That Forgetful Shore (24 page)

What will he be like, when he comes home? What sort of Marriage can it be, that has begun with four years of
lonely
 
independence
on my part, and four years of
Horror
 
and
 
Violence
on his?

Kit has come to the bottom of the page and started another. Those last two sentences stand alone on a second page, and she looks at them a long time, wondering if she will send them to Triffie. Apart from the fact that she's trying to curb her girlish habit of underlining all the important words, she fears the last paragraph is a bit too honest. To confess to worry is one thing; to doubt her good fortune is another.

Twice she picks up the second page to tear it in two, but instead she folds it and slides it inside her copy of
Ethan Frome
. On the bottom of the first page, below the words “what such men go through,” she writes:

I hope for the best.

And she does. She hopes for the best on the day she goes to the harbour to see Ben's ship come in. She hopes that they will still know each other; that the pounding in her chest and the grip of fear around her throat will ease when he is here and she is in his arms. That they will still love each other.

It takes her a moment to recognize him. She's seen returning servicemen before, knows that they look aged and tired and worn beyond their years. She is prepared for a sprinkling of grey in the brown hair at Ben's temples, for the deep lines around his mouth. She isn't prepared for his voice. It has changed – or rather, she realizes after a few moments, it hasn't changed. She has forgotten the sound of his voice. His photograph has kept his face before her eyes, letters have captured a little of his personality, his spirit. But his voice has been silent for over four years. He has a nice voice, warm and low, a little rough.

“I can't believe it's you. Really you, and not a picture,” Ben says. “And your voice! Katherine, can you believe, I used to lie awake nights torturing myself because I couldn't remember what your voice sounded like?”

“You too? I was just thinking I'd forgotten your voice – I didn't realize how much I missed it.”

They both laugh, and kiss. She has forgotten so much: not just his voice, but how he makes her laugh, how often their minds work together as one. It will be all right, she tells herself on the way home from the harbour. Everything will be fine.

Over the years since Cousin Ethel's death, she has been redecorating the house as much as her budget allows, turning it from its maidenly, musty gloom to something better suited to a young married couple. A young lawyer and – a lawyer's wife. The Board at Spencer has been kind enough to tell her that she can keep her position until Christmas. After that, the trustees imply, she will be expected to take up her wifely duties again.

Some wifely duties are easy and pleasant to slip back into. She asks Ben no awkward questions about French farm girls, as she knows some wives have done when the boys came home. Four years is a long time. She has been faithful, of course, but men have different needs – and more opportunities, especially in the chaos of wartime.

Night after night she's lain in bed, imagining Ben's homecoming, imagining the nights when she'll share it with him. But if slipping between the sheets with Ben, fitting her body back to his, is easy, spending an untroubled night in his arms is not. His first two nights at home go well, but on the third night she wakes to the sound of screaming. Ben sits straight up in bed, shouting at the top of his lungs.

She has tried to prepare herself for nightmares. When Ben wakes, shaking and screaming in the middle of the night, she puts her arms around him, holds him, tells him it's all right, he's safe at home now. She's not prepared for him to pull away from her embrace, shrug it off, leave the bedroom and pace the hall outside. But everyone tells her the men who've been in the trenches have a hard time, even after they're back home. You can't just pick up the threads of the old life without interruption. So Kit gets used to interrupted nights. She wonders how long this will last, if it will pass away after a few months, but she knows of no-one to ask, and Ben himself doesn't like to talk about it. In daylight, his night terrors are a weakness of which he is ashamed.

In daylight, things seem almost normal. At first. When she goes to work, Ben goes for walks, visits old friends. He says he needs a few weeks before he feels ready to visit the law firm where he was supposed to have begun work in the fall of 1914, to talk about whether there's a place for him now. If not, perhaps he'll go into practice with someone else, maybe even somewhere else. They have Kit's salary till December, so there's time for Ben to adapt. She's not surprised that he startles at loud noises or sometimes has difficulty knowing what to say when people ask about his time overseas. She leaves him to his own devices during the hours she's at work, and sometimes she works late. Things are busy at Spencer, as two teachers are off work with the influenza that's come to the city.

She comes home to have dinner with Ben at one o'clock, then goes back to work for the afternoon. When she returns at five she usually finds Ben sitting in the wingback chair by the parlour window, a book facedown on his lap, staring out through the window. Yet he often claims he didn't see her coming through the gate and into the front yard, which you couldn't miss from the parlour window. Kit wonders what he sees when he gazes out through that window with those blank eyes.

Betty Bradbury is still keeping house for Kit. Betty is nearly seventeen now, a good steady girl; the young fellow who was courting her signed up last summer and the fact that she and Kit both had menfolk overseas created a bond between them. One evening Kit goes into the kitchen after supper.“ Betty, is Captain Porter home all day? He doesn't go out for a walk or to visit anyone?”

Betty's brow wrinkles and her answer comes without hesitation. “No, he don't go out at all, Mrs. Porter.” Back home on the Point, Betty called her “Kit,” but since coming to work in town she has been careful to address the mistress of the house properly. “I been asking myself should I say anything to you about it. The first week or two he was home, now, he'd sometimes go out for an hour or so. But now he don't go nowhere at all – just sits in the parlour all day.”

Kit promises herself she will not put any pressure on him. It's wonderful just to have him back, safe and alive. She doesn't ask that he rush out and find a job, or resume his life where he left off. Only that he be here, and alive and more or less well – that's enough. Enough for now, anyway.

But when Ben has been home for more than a month, she has to admit to herself that he seems to be getting worse instead of better – more troubled, more remote, harder to talk to. In those first days after his return they poured their hearts out to each other eagerly, telling each other everything they could remember from the last four years. Now Ben is irritated when she prods him to talk. “Give me time,” he says, over and over. “I'm sorry, Katherine, I can't just walk back into the man I used to be – I'm sorry.”

