The Age of Hope (18 page)

That night she dreamed that she was walking gaily down a Parisian street carrying a baguette under one arm, and suddenly the heel of one shoe snapped and she fell to the ground and skinned her knees. A crowd gathered around and pointed at her, jeering in a language that she did not recognize. She woke, confused, and heard the street washers outside the window. A grey morning light filtered in. She was losing Judith, and she was helpless to change that fact. Roy would have said, “Hope, you worry too much,” and yet what a fine line there was between joy and sorrow. She had given her children every possible tool to survive, hadn’t she? Or had she failed to instill in them the ability to judge others, and themselves? To raise a child was more than plopping down little clones of oneself. Who needed four more little Hopes romping through the world? What folly. The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one’s children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices, and the utter determination. In the light of the morning, she feared that Judith would be terribly hurt by this Frenchman with his suave flirtatious manner. Was he solid? Was he faithful?

In her more dire moments Hope saw how bleak the future was becoming. The world was spinning out of control and it was scooping up her children, one by one.

And so it was that she and Roy arrived home from Europe to discover that Penny had fallen in with a religious group that spent time handing out tracts warning people about the end of the world. It was a small group, based out of the Pentecostal church in Eden, and was run by a man named Garry Doerksen, who preferred to be called simply Eli. One night at the supper table, two days after her parents’ return, Penny handed out a tract to each family member and proceeded to proselytize. She had become a robot, spouting nonsense. And yet Hope couldn’t help but be impressed by her salesmanship, her knowledge of Armageddon. “Behold,” she said, “a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him; and he went out conquering, and to conquer.”

“What a load of shit,” Conner said. He tossed aside the tract and helped himself to meatballs and potatoes.

“Your language,” his father said.

“Well, it is.”

Penny was very calm. “It’s okay, Dad. For the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”

“Oh my,” Hope said. “Isn’t that a little harsh, sending your brother there?” She thought a little levity might be necessary.

“I didn’t send him,” Penny said. “He chooses.”

Conner grinned. “Oops,” he said. For two years now he had been dating that beautiful girl from the photo Hope had come across. Her name was Charlotte Means, and she floated in and out of the house, often appearing at the dinner table though rarely speaking. Hope wondered if she didn’t like her own mother’s cooking, or perhaps her mother didn’t cook at all. Charlotte was present now, at Conner’s right hand, her long hair framing her perfect face. She did not seem curious about the conversation, though she became more alert when Conner spoke. There was always a sense of disdain attached to her, as if she were too good for the Koops.

Conner said, “This Garry Doerksen was in prison. Just got out.”

“Was not,” Penny said. Her lips tightened and she sat up straighter.

“Was. For pederasty or something.”

“What’s pedasty?” This was Melanie, suddenly all ears. Up until now she had been picking at a single meatball, cutting it up into little bits and moving them glacially towards her mouth.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hope said. She looked at Roy, whose nonchalance affronted her. She told Penny that it was her turn to clear the table and do the dishes. “Even if the world is ending, we want to have a clean house.”

Two weeks later, on a Saturday, Penny went out with the Pentecostal group in the pouring rain to a rock concert that was taking place in a nearby town. The intention was to blanket the large crowd with tracts and the message of the impending apocalypse. The rain descended and the farmer’s field turned to soup. By the end of the day, the concert was cancelled, Penny had been spit at and cursed, and Conner showed up with his father’s tow truck and made seven hundred dollars pulling cars out of the mud and back onto the highway, his golden girl beside him counting the bills. Penny came down with a cold and spent several days in bed.

The following Saturday, cleaning the bathroom, Hope found a stack of religious tracts in the garbage. When she asked Penny about them, she said something about Eli being a fraud. Hope was pleased. It was necessary for her children to have various experiences, to taste failure, to discover that not everyone was marching down the straight and narrow road, and it was also necessary to be able to pull back wisely from the precipice, as Penny had done.

And so Penny went back to studying biology and physics and chemistry with a vengeance. She was planning to go into medicine.

