The Age of Hope (23 page)

One evening, as the light fell away, she took a room on the outskirts of Regina in one of those chain hotels. She sat in a chair by a window that looked out onto the parking lot and nibbled at a takeout salad. A memory had arrived that day, during the last hour on the road, of Conner at the age of twelve. He had been caught shoplifting a hockey stick from the local hardware store. The strange thing was that Conner didn’t like hockey, had never been interested, and yet there he was, stealing a stick. She had driven over to talk to the store owner, Ben Fehr, in his office while Conner sat on a chair beside her. Ben said that he wouldn’t press charges. He trusted that Hope and Roy would set the boy straight. He looked at Conner. “You’ve got good parents, son, and you shouldn’t be humiliating them in this way.” Then he addressed Hope. “This isn’t the first time, Mrs. Koop. It so happens that two months ago Conner and I ended up in this same room. He was to tell you, and it disappoints me that he didn’t.”

“I’m disappointed as well, Ben.” She turned to address Conner, who appeared to believe that the conversation the adults were having was not about him at all. He seemed uninterested. “Why didn’t you tell me, Conner?”

He shrugged.

Hope felt that she was failing in every way.

“Your boy is spoiled,” Mr. Fehr said. He shook his head and said the word “shiftless.”

She nodded. She did not defend Conner. The hardest part was that Conner had witnessed her lack of fortitude. She had been devastated then, and she felt the residue of shame now.

Approaching the lights of Winnipeg the following April evening, she wished that she might have the courage to just keep driving. She did not miss Roy. Or her children. Or the small apartment. But she went home. First, she stopped and picked up some hot food for Roy, and then she brushed her teeth in the restaurant bathroom, tidied her hair, and inspected her makeup. She was sixty. Still young enough to care how she looked as she returned to her husband of forty years.

For two months Hope did not visit her son in prison. She sent cigarettes and biscuits and cakes along with Roy, but she herself stayed away in protest. She was still angry. When Roy came home from his weekly prison visits, she sat down across from him and asked after her son. The details he offered her were so bare that her imagination filled in the blank spots and she pictured Conner overwhelmed by the chaos and darkness of prison life. She visited him only once. Sat in the large room where visitors were allowed and folded her hands in her lap and studied her boy, who was thinner, with even less hair. She was aware of the other families gathered in bunches, of conspiratorial whispers, of children playing. She and Roy were the oldest people in the room. This fact was sobering.

“How’s the food?” she asked. When all other topics were off limits, focus on eating.

Conner shrugged. “Not French cuisine,” he said.

She laughed, a quick short yelp. “You never liked fancy food in the first place.”

Conner leaned forward, twisting his hands together. “Have you heard from Charlotte? The kids?”

“Not a peep.”

“I write them letters, but I don’t know if Charlotte lets the kids know. Could you call on them, Mom? See them?”

“Oh, Conner. I don’t think so. There’s a restraining order. You know that. Fact is, you aren’t supposed to even write letters.”

And so it was. Not only was Conner denied access to the children, but so were Hope and Roy. It was a shame, she thought. As if Rudi and Ilke would choose not to see their grandparents. Upon hearing of the restraining order she had fallen into a depression, and then lifted herself up through anger and rage, and then tumbled again, and finally settled upon resignation, which was a difficult and hard-earned emotion, according to Emily Shroeder.

“People see resignation as giving up,” Emily said. “It isn’t. It’s acceptance of a situation that is beyond your control. You have accepted the loss of your grandchildren. Which doesn’t mean you can’t picture them moving through the world, playing piano, going to school, making friends, thinking of Grandma and Grandpa Koop. Who knows, when they are older, they may come back to you.”

Penny turned up her nose at what she called Emily’s fatalism. The other children might also have disagreed, but they weren’t around. Judith still called regularly from Paris, especially now that Conner was in prison. And Melanie was progressing in the world of high jump, training for the upcoming Olympics. One Saturday afternoon, Hope watched a track and field competition beamed out of Sydney, and there Melanie was, all limbs, mostly naked except for little bottoms and a tiny tank top, a twinkling stud in her belly button, no breasts to speak of. What did the girl eat? How elastic she was, so focused, rocking on her heels before beginning her approach, and then the colt-like steps, the bounce, and the takeoff into the Fosbury flop. Hope knew of the flop only because Melanie had explained it to her during a rare visit. She saw two of Melanie’s attempts, one successful, one not, before the camera switched to the steeplechase, and even then, as the runners moved around the track, there was the occasional glimpse of the high jump pit and the girls, perhaps Melanie, warming up.

Hope believed that Melanie would not have been as harsh as Penny in judging Hope’s notion of resignation. Melanie had always been more easy-going, forgiving, like-this like-that. She made few demands, except the singular demand she made upon herself to jump as high as possible. Penny was more rigorous and less sympathetic. In fact, there were moments when Hope believed that her middle daughter was simply too cold and calculating, that her expectations were too high. As a mother, it was much easier to love a child who had failed, because that was the child who came back home and said, “Hold me.”

