Various Miracles (20 page)

The evening grew chilly. A breeze came up, and Gweneth swore she could smell mustard in the air. Gwen brought them more coffee, a cardigan for her mother and a lacy wool shawl for Gweneth. “She’s playing handmaiden tonight,” Northie said when the girl had gone back into the house to her Bruce
Springsteen records. “She’s got very maternal since Mac was killed. She thinks this is what I need, to sit and talk with an old friend.”

Gweneth asked. “And is it what you need?”

“Yes,” Northie said. “But I don’t need to talk about
it
. You don’t want that, and I can’t quite manage it.”

“It isn’t a question of my wanting it or not wanting it. If you want to talk, well, that’s—”

“That’s what you came for?”

“I was going to say that, but it’s not true, of course. I don’t think comfort is what you and I are able to do for each other. It wasn’t in our syllabus, as the saying goes.”

“The night before Mac left for that hiking trip we sat out here. Just like tonight. Except, the most extraordinary thing happened. There was a display of northern lights—have you ever seen the northern lights?”

Gweneth said no, glad she could say no.

“It’s rather rare just here. Normally, you have to be away from the city because the general illumination interferes. But something was just right with the atmosphere that night, and it was a dazzling show. I hadn’t imagined it would be so precisely outlined as it’s shown in pictures—those folded curtains dragging down from the heavens. Mac said—I remember his exact words—he said all we needed was a celestial choir. Straight out of MGM, corny as hell. You know I’m not one for omens and portents, but it’s given me something to hang on to. Along with Maximinus and mustard. And Gwen, of course.”

“You’re lucky to have a child. That’s something I’m sorry I missed.” Gweneth said this even though it wasn’t true. (The lie bothered her not at all since she knew it did people good to be fulsomely envied.) She had never wished for a child. Once
she said to a man she was living with, “The saddest thing in the world is a woman who thinks with her womb.”

“No,” he said, “the saddest thing in the world is an artist whose work speaks to no one.” This man, an abstract painter by profession, was always watering down her observations, and eventually it drove her straight into the arms of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

When her thesis was published, she liked to pat its brown covers and say, “Hi there, baby.” When she was interviewed, shaking, on the BBC—the Third Programme yet—she found herself talking about her research like a mother, and indulging in a mother’s fond praising, defensive and faultfinding by turn. And once she sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum and examined a tiny nineteenth-century book of essays written by an obscure country clergyman. The binding had long since deteriorated, and the pages had been tied together by someone—who?—when?—with a piece of ribbon. Slowly, respectfully, she’d tried to undo the knot, but the ribbon was so stiff with age that it crumbled on the table into a kind of white powder. She had examined the severed pages with more tenderness and sense of privilege than she’d ever felt toward anything in her life, and it occurred to her that perhaps this is what mothers feel for the secret lives of their children. Surely—she glanced at Northie—such moments keep people from flying into pieces.

“I didn’t know you ever wanted children,” Northie said after a while. “I mean, you never said.”

They sat in silence a little longer until they began to shiver with cold.

When they came into the house, they found Gwen sitting on the living-room floor listening to a Bruce Springsteen record, a long moaning song. She held up the record sleeve, which said: “New York City Serenade.”

“It’s coming,” she told the two of them as they stood in the doorway. “The best part is coming.” She shut her eyes and held up a finger, just as the song changed abruptly from gravel-weighted melody to anguished wail and the repeated phrase, “ ‘She won’t take the train, she won’t take the train.’“ Listening, her face went luminous with sorrow and her lips mouthed the tragic words. “ ‘No, she won’t take the train, no, she won’t take the train.’“

Who won’t take the train? Gweneth wanted to demand roughly. Why not? And did it matter? The mystery was that a phrase so rich with denial could enthrall a young girl.

