Various Miracles (23 page)

FOR THEIR HONEYMOON
, Robert and Lila went to France. Neither of them had been to Europe before, but Lila’s mother had given them a surprisingly generous check, and they said to each other: why not?

They started out in Normandy, and their first night there, as they sat puzzling over the menu, a man approached them. He was an English civil servant on holiday. “Excuse me,” he said, “I overheard you and your wife speaking English, and I wonder if I might ask an enormous favor of you.”

The favor was to cash a personal check—the hotel in the village was being sticky for some reason. Robert agreed to cash it—it was only for fifty pounds—but with some concern. The world, after all, was full of con artists with trustworthy faces, and one couldn’t be too careful.

The check went through, however, with no trouble, and the Englishman now sends Robert and Lila Christmas greetings every year. He signs them with a joint signature—Nigel
and Jane—and adds a few words about the weather, the state of their health (both his and Jane’s) and then thanks them yet again for coming to their rescue in Normandy. This has been going on now for twenty-five years.

Lila’s grandfather was William White Westfield, the prosperous Toronto lawyer, who, in the twenties, wrote a series of temperance novels that were printed by a church-owned press and distributed free to libraries across Ontario.

When Robert married Lila, her mother’s wedding gift was a set of these books—this, of course, was in addition to the honeymoon check. “Even if you never read them, Robert,” she said, “I know you’ll be amused by the titles.”

He was.
Journey to Sobriety, The Good Wife’s Victory, A Farewell to Inner Cravings
and, his favorite,
Tom Taylor, Battles and Bottles
. Robert and Lila displayed the books in a little bookcase that Robert made out of bricks and plain pine boards. It gave their apartment a look of solidarity, a glow. They lived, when they were first married, in an old duplex just north of High Park that had three rooms, all painted in deep postwar colors—a purple kitchen, a Wedgwood-blue bedroom, and a Williamsburg-green living room. That winter they sanded the living room floor by hand. Later, this became their low-water mark: “Remember when we were so broke we couldn’t afford to rent a floor sander.” It took them a whole month, square foot by square foot, to sand their way through the sticky old varnish. Robert, who was preparing for exams, remembers how he would study for an hour—memorizing the names of the cranial nerves or whatever—and then sand for an hour.

When they finished at last with the sanding and with the five coats of wax, and when Robert had passed his examinations, they bought a bottle of cheap wine, and sat in the middle
of the shining floor drinking it. Lila lifted her glass toward the shelf of temperance books and said, “Cheers.”

“Cheers” was what Nigel and Jane had written on their first Christmas card. Just a simple “Cheers, and again our hearty thanks.”

The next winter they wrote, or rather Nigel wrote, “A damp winter, but we’ve settled into our new house and find it comfortable.”

By coincidence, Robert and Lila had moved as well—to a new apartment that had an elevator and was closer to the hospital where Robert was interning. Thinking of Nigel and Jane and their many other friends, Lila arranged to have the mail forwarded to the new address. She missed the old duplex, especially the purple kitchen with its high curving cornices. She suspected Robert of having a cyst of ambition, hard as a nut. She was right. This made her feel lonely and gave her a primal sense of deprivation, but she heard in her head a voice saying that the deprivation was deserved.

It was only at night, when she and Robert lay in each other’s arms, that everything slipped back into its proper place. Her skin became mysteriously feathered, like an owl’s or some other fast-flying night bird. “Open, open,” she begged the dark air of their little bedroom, and often it did.

It was different for Robert, who felt himself settling into marriage like a traveler without provisions. Sleeping with Lila in the first year of their marriage, he often thought: How can I use this moment? What can it teach me?

But finally he let himself be persuaded that he had come under the power of love, and that he was helpless.

Robert and Lila had a baby that was stillborn. It must not be
thought of as a tragedy, friends told them; it was nature’s way of weeding out the imperfect. They left soon afterward for three weeks in England because they were persuaded that a change of scene would do them good. The flight was very long, but smooth. Fresh Canadian blueberries were served on the plane, and all the passengers piled off, smiling at each other with blue teeth. “We should get in touch with Nigel and Jane,” said Lila with her blue mouth.

