The Progress of Love (29 page)

Dr. Streeter’s voice has an underlying sadness. It’s not only his voice. His breathing is sad. An incurable, calm, and decent sadness is what he breathes out over the phone before you even hear his voice. He would be displeased if you told him that. Not that he particularly wishes to be thought jolly. But he would think it unnecessary, impertinent, for anybody to assume that he is sad.

This sadness seems to come from obedience. Mary Jo can just recognize that, never understand it. She thinks there is an obedience about men that women can’t understand. (What would Rhea say to that?) It’s not the things he knows about—Mary Jo could manage that—but the things he accepts that make a difference. He baffles her, and compels her. She loves this man with a baffled, cautious, permanent love.

When she pictures him, she always sees him wearing his brown three-piece suit, an old-fashioned suit that makes him look like a doctor from his classically poor and rural childhood. He has good-looking casual clothes and she has seen him in them, but she thinks
he isn’t at ease in them. He isn’t at ease with being rich, she thinks, though he feels an obligation to be so and a hatred for any government that would prevent him. All obedience, acceptance, sadness.

He wouldn’t believe her if she told him that. Nobody would.

She is shivering, even with her jacket on. She seems to have caught something of the girl’s persistent and peculiar agitation. Perhaps she really is sick, has a fever. She twists around, trying to compose herself. She closes her eyes but cannot keep them closed. She cannot stop herself from watching what is going on across the aisle.

What is going on is something she should have the sense and decency to turn away from. But she hasn’t, and she doesn’t.

The whiskey glasses are empty. The girl has leaned forward and is kissing the man’s face. His head is resting against the cushion and he does not stir. She leans over him, her eyes closed, or almost closed, her face broad and pale and impassive, a true moon face. She kisses his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, his forehead. He offers himself to her; he permits her. She kisses him and licks him. She licks his nose, the faint stubble of his cheeks and neck and chin. She licks him all over his face, then takes a breath and resumes her kissing.

This is unhurried, not greedy. It is not mechanical, either. There is no trace of compulsion. The girl is in earnest; she is in a trance of devotion. True devotion. Nothing so presumptuous as forgiveness or consolation. A ritual that takes every bit of her concentration and her self but in which her self is lost. It could go on forever.

Even when the girl’s eyes open and she looks straight out across the aisle, with an expression that is not dazed and unaware but direct and shocking—even then, Mary Jo has to keep looking. Only with a jolting effort, and after an immeasurable amount of time, is she able to pull her own eyes away.

If anybody was to ask her what she was feeling while she watched this, Mary Jo would have said that she felt sick. And she would have meant it. Not just sick with the beginnings of a fever or whatever it is that’s making her dull and shivery, but sick with
revulsion, as if she could feel the slow journeys of the warm, thick tongue over her face. Then, when she takes her eyes away, something else is released, and that is desire—sudden and punishing as a rush of loose earth down a mountainside.

At the same time, she is listening to Dr. Streeter’s voice, and it says clearly, “You know, that girl’s teeth were probably knocked out. In some brawl.”

This is Dr. Streeter’s familiar, reasonable voice, asking that some facts, some conditions, should be recognized. But she has put something new into it—a sly and natural satisfaction. He is not just sad, not just accepting; he is satisfied that some things should be so. The satisfaction far back in his voice matches the loosening feeling in her body. She feels a physical shame and aversion, a heat that seems to spread from her stomach. This passes, the wave of it passes, but the aversion remains. Aversion, disgust, dislike spreading out from you can be worse than pain. It would be a worse condition to live in. Once she has thought this, and put some sort of name to what she is feeling, she is a little steadier. It must be the strangeness of being on the flight, and the drink, and the confusion offered by that girl, and perhaps a virus, that she is struggling with. Dr. Streeter’s voice is next thing to a real delusion, but it isn’t a delusion; she knows she manufactured it herself. Manufactured what she could then turn away from, so purely hating him. If such a feeling became real, if a delusion like that got the better of her, she would be in a state too dreary to think about.