At the age of twenty-two, in 1977, Conner married Charlotte Means in the Eden United Church. It was an elaborate and large wedding, paid for by Eddie Means, Charlotte’s father, who owned the lumberyard in town. Hope didn’t believe that Conner should be marrying the girl he had dated since he was fifteen. He had become less and less the joyful and insatiable boy hungering after the world, and in his place there was a young man who seemed weak and soft. Hope anticipated that the security of marriage might free Conner once again.

The plan had been for Melanie to be the flower girl, but in the eight months leading up to the wedding, she grew half a foot, and by the time the wedding took place, she was taller than the bride and Charlotte asked her cousin Carly to take her place. Melanie was distraught and wept for a day, walking around the house in her nightgown. In the end, a compromise was reached, and Melanie lit the candles during the service, her long tremulous arms reaching up to touch the seven pink candles. She was incredibly skinny, as Penny had been once, and yet Hope saw only the beauty of her daughter, who, after completing her mission, reclaimed her seat beside her father. Really, children could break your heart.

Roy paid for the couple’s honeymoon in San Francisco. Upon their return they settled into a house that Charlotte had insisted on, a few doors down from her parents’ place. The whole situation was claustrophobic to Hope, but she kept her mouth shut. Charlotte was articling for a firm in Winnipeg, commuting back and forth, sometimes staying quite late, sometimes not coming home at night at all. Because Conner was Hope’s only son, and because sons were more vulnerable than daughters, she worried that he would not be cared for. But what was there to be concerned about? The dealership was thriving. Roy was on top of the world and had begun to plan an expansion, perhaps Winnipeg, perhaps another town in southern Manitoba. Units were flying off the lot, he was well respected, and in 1979 his photo adorned the cover of a Winnipeg magazine as businessman of the year. Hope had the cover framed and presented it to him that Christmas, during the winter vacation in Hawaii. The family members were all present for the holiday. Judith had managed to fly out alone from France for a week. Hope was surrounded by her children. She was loved. Goodness and mercy. She even found a way to have a passable relationship with Charlotte, who for some reason, in Hawaii, seemed more generous.

One night Hope and Roy returned to their hotel room after a family dinner. The children had decided to head into town to find a disco. Hope said, “Have you noticed how Charlotte orders Conner around? He’s a frightened lamb.”

“They seem to have figured out how to be married.”

“Was he always so passive? It’s scary to watch. Where did he get that from? You’re not like that. Do you think maybe I did something wrong? Or maybe it’s being surrounded by girls. He needed a brother.”

“He did. My older brother kept me tough.”

“I wish he would stand up to her just one time. She’d be flabbergasted.”

“She’s incapable of being flabbergasted.”

“Do you think she’s pretty?”

“Yes, she is.”

“I used to think so, but since I’ve got to know her, her beauty has worn thin. Listen to me. Running down my daughter-in-law.”

“Well, you didn’t marry her.”

“Thank goodness.” She paused, and then said, “Maybe Conner has my nature. Deluded.”

“Melanie gets along with her.”

“Melanie would get along with a rabid dog. I wonder sometimes what will happen to her.”

“You wonder that about all your children.”

“And so I should. They’re my children.”

“You’re a good woman, Hope. A good mother.”

“Do you think so?”

“I do.”

“Did you notice, today, down by the pool? My legs are losing their shape.”

“Never noticed.”

“Well, look now. See? Gravity’s doing weird things, Roy. You’re gonna have to find someone younger.”

“And train her? No way.”

She hit him lightly across the head. She was standing by the bed. He was seated. She kissed the spot where her hand had landed. “There you go, Mr. Koop. What do you want to do? The kids are partying. We’re all alone.”

“We could lie down side by side. Right here.” Roy patted the bed.

“You’d like that.”

“I would.”

“Okay.” She walked across the room and turned off the lights. “Okay,” she said again.