Gweneth felt an impulse to rescue her with logic, with exuberance, but stopped just in time. An image came into her mind, an old, traditional image of women who, after a meal, will take a tablecloth, shake it free of crumbs and put it away, each taking a corner, folding it once, then twice, then again. They never hesitate, these women, moving in and out, in and out, as skilled and graceful as dancers. And now, Gweneth thought: here we are, the three of us, holding on to this wailing rag-tag of music for all we’re worth, and to something else that we can’t put a name to, but don’t dare drop.

IT WAS SUMMER
, the middle of July, the middle of this century, and in the city of Toronto 100 people were boarding an airplane.

“Right this way,” the lipsticked stewardess cried. “Can I get you a pillow? A blanket?”

It was a fine evening, and they climbed aboard with a lightsome step, even those who were no longer young. The plane was on its way to London, England, and since this was before the era of jet aircraft, a transatlantic flight meant twelve hours in the air. Ed Dover, a man in his mid-fifties who worked for the Post Office, had cashed in his war bonds so that he and his wife, Barbara, could go back to England for a twenty-one-day visit. It was for Barbara’s sake they were going; the doctor had advised it. For two years she had suffered from depression, forever talking about England and the village near Braintree where she had grown up and where her parents still lived. At home in Toronto she sat all day in
dark corners of the house, helplessly weeping; there was dust everywhere, and the little back garden where rhubarb and raspberries had thrived was overtaken by weeds.

Ed had tried to cheer her first with optimism, then with presents—a television set, a Singer sewing machine, boxes of candy. But she talked only about the long, pale Essex twilight, or a remembered bakeshop in the High Street, or sardines on toast around the fire, or the spiky multicolored lupines that bloomed by the back door. If only she could get lupines to grow in Toronto, things might be better.

Ed and Barbara now sat side by side over a wing, watching the propellers warm up. She looked out the window and dozed. It seemed to her that the sky they traveled through was sliding around the earth with them, given thrust by the fading of the sun’s color. She thought of the doorway of her parents’ house, the green painted gate and the stone gateposts that her father polished on Saturday mornings.

Then, at the same moment, and for no reason, the thought of this English house fused perfectly with the image of her own house, hers and Ed’s, off Keele Street in Toronto, how snug it was in winter with the new fitted carpet and the work Ed had done in the kitchen, and she wondered suddenly why she’d been so unhappy there. She felt something like a vein reopening in her body, a flood of balance restored, and when the stewardess came around with the supper tray, Barbara smiled up at her and said, “Why, that looks fit for a king.”

Ed plunged into his dinner with a good appetite. There was duckling with orange sauce and, though he wasn’t one for fancy food, he always was willing to try something new. He took one bite and then another. It had a sweet, burned taste, not unpleasant, which for some reason reminded him of the sharpness and strangeness of sexual desire, the way it came
uninvited at queer moments—when he was standing in the bathroom shaving his cheeks, or when he hurried across Eglinton Avenue in the morning to catch his bus. It rose bewilderingly like a spray of fireworks, a fountain that was always brighter than he remembered, going on from minute to minute, throwing sparks into the air and out onto the coolness of grass. He remembered, too, something almost forgotten: the smell of Barbara’s skin when she stepped out of the bath and, remembering, felt the last two years collapse softly into a clock tick, their long anguish becoming something he soon would be looking back upon. His limbs seemed light as a boy’s. The war bonds, their value badly nibbled away by inflation, had been well-exchanged for this moment of bodily lightness. Let it come, let it come, he said to himself, meaning the rest of his life.

Across from Ed and Barbara, a retired farmer from Rivers, Manitoba sat chewing his braised duckling. He poked his wife’s knee and said, “For God’s sake, for God’s sake,” referring, in his withered tenor voice, to the exotic meal and also to the surpassing pleasure of floating in the sky at nine o’clock on a fine summer evening with first Quebec, then the wide ocean skimming beneath him.