How much time?
she wonders. If there were an end in sight – if she knew he would recover in six weeks or six months, she could bear it. Instead she is faced with the possibility that after waiting four years for Ben to come back, she has now lost him forever. A different man – a shell-shocked man, a shell of a man – has come back, and she has no idea how to help him.

There are glimpses – moments when she hopes things will soon be back to normal. One night she comes home from work and Ben is not sitting blankly in the chair, but is dressed in his best suit, waiting for her. “It's Betty's half-day off,” he says. “Let's go out to dinner.” They dine at the Crosbie Hotel. The evening is a pleasant echo of the dinners they used to share together during student years in Halifax, when they could afford a rare evening out. They do not talk about Ben's time overseas, nor about the boys who never came home. They talk a little about Kit's war years; she tells him stories about the home front, about life in St. John's while the men were at the Front. Mostly, they reminisce about the past, about Elliston and about Dalhousie. And, for the first time, they dare to talk a little, hopefully, about the future. Ben says that this week he will go see Mr. Harrison, one of the partners in the law firm that hired him in 1914. “I'll write him a note tomorrow morning, and tell him I'll be calling at his office on Wednesday or Thursday,” he says, decisively. “If he doesn't still have a place for me, he may have some other recommendations – might know of an opening.”

That night they go home, make love, and both sleep peacefully for the first night in weeks.

It turns out to be a good thing they chose this night to go out, for in the morning the news that has been threatening for a fortnight is finally announced. With the influenza epidemic spreading throughout the city, all theatres, restaurants and other public gathering places are closed. Schools are closed as well, which means Kit is out of work and home all day.

“Makes no sense writing a note to Harrison now,” Ben says. “Who knows how long this damned 'flu will keep spreading? Harrison might not be even in the office – and if he is, I'm sure he won't want callers who aren't absolutely necessary.”

“But sending your card can't do any harm – that will at least remind him of you, keep your name in the front of his mind –”

“Stop nagging at me about it!” Ben stalks from the room, slamming the door. Kit gets up to run after him, then sits back down. Nothing good can come of running after him, cornering him. Nagging him.

Now that they are virtually quarantined, the big house seems too small, with the two of them and Betty in it. Moments when things seem comfortable again are punctuated with sullen silences and angry outbursts. Not all the silences, nor all the outbursts, are Ben's. Kit finds it hard to be patient with him, to be gentle in tending wounds she cannot see.

One day they have a screaming fight about Kit's decision to re-arrange the parlour furniture, and they both retreat to separate corners of the house, exhausted. Later that day, a note comes in the mail from Alice Templeman, now Mrs. Penney, Kit's old friend from her student days at Spencer. Alice is the wife of a well-off businessman now, and she and Kit have seen each other occasionally, once every few months, since Kit moved to town.

Dearest – I'm driven mad. Surely we'll die of boredom long before the Spanish 'flu gets us? Our boys are winning battles at the Front and we're here at home as bored as anyone could be in a trench. I simply can't bear it a moment longer, and am spitting in the face of Fate. I'm inviting a half-dozen couples to dinner Saturday night and we'll socialize in spite of epidemics and war and all. Will you please come along and bring that dashing man of yours in uniform? Having a veteran of Beaumont-Hamel, Monchy and all the rest, in our company, will certainly put our silly little influenza fears in perspective, don't you think?

Please do come, darling. I'm so bored, you can't imagine.

“Infectious” – the word is used, mostly these days, in reference to the 'flu, but Kit is infected with Alice's spirit as soon as she lays down the note. All of it – the ennui, the frivolity, the desire to thumb her nose at destiny. To dress up in something pretty and go out to be among people. She and Ben have seen almost no-one but each other since he came home.

“Please let's go,” she says to Ben, after telling him about the party, though not showing him the note.

“It seems a foolish time to be throwing a party.”

“You've risked death every day for four years and now you're afraid to go to a dinner party?”

His eyes flash for a moment and she almost hopes he'll get angry, but the mood passes in a second and he looks heavy and beaten again, his eyes empty. “It wasn't every day. People never understand that – people who weren't over there. You have weeks, months even, of boredom, punctuated with a few hours of screaming terror.”

Kit suddenly feels very hard. “Fine, then. Do as you please. I want to go to a party, and I'd like to go on my husband's arm. After four years alone, waiting for you to come home, you wouldn't think that would be too much to ask, would you?”

His expression is like ice. “Are you … really … trying to make
me
feel sorry for what you've endured these past four years?”

Kit shrivels inside, like a crumpled piece of paper. He's right. Nothing she's suffered can compare to what he went through. But despite her guilt there's still that hard-edged thing inside, sharp as a blade, that makes her say, “Of course. All the suffering was yours – we can't forget that.” And for a change, she is the one who turns and leaves the room. She goes up to her desk and writes a letter to Triffie, then, on re-reading, tears it into tiny pieces.

For a long time she stays up in the room she plans to turn into a library, the room with the tall bookshelves and her writing desk by the window. It's dark when he comes in, walks up behind her, places his hands on her shoulders. “I'm sorry,” his voice says behind her. She doesn't turn around; he is just a voice and a pair of hands. Maybe it's better this way; maybe this is all of him she can handle.

“I'm sorry, too,” she says. “I should never have belittled what you went through. You have every right – it doesn't matter how long it takes you to get better.”

“What if I never do?”

She reaches up to her shoulders to cover his hands with her own. But she doesn't answer.

“I'm sorry,” he says again after a moment. “I am trying. You know that, don't you?”

“I do. I know that.” She stands up then, and turns to face him, and he takes her in his arms. “I know you're doing the best you can.”