Not long after, when the thin years arrived, she would look back on the vacation to Hawaii as the last hurrah and wonder if she had appreciated the fullness of that time. She worried that she had taken it all for granted, the easy lassitude, the money, the pleasure of lovemaking, the pride she felt being surrounded by family. The world and the joys offered to her.

Four years after Conner’s wedding, Penny was well into her third year of medicine and living in the city, coming home infrequently to do laundry or to eat, and sometimes deigning to share with her mother the odd detail from her life. She was an obsessed and hard-working student, and Hope wondered where her drive and vision had come from. Certainly not from Hope, who had studied French one year in order to be able to carry on a basic conversation with Jean-Philippe, but had given up when overwhelmed by the logic and simplicity of French verbs neatly aligned in her
Bescherelle.
It must have been Roy who passed down to Penny the genetic makeup to persevere, to memorize, and to press on like an implacable iceberg. And Hope was fine with that. She was maternal. Someone in the family had to dole out love.

Melanie graduated from high school that year. She was six feet two. Her height combined with her striking looks absolutely terrified boys her age, who consoled themselves by nicknaming her Giraffe. She had a scholarship to attend the University of Texas, where she would be joining the track team, her specialty being the high jump. At her graduation she took as her escort the phys. ed. teacher, Ollie Carlyle, who was single, twenty-eight, and known to be a bit of a playboy.

“Is that legal?” Hope asked one afternoon in June as she was fitting Melanie’s grad dress. Hope was on her knees, stick pins in her mouth. She looked up at her daughter’s chin.

“I don’t give a shit,” Melanie said.

“Well, Mr. Carlyle should maybe
give a shit.
”

“Mom. It’s not like we’re dating.”

“You’re not?”

“No.”

“Will he expect something in return?”

“He can expect whatever he wants. I’ll do what I like.”

“People will talk.”

“You’ve never cared about what people think, Mom. Why start now?”

Was this true? Why didn’t she know this? Perhaps she did know this at some deep level and was both ashamed and proud. Roy appeared to be indifferent to Melanie’s choice of escorts. He was deeply preoccupied with the business. Interest rates had risen to 22 percent and he was having a difficult time simply paying the interest on the excess units on the lot. The bank was intractable, threatening foreclosure, and though Hope heard hints of the trouble, she was typically in the dark when it came to the business. One night she woke and found the bed empty beside her and she rose and went to seek out her husband, who was sitting in his leather chair in the living room.

She stood in her nightie and said, “What is it, Roy?”

“I couldn’t sleep. It’s okay, Hope. Go back to bed.”

“Is it bad?” she asked.

“It could be better.”

She sat on the couch across from him. He looked diminished, sitting in the blackness of the living room, the faint shadow of his head in profile, and she felt the despair trickle out into the room.

“Would you like some tea?” And she rose and boiled water and steeped a cup of tea for him and placed it in his hands, which were shaking.

“I’m sorry, Hope,” Roy said. “You shouldn’t have to suffer this.”

“Don’t worry about me, Roy. Take care of yourself.”

“Forty years down the drain.”

“Don’t talk like that. Our children are healthy. We ‘re healthy.”

He did not answer.

She said, “We have friends. Couldn’t they help?”

They did have friends and acquaintances with more than enough, but as one of these friends said when Roy went to ask for a loan, “Why throw good money after bad?” Another said, “You made your bed, you’ll have to lie in it.” And another, who owned the wealthiest business in Eden, said, “Roy, you know very well that we are not a generous family.” His brother, Harold, who had left the business a number of years earlier to work as a manager with a new grocery chain in town, offered comforting words but had little advice and no money. At least Roy’s father, who had started the business, was in a seniors’ home and blissfully senile, unaware of the dealership’s decline.

Over the month that followed, Roy attempted to save the business. He asked General Motors to take back one hundred new vehicles, thereby reducing his debt load, but GM wouldn’t accept the returns. It was sink or swim. His debt grew and the bank panicked.

One Saturday morning, Roy went to the dealership early and returned half an hour later. He walked into the house and sat down at the kitchen table, looked right at Hope, who was standing by the stove, and said, “They shut me down.”