But when they tried to find them in the telephone book, they discovered they weren’t listed. There was nothing to be done. The Christmas cards had carried no return address, only a London postmark, and so Robert and Lila were forced to admit defeat. Both of them were more disappointed than they said.

The year before, Nigel had written: “Our garden gives us great pleasure.” Lila had felt envious and wished she had a garden to give her pleasure.

Both Lila and Robert liked to stay in bed on Sunday morning and make love, but occasionally, four or five times a year, they went to church. There was pleasure to be had in passing through a set of wide oak doors into the calm carpeted Protestant sanctuary, and they enjoyed singing the familiar old hymns, Robert for their simple melodies and Lila for their shapely words which seemed to meet in the final verse like a circle completed. “Reclothe me in my rightful mind,” was a phrase she loved, but was puzzled by. What was her rightful mind? All autumn she’d wondered.

At Christmas, the card from England came zipping through the mail slot with the message, “An exceptional winter. Our pond has frozen over completely, and Jane has taken up ice skating, North-American style.”

Robert read the message over several times. Each inky
letter was crisply formed and the Ts were crossed with merry little banners. “How can they have a pond if they live in London?” he asked. He was thinking about Jane, imagining her whirling and dashing to and fro in a sky-blue skating costume and showing a pronounced roundness of thigh.

“Do you have any recollection at all of what Nigel looked like?” Lila asked Robert once, but Robert couldn’t remember anything about him except that he had looked respectable and solid, and not much older than himself. Neither of them could remember Jane at all.

Lila took a job teaching in a French school, but quit six weeks later when she discovered she was pregnant. Twin boys were born. They were exquisite, lively and responsive, following with their quick little eyes the faces of their parents, the turning blades of a butterfly mobile and bright lights of all kinds. Robert and Lila carried them into the big chilly Protestant church one rainy Sunday and had them officially christened. The little house they rented filled up overnight with the smell of talcum powder and oats cooking; Robert became an improbable night visitor who smelled dark and cold in his overcoat. From across the ocean come the message: “Summer found us back in Normandy, reliving old memories.”

“Where does the time go?” Robert said one morning in a voice that was less a lament than a cry of accomplishment. It seemed to him a good thing for time to pass quickly. He wondered sometimes, when he went off in the mornings, especially in the winter, if work wasn’t just a way of coping with time. He also wondered, without jealousy or malice, what kind of salary Nigel pulled down.

They were surprised at how quickly routines and habits
accrued. Patterns, rhythms, ways of doing things—they evolved without a need for conscious decision. The labor of the household split itself, not equitably, perhaps, but neatly. Robert ruled over the garage and the cement-linked kingdom of the basement, keeping an ear permanently cocked for the murmuring of machinery and for its occasional small failures. For Lila there was the house, the children, the bills and the correspondence. The task of writing Christmas cards fell mainly to her. One year she sat down at Grandfather Westfield’s roll-top desk and wrote 175 cards. So many friends, so many acquaintances! Still she paused, lifted her head and melodramatically said to herself, “I am a lonely woman.” She wished once again that she knew Nigel and Jane’s address so she could send them a snap of the boys and ask them if they had any children—she suspected they didn’t, in which case she would like to write them a few words of comfort, perhaps counsel patience.

Nigel had written that year about the coal strike, about a fortnight he and Jane had spent in Scotland, about the flooding of a river near their house.

Eight people were seated around a table. There were candles, Lila had made a salmon mousse and surrounded it with cucumber slices and, after that, there was a leg of lamb, wild rice and fresh asparagus. Robert walked around the table and poured wine. The conversation had taken a curious turn, with each couple recounting the story of their honeymoon. Some of the stories were touched-up sexual burlesques—the red wine brought a slice of the ribald to the table—and some were confused, unedited accounts of misunderstandings or revelations.

Robert and Lila described their month in France, and Robert, making a fine story of it, told the others about the
check they had cashed for an English stranger who now sends them Christmas cards.

“And I’ve saved every single one of them,” Lila said.

