Unless (4 page)

I understand you’re working on a second novel, said he.

Well, yes.

Takes nerve.

Uh-huh.

Actually—actually, well, he had a novel on the go himself.

Really! What a surprise!

At the end of the hour he did not ask for the bill. I asked for the bill. “I’ll just put it on my Visa,” I said, breaking a tenuous breadth of silence. I announced this with all the majesty I could muster over a vinyl table, like a
grande dame
, adding twenty years to my age, and feeling the vowels shifting
in my beautifully moulded throat. Such dignity; I surprised myself with my own resonance, and I may have managed a pained smile, displaying, no doubt, that famous overbite. He turned off the tape recorder at the word “Visa.”

He had two young children at home, he said. Christ, what a responsibility, although he loved the little bastards. One of them was quite, quite gifted; well, they both were in their separate ways. But the work of raising kids! Never enough time to read the books he had to review, books all over the house with little markers in them, books he would never finish. So much was expected, and of course, like all journalists, he was underpaid.

Oh, shut up.

They also expected him to do a feature on the weekend.

Uh-huh?

And last week he’d actually broken the MacBunna story.

Really? Macumba? Marimba?

Congratulations, said Mrs. Reta Winters from Orangetown.

Thanks.

I should be getting on my way, I said. My parking meter. A lunch date. A long drive home.

I understand you and your family live in a lovely old house near Orangetown…

And then, slyly: I understand one of your daughters now lives in Toronto and…

I’ve been here before. There is something about having an established family, a long-lasting spousal arrangement, three daughters in their teens, a house in the country, a suggestion of impermeability, that draws the curiosity of others so that they can, as Tom says, probe with probity.

But no, this man across the table will not be feeding on my flesh, nor will his colleagues—though one can tell that he has no colleagues; there is no possibility of colleagues. He has no context for friends or co-workers, though there are the kids and there’s the wife; he’s referred to her three times now. Nicola. She has her professional life, too, he tells me, as though the matter were in dispute.

I can’t resist. “Does Nicola—is she a journalist too?”

“Journalist?”

“Like you, I mean.”

His hand jumps, and for a moment I think he’s going to turn the tape recorder on again. But no, he’s reaching into his pocket and now he’s releasing two coins onto the table. The tip. They lie there, moist from his hand. Two dimes. I focus on them with what I hope is a cool, censorious gaze.

But he’s not looking at me. He’s looking across the room where a silver-haired man is seating himself gracefully at a table. “I’m not sure, but I think that’s Gore Vidal,” my interviewer whispers in a hungry voice. “He’s here for the writers’ festival, you know.”

I rise and exit, as though led by a brass quintet.

The charming Mrs. Winters slips on her comfortable beige raincoat…

Wherein

I
T IS LATE AFTERNOON
, early October, the sky darkening, and the lights in the old Orangetown Library already on. The smell of waxed floors is particularly sharp at this hour; it must be the heating system that triggers it.

Today, as always, the librarians, Tessa Sands and Cheryl Patterson, are helpful. I’ve dropped by to pick up Dennis Ford-Helpern’s
The Goodness Gap
. I am not, by the way, unaware of the absurdity of believing one can learn goodness through the medium of print. Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it’s been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

I could easily have bought the Ford-Helpern book last week when I was in Toronto. But no, if I am sincere about achieving genuine goodness in my life and thereby finding a way to reconnect with Norah, this means dealing with issues large and small, or else shifting my finite dispersal of goodness to goodish places such as the public library. At the moment I am attempting to be a good citizen who supports
her local library, which is dramatically underused by the community and in danger of closing.

Aside from a part-time custodian, these two librarians, Tessa and Cheryl, are the only full-time employees of the Orangetown Library; everyone else got the boot a year ago when the town council announced the library cutbacks.

Tessa and Cheryl have known our family for years. I’ve been a member of the Library Board forever, and Tessa remembers Norah from when she was four years old, attending Saturday-morning story hour, able to sit cross-legged and absolutely still, wearing only a nametag, not a sign saying GOODNESS. She was capable at that age of an exquisite shiver when listening to the adventures of Bluebeard and ready to shed tears over the fate of the twelve dancing princesses, a story that Tessa always reshapes for her young audiences. Happy endings are her specialty.

