarseness, the hairiness, the horrid secretions. But this was more. And the accompanying anger had nothing sharp and self-respecting about it. There was no release, as when I would finally bend and pick up a stone and throw it at Steve Gauley. It could not be understood or expressed, though it died down after a while into a heaviness, then just a taste, an occasional taste—a thin, familiar misgiving.

•   •   •

Twenty years or so later, in 1961, my husband, Andrew, and I got a brand-new car, our first—that is, our first brand-new. It was a Morris Oxford, oyster-colored (the dealer had some fancier name for the color)—a big small car, with plenty of room for us and our two children. Cynthia was six and Meg three and a half.

Andrew took a picture of me standing beside the car. I was wearing white pants, a black turtleneck, and sunglasses. I lounged against the car door, canting my hips to make myself look slim.

“Wonderful,” Andrew said. “Great. You look like Jackie Kennedy.” All over this continent probably, dark-haired, reasonably slender young women were told, when they were stylishly dressed or getting their pictures taken, that they looked like Jackie Kennedy.