She sets about deliberately to calm herself down. She breathes deeply and pretends that she is going to sleep. She starts telling herself a story in which things work out better. Suppose the girl had followed her to the back of the plane a while ago; suppose they had been able to talk? The story slips ahead, somehow, to the waiting room in Honolulu. Mary Jo sees herself sitting there in a room with stunted, potted palm trees, on a padded bench. The man and the girl walk past her. The girl is walking ahead, carrying the shopping bags. The man has the travelling bag slung over his shoulder and he is carrying the umbrella. With the end of the furled umbrella, he gives the girl a poke. Nothing to hurt her or even surprise her.
A joke. The girl scurries and giggles and looks around her with an expression of endless apology, embarrassment, helplessness, good humor. Then Mary Jo catches her eye, without the man’s noticing. Mary Jo gets up and walks across the waiting room and reaches the bright, tiled refuge of the ladies’ washroom.

And this time the girl does follow her.

Mary Jo runs the cold water. She splashes it over her own face, in a gesture of encouragement.

She urges the girl to do the same.

She speaks to her calmly and irresistibly.

“That’s right. Cool your face off. Get your head clear. You have to think clearly. You have to think very clearly. Now. What is it? What is it you want? What are you afraid of? Don’t be afraid. He can’t come in here. We’ve got time. You can tell me what you want and I can help you. I can get in touch with the authorities.”

But the story halts at this point. Mary Jo has hit a dry spot, and her dream—for she is dreaming by now—translates this in its unsubtle way into an irregular, surprising patch of rust where the enamel has worn away at the bottom of the sink.

What a badly maintained ladies’ room.

“Is it always like this in the tropics?” says Mary Jo to the woman standing beside her at the next sink, and this woman covers her sink with her hands as if she doesn’t want Mary Jo to look at or use it. (Not that Mary Jo was intending to.) She is a large, white-haired woman in a red sari, and she seems to have some authority in the ladies’ room. Mary Jo looks around for the Eskimo girl and is bewildered to see her lying on the floor. She has shrunk, and has a rubbery look, a crude face like a doll’s. But the real shock is that her head has come loose from her body, though it is still attached by an internal elastic band.

“You’ll get a chance to choose your own,” says the white-haired woman, and Mary Jo thinks this means your own punishment. She knows she is in no danger of that—she is not responsible, she didn’t hit the girl or push her to the floor. The woman is crazy.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I have to get back to the plane.”

But this is later, and they are no longer in the ladies’ room.
They are back in Dr. Streeter’s office and Mary Jo has a sense of a dim scramble of events she can’t keep track of, of lapses in time she hasn’t noted. She still thinks about getting back on the plane, but how is she to find the waiting room, let alone get to Honolulu?

A large figure entirely wrapped up in bandages is carried past, and Mary Jo means to find out who it is, what has happened, why they are bringing a victim of burns in here.

The woman in the red sari is there, too. She says to Mary Jo, in quite a friendly way, “The court is in the garden?”

This may mean that Mary Jo is still to be accused of something, and that there is a court being conducted in the garden. On the other hand, the word “court” may refer to Dr. Streeter. The woman may mean “count,” being mixed up in her spelling. If that’s so, she intends to mock him. Calling him the count is a joke, and “in the garden” means something else, too, which Mary Jo will have to concentrate hard on to figure out.

But the woman opens her hand and shows Mary Jo some small blue flowers—like snowdrops, but blue—and explains that these are “court” and that “court” means flowers.

A ruse, and Mary Jo knows it, but she can’t concentrate because she’s waking up. In a jumbo jet over the Pacific Ocean, with the movie screen furled and the lights mostly out and even the baby asleep. She can’t get back through the various curtains of the dream to the clear part, in the ladies’ room, when the cold water was streaming down their faces and she—Mary Jo—was telling the girl how she could save herself. She can’t get back there. People all around her are sleeping under blankets, with their heads on small orange pillows. Somehow a pillow and a blanket have been provided for her as well. The man and the girl across the aisle are asleep with their mouths open, and Mary Jo is lifted to the surface by their duet of eloquent, innocent snores.