Tessa, in her fifties—married to a classical guitarist, mother to one adolescent child—is big, starchy, and pedagogic and getting more so every year. She possesses several lolloping chins, which shift as she talks, each one a millisecond out of sync with the movement of her surprisingly small mouth. She was a biologist before she decided to get her librarian’s qualifications. Her voice is clear and elocutionary.

Cheryl, divorced, in her late thirties, leans toward me today with both elbows on the desk, her chin cupped in her hands; her look is hunched and quizzical and surprisingly
chic. Today she has a stick-on bindi in the middle of her forehead; I find it hard to avoid staring at this little colourful spot, which is in honour, I can only suppose, of the man she is currently seeing, a dentist trained in Bombay who has hung up his shingle at the Orangetown Mall, a shy young bespectacled man whose Indian wife couldn’t deal with small-town Ontario and went back to her parents after six months.

They are great friends, Tessa and Cheryl—colleagues—and they have the good sense to be proud of the generation-stretching bond they’ve devised. Snobbishness of a particular kind attends them, a case of old-style womanhood kissing up with the new—they’ve actually done it. It’s almost like love. They’re each so proud of the other, and like to express this reciprocal pride aloud.
She knows exactly where to find things. Well, she’s the best there is when it comes to following up on the Internet
. What they share is their dominion over this granite building, whose brown stones hint at the colour of the earth beneath, that good rich agricultural land so wisely set aside for the public good. Another serious budget cut, though, and this place will be a tea room-slash-gifte shoppe.

Tessa and Cheryl are united in their passion for books, books like Ford-Helpern’s, which they are happy enough to provide, but especially novels, novels that describe the unwrittenness of unremarkable men and women. Their instinct is to keep these books flowing toward those who have lost touch with the “real world.” I’m their number-one
project these days. “Here’s the new Atwood,” Tessa tells me today, patting the book’s cover. “It came in yesterday, and I moved your name to the top of the waiting list.”

“It’s been nominated for the Booker, you know.”

“Thanks” I say in an immaculate tone, “both of you.”

They beam. And wait for more.

“How’s Norah? Any news? Is she coming home soon?”

No, she will not be home soon. That is perfectly clear. “I’m not sure when she’ll be home. Nothing much has happened.”

The fact is, Tom and I don’t use the library nearly as much as we used to. Tom orders his books—mostly about trilobites—through Amazon.com, and I tend to pick up what I need in Toronto.

“How’s she doing?” From Cheryl.

“Reasonably well. As far as we know.”

Ah! They exchange glances. Tessa, who has some of the rough, shaggy manners of our own Pet, reaches awkwardly over the counter and embraces me. “She’ll get through this nonsense.” She fixes me with a snagging look of determination and strength, that “carry on” look that brings tears to my throat.

It was Tessa who alerted us to Norah’s whereabouts last April. We hadn’t heard from her for over a week. Tom thought Norah had quarrelled with her boyfriend, but I knew better. When we tried to phone we could never get
through. Her last visit home at the end of March had been deeply disturbing. I thought several times of getting in touch with the university, but the idea seemed ridiculous, parents checking up on a grown daughter. We were worried, worried sick. Springtime depression. The thought of suicide. Only recently a Muslim woman had set herself on fire in Toronto. I read something about it in the paper. Then Tessa happened to go into the city to visit her elderly mother, and there she caught a glimpse of Norah when she came up out of the subway. Norah, sitting on the sidewalk, begging.

“Norah?” Tessa said.

Norah looked up. Of course she recognized Tessa at once, but she said nothing. She firmed her grip on the little square of cardboard and thrust it at Tessa. It must have been a cool day, Tessa remembers, because Norah was wearing a pair of old gardening gloves, far too big for her small hands.

“Norah,” softly, “do your parents know you’re here?”

Norah shook her head.