His wife was not a woman who appreciated being poked in the knees, but she was too busy thinking about God and Jesus and loving mercy and the color of the northern sky, which was salmon shading into violet, to take offense. She sent the old man, her husband for forty years, a girlish, newminted smile, then brought her knuckles together and marveled at the sliding terraces of grained skin covering the backs of her hands. Sweet Jesus our Savior—the words went off inside her ferny head like popcorn.

Not far from her sat a journalist, a mole-faced man with a
rounded back, who specialized in writing profiles of the famous. He went around the world phoning them, writing to them, setting up appointments with them, meeting them in hotels or in their private quarters to spy out their inadequacies, their tragedies, their blurted fears, so that he could then treat them—and himself—to lavish bouts of pity. It was hard work, for the personalities of the famous vanish into their works, but always, after one of his interviews, he was able to persuade himself that it was better, when all was said and done, to be a nobody. In Canada he had interviewed the premier of a large eastern province, a man who had a gray front tooth, a nervous tremor high up on one cheek and a son-in-law who was about to go to jail for a narcotics offense. Now the journalist was going home to his flat in Notting Hill Gate; in twenty-four hours he would be fingering his collection of tiny glass animals and thinking that, despite his relative anonymity, his relative loneliness, his relatively small income and the relatively scanty degree of recognition that had come his way—despite this, his prized core of neutrality was safe from invaders. And what did that mean?—he asked himself this with the same winning interrogation he practised on the famous. It meant happiness, or something akin to happiness.

Next to him sat a high school English teacher, a woman of forty-odd years, padded with soft fat and dressed in a stiff shantung travel suit. Once in England, she intended to take a train to the Lake District and make her way to Dove Cottage where she would sign her name in the visitors’ book as countless other high school teachers had done. When she returned to Toronto, a city in which she had never felt at home, though she’d been born there, and when she went back to her classroom in September to face unmannerly adolescents who would never understand what
The Prelude
was about, it would
be a comfort for her to think of her name inscribed in a large book on a heavy oak table—as she imagined it—in the house where William Wordsworth had actually lived. The world, she suddenly saw, was accessible; oceans and continents and centuries could be spryly overleapt. From infancy she’d been drawn toward those things that were transparent—glass, air, rain, even the swimmy underwaterness of poetry. The atmosphere on the plane, its clear chiming ozone, seemed her true element, rarified, tender, discovered. Thinking this, she put back her head and heard the pleasurable crinkle of her new perm, a crinkle that promised her safe passage—or anything else she desired or could imagine.

They were all happy, Ed and Barbara Dover, the lip smacking farmer and his prayerful wife, the English journalist, and the Toronto teacher—but they were far from being the only ones. By some extraordinary coincidence (or cosmic dispensation or whatever), each person on the London-bound flight that night was, for a moment, filled with the steam of perfect happiness. Whether it was the oxygen-enriched air of the fusiform cabin, or the duckling with orange sauce, or the soufflé-soft buttocks of the stewardess sashaying to and fro with her coffeepot, or the unchartable currents of air bouncing against the sides of the vessel, or some random thought dredged out of the darkness of the aircraft and fueled by the proximity of strangers—whatever it was, each of the 100 passengers—one after another, from rows one to twenty-five, like little lights going on—experienced an intense, simultaneous sensation of joy. They were for that moment swimmers riding a single wave, tossed upwards by infection or clairvoyance or a slant of perception uniquely heightened by an accident of altitude.

Even the pilot, a Captain Walter Woodlock, a man plagued
by the most painful and chronic variety of stomach ulcers, closed his eyes for the briefest of moments over Greenland and drifted straight into a fragment of dream. It couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds, but in that short time he felt himself falling into a shrug of relaxation he’d almost forgotten. Afloat in his airy dimension, he became a large wet rose nodding in a garden, a gleaming fish smiling on a platter, a thick slice of Arctic moon reaching down and tenderly touching the small uplifted salty waves. He felt he could go on drifting forever in this false loop of time, so big and so blue was the world at that moment.