This is the beginning of her holiday.

Violet’s mother—Aunt Ivie—had three little boys, three baby boys, and she lost them. Then she had the three girls. Perhaps to console herself for the bad luck she had already suffered, in a back corner of South Sherbrooke Township—or perhaps to make up, ahead of time, for a lack of motherly feelings—she gave the girls the fanciest names she could think of: Opal Violet, Dawn Rose, and Bonnie Hope. She may not have thought of those names as anything but temporary decorations. Violet wondered—did her mother ever picture her daughers having to drag such names around sixty or seventy years later, when they were heavy, faded women? She may have thought her girls were going to die, too.

“Lost” meant that somebody died. “She lost them” meant they died. Violet knew that. Nevertheless she imagined. Aunt Ivie—her mother—wandering into a swampy field, which was the waste ground on the far side of the barn, a twilight place full of coarse grass and alder bushes. There Aunt Ivie, in the mournful light, mislaid her baby children. Violet would slip down the edge of the barnyard to the waste ground, then cautiously enter it. She would stand hidden by the red-stemmed alder and nameless thornbushes (it always seemed to be some damp, desolate time of year when she did this—late fall or early spring), and she would let the cold water cover the toes of her rubber boots. She would contemplate getting lost. Lost babies. The water welled up through the tough grass.
Farther in, there were ponds and sinkholes. She had been warned. She shuffled on, watching the water creep up on her boots. She never told them. They never knew where she went. Lost.

The parlor was the other place that she could sneak to by herself. The window blinds were down to the sills; the air had a weight and thickness, as if it were cut into a block that exactly filled the room. In certain fixed places could be found the flushed, spiky shell with the roar of the sea caught inside it; the figure of the little kilted Scotsman holding a glass of amber liquid that would tilt but never spill; a fan made entirely out of glossy black feathers; a plate that was a souvenir of Niagara Falls and showed the same picture as the Shredded Wheat box. And a framed picture on the wall that affected Violet so intensely that she couldn’t look at it when she first came into the room. She had to work her way around to it, keeping it always in a corner of her vision. It showed a king with his crown on, and three tall, queenly-looking ladies in dark dresses. The king was asleep, or dead. They were all on the shore of the sea, with a boat waiting, and there was something coming out of this picture into the room—a smooth, dark wave of unbearable sweetness and sorrow. That seemed a promise to Violet; it was connected with her future, her own life, in a way she couldn’t explain or think about. She couldn’t even look at the picture if there was anybody else in the room. But in that room there seldom was anybody else.

Violet’s father was called King Billy, King Billy Thorns, though William was not in his name. There was also a horse called King Billy, a dapple-gray horse that was their driver, hitched to the cutter in wintertime and the buggy in summer. (There was not to be a car on that place until Violet was grown up and bought one in the nineteen-thirties.)

The name King Billy was usually connected with the parade, the Orange Walk, on the twelfth of July. A man chosen to be King Billy, wearing a cardboard crown and a raggedy purple cloak, would ride at the head of the parade. He was supposed to ride a white horse, but sometimes a dapple-gray was the best that could be found.
Violet never knew if the horse or her father, or both, had figured in this parade, either separately or together. Confusion abounded, in the world as she knew it, and adults as often as not resented being asked to set it straight.

But she did know that her father, at one time in his life, had worked on a train up North that ran through the wild bush where bears were. Loggers would ride this train on the weekends, coming out of the bush to get drunk, and if they got too rambunctious on the way back, King Billy would stop the train and kick them off. No matter where the train was at the time. In the middle of the wilderness—no matter. He kicked them off. He was a fighter. He had got that job because he was a fighter.

Another story, from further back in his life. He had gone to a dance, when he was a young man, up on the Snow Road, where he came from. Some other young fellows who were there had insulted him, and he had to take their insults because he did not know a thing about fighting. But after that he got some lessons from an old prizefighter, a real one, who was living in Sharbot Lake. Another night, another dance—the same thing as before. The same kind of insults. Except that this time King Billy lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.