Around the corner, Tessa opened her bag, fished out her cell phone, and reached me in Orangetown. Luckily, Tom was home. We got straight into the car and drove to Toronto. All the way, my chest was convulsed with pain. The air we breathed was shaking like a great sail.

I’m supposed to be Reta Winters, that sunny woman, but something happened when her back was turned. Reta’s dropped a ball in the schoolyard, she’s lost that curved, clean
shell she was carrying home from the beach. And these two women—Tessa and Cheryl—know what I am, standing here juggling my cascading images of before and after, all my living perfume washed off because my oldest daughter has gone off to live a life of virtue. Her self-renunciation has even made her choose a corner of Toronto where the pickings are slim. I had to explain the situation to my other daughters, how their sister Norah was in pursuit of goodness. I remember that I sketched in the picture fast, using the simplest and shortest words I could find, as though a summary would take the sting and strangeness away.
Yes, a life of goodness, that’s what she’s chosen
.

They’ve been expecting me at the library; I always phone ahead. They have six books stacked on the counter,
The Goodness Gap
on top, then the Atwood, then a biography and a couple of slender new mysteries for my mother-in-law, Lois, and a copy of
The Waves
for Christine, who has just discovered Virginia Woolf. These books have been carefully chosen. Just the right degree of narrative packing for me, nothing too dark or New Agey; literary novels, but not postmodernly so; no “poetic” novels, please; no insulting trash. An exotic setting is always nice. But nothing about rich people or people who go to lunch—that is, people who know “where” to go to lunch, those smart-edged professionals who “want a life,” as if they weren’t getting one. Nothing hip. No family sagas, no male bonding with nature stuff. No horses. No poetry or short stories, not for the moment; they don’t work.

Cheryl slides the little tower of books toward me slowly, as though they were gathered treasure aboard the deck of a schooner. Their bright new covers gleam in plastic library coats, catching warm bars of light from overhead. I dig into my bag for my library card, grateful.

The reading room today is, as usual, lightly scattered with housewives and seniors, a few students, several of whom I recognize, and one or two strangers. These people move through the stacks or sit quietly at the old oak tables, turning the pages of reference books, poring over newspapers, glancing up when the door opens or closes, looking around and observing the quiet activity, and then retreating to print. This might be a private club, with everyone so relaxed and polite and obeying the rules.

No one actually stares, but they know who I am. I’m Reta Winters, the doctor’s wife (that fine man!), the mother of three daughters, the writer. I live five miles out of town, in what used to be the countryside but is now becoming more and more a part of Orangetown, almost a suburb, if a town of five thousand can have a suburb. In our big old house, it could be said, we live the life we long ago chose: abundant, bustling, but with peaceful intervals, islands of furniture, books, music, soft cushions to lean into, food in the fridge, more in the freezer. I work as a writer and translator (French into English). And I am the mother of Norah Winters, such a sad case. They remember seeing her around town, a striking
girl with fine features, tall like Tom, sometimes riding her bike up Main Street or sitting with her friends in front of the high school, that long straight blonde hair of hers, those strong slender legs testifying to the loose agility of the young. She had a smile that cut like a crescent through her whole body. She went away to university in Toronto, where she had a boyfriend, then she went missing for a few days last spring, then she turned up on a Toronto street corner. The word’s got around.

They nod in my direction or else they utter greetings under their breath. “Afternoon.” Blessings that I return with a congenial dip of my head as though I were sniffing a nosegay. I’m braced by people’s steady repeatable gifts of acknowledgement, and am reminded of what I seem to be waiting for, what all of us wait for: that moment of grace or surprise that has left us but will certainly return. It always does. I believe this, more or less.

In half an hour—I will be gone by then—Cheryl will ring a little bell and move from table to table, announcing in her tender girl’s voice that the library will be closed in five minutes. She will say this with a plunge of apology; she is genuinely sorry to break through the thread of her clients’ thoughts and regretful about disturbing the concentration of perception and silence that the library has promised each of its visitors and that has accumulated during the long sleepy afternoon. There is no longer enough money to keep the library open on weekday evenings. This is not Cheryl’s
fault, but she feels sorry about the situation and hopes that they will understand.