This surprised Robert, who was proud to be married to a woman who was not a collector of trivia. Lila sent him a wide, apologetic smile across the roasted lamb and a shrug that said: Isn’t it absurd, the things we do.

“You took a real chance,” someone at the table remarked. “You could have lost the whole bundle.”

Robert nodded, agreeing. He thought again as he had thought before, how generous, open and trusting he and Lila must have been in those days. It was an image he cherished, the two of them, lost in their innocence and in each other.

Lila went to visit her mother one day and they had a quarrel. The argument was over something of no importance, a photograph Lila had misplaced. They both apologized afterward, but Lila cried on her way out to the parking lot, and a man stopped her and said, “Pardon me. You seem to be in distress. May I help you.”

He had a kind, anonymous face. Lila told him she was upset because she had quarreled with someone. The man understood her to mean she had quarreled with a lover, and that was what Lila intended him to understand.

He walked her to her car, held her arm for a moment and said a few kind words. Things would look different in the morning. Things had a way of blowing over. Misunderstandings were inevitable, but sometimes they yielded a deeper sense of the other person.

Lila drove home in that state of benign suspension which can occur when a complete stranger surprises one by an act of intimacy. She felt not only rescued, but deserving of rescue.

Often, she thought how it would be possible to tell Nigel things she could never tell Robert. He would never drum his fingers on the table or interrupt or correct her. He would be patient, attentive and filled with a tender regard for women.

She seldom thought about him concretely, but an impression of him beat at the back of her head, a pocket watch ticking against a silky lining. “Jane has made a splendid recovery,” he wrote rather mysteriously at Christmas.

“A wonderful year,” Lila wrote to friends at Christmas. “The children are growing so fast.”

When she wrote such things, she wondered what happened to all the other parts of her life that could not be satisfyingly annotated. She tried at first to rescue them with a series of graceful, old-fashioned observations, but she soon became tired and discouraged and suspected herself of telling lies.

Robert and Lila acquired a cat, which ran up a tree in a nearby park and refused to come down. “He’ll come down when he’s good and hungry,” Lila assured her children, but several days passed and still the cat refused to descend. At length, Robert dipped a broomstick into a tin of tuna fish and, standing on a ladder, managed to coax the cat down by waving this fragrant wand before his stubborn nose.

A photographer for a Toronto newspaper happened to be standing not ten feet away, and he snapped a picture of Robert in the act of rescue. The picture and story were picked up by a wire service as a human-interest piece a few days later—this was during a quiet spell between elections and hijackings—and appeared on the inside pages of newspapers across the continent. Robert was amazed. He was, he realized, mildly famous, perhaps as famous as he would ever be again. It was
not the kind of fame he had imagined for himself and, in fact, he was a little ashamed of the whole episode. Friends phoned from distant cities and congratulated him on his act of heroism. “Yes,” Lila said with expansive good humor, “I am indeed married to the illustrious cat rescuer.”

Robert couldn’t help wondering if the picture had been published in the English dailies, and if Jane had seen it. It might have made her laugh. Jane, Jane. He imagined she was a woman who laughed easily. “Jane and I are both in excellent spirits,” a recent Christmas greeting had reported.

Whenever Lila went into a café or restaurant, she slipped the little packets of sugar into her purse, even though she and Robert no longer used sugar. They had grown health-conscious. Robert swam laps twice a week at the sports club he joined, and he was making an effort to cut down on martinis. All this dieting and exercise had stripped away his flesh so that when they made love Lila felt his hip bones grinding on hers. She believed she should feel healthier than she did, what with all the expensive, fresh vegetables she carried home and cooked in the special little steamer Robert had brought back from San Francisco.

She wondered if Jane had to watch her figure as carefully as she herself did. She wondered if Jane were attractive. Sometimes, she saw women on the street, women who had a look of Englishness about them, someone wearing a simple linen dress or with straight graying hair. If these women wore perfume, it was something grassy. They were determinedly cheerful; they put a smiling face on everything, keeping life joyful, keeping it puffing along, keeping away from its dark edges. They swallowed their disappointments as though to do so was part of a primordial bargain.