Resignation, quite simply, brought peace. It was as if by saying “I am incapable,” she became capable once again. The sweetness of existence could be discovered only by forgetting herself. She now preferred to live without any thought of the future. She scampered, like a fox, between bliss and oblivion.

Roy died at night, in bed beside Hope. She woke, as usual, around 6 a.m. and knew immediately that he had left her. He was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Roy?” she whispered. “Are you there?”

Nothing.

She lay still, staring at the tiny grey hairs in his left ear. His lips were parted slightly, his eyes open.

“Oh,” she whispered, and she lifted a hand and touched his face. And pulled it away. She slid sideways, away from him. She sat up and studied him. In death he was still Roy, or so she wanted to believe.

She got out of bed and tiptoed to the door, opened it, stepped down to the bathroom and peed. She didn’t know what to do. She walked back to the bedroom, paused, and then gently knocked. “Roy?” she called out. She stepped back into the room. He lay as before. She sat on the edge of the bed and reached under the blanket and took his hand. This was not his hand. Still, she held it and waited. Then she lifted the hand to her mouth and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

For the next hour she sat with him and patted his leg through the blanket, and she tried to will herself to rise and go to the phone, but what was the point? There was no rush. Roy wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was she. She talked to him softly. “Here I am and there you are and who knew? Did you? I’m sorry to have slept through your passing. How lonely it must have been, me lying asleep beside you while you just floated away. In a bit, not yet, but in a bit, I’m going to call Penny, who will know exactly what to do. She’s always so efficient and competent, not like me, who seemed to hold you back with my needs. There were times, though I’ve never told you this, when I thought, He should have married a different woman, a woman who understood money, a woman with more love, more forgiveness. A bigger heart. But you got me, didn’t you. And now you’ll never know better.” She stopped talking. Waited. Then started again. “Funny thing, how one evening you’re eating fish and go to bed and kiss Hope good night, and the next morning you find yourself like this, in this state, and your wife sits and holds your hand and talks to you in a manner that she never talked to you before. With no expectations, no repercussions, just little old me throwing words down into a deep dark well. Can you hear? I think you can. I’m sorry I wasn’t better and I’m sorry I wasn’t the best. Not for trying, you know. My repo man. My sweet car dealer. You with the most beautiful hair. Tall and big-hearted and gorgeous. Goodbye.”

She waited. Placed his hand back inside the blanket. Closed his mouth and his eyes. That was better. She realized that she would have to begin making up her own life, by herself, working it out minute by minute. Starting now.

She went to the phone in the kitchen and picked it up. When Penny answered, Hope said, “Your father passed away during the night. You should come.”

For Hope, tossed about by Roy’s death, the funeral was like a shelter from the storm. Penny, who had written the eulogy, ordered the flowers, and, over the last three days, spoken in soft tones with the funeral director, was constantly at her side. Nothing was required of her. She wore a charcoal-coloured dress that Roy had always favoured, and she clutched a small handbag throughout the service. The handbag held her lip gloss and Roy’s money clip, now empty. The funeral took place at a small north-end Mennonite church. Hope, who had always enjoyed singing, was surprisingly put off by the hymns and the choice of music. It was all so gloomy, and she wished, during the service, that she had asked for chamber music to be piped in, rather than the stolid thumping coming from a piano played by a very tall thin woman she had never seen before. She told herself to remind Penny that when she died she wanted a pine box, a single violin playing, and a minor speech prepared by one of her children. She certainly didn’t want this preacher, a youngish man who was far too evangelical. Roy wouldn’t have liked his tone or his fervour for salvation.

Emily sat with the family, as did Berta and her husband. Roy’s brother Harold kept leaning forward to blow his nose. He was a solid man whose wife of forty years had recently died of cancer. He had hugged Hope in the church foyer, next to the casket, as if they were now more connected. Hope’s cousin, Frida, and her husband, George, sat next to Conner at the far end of the pew. Hope, looking at Conner at one point, thought that as Roy’s son he would suffer the most. She feared for him. He sometimes appeared with a certain woman on his arm and the next month there would be a different one. His love life was a blur. And would he ever work again?

To Hope’s delight, and she imagined to Conner’s as well, Rudi and Ilke were at the funeral. They came for the whole day, brought by Penny, who had made the arrangements, and Hope caught herself experiencing too much joy as she clutched their sweaty hands. When she lost sight of them—at the burial for instance, the cold air sweeping across the bare ground—she called out their names several times in a high desperate tone, until she saw them and beckoned wildly to come. Come here. Ilke was a little princess. In fact, she was a miniature version of her mother. Gorgeous, with long wavy hair and a button nose and perfect skin. She even walked like her mother and, to Hope’s horror, had already acquired her mother’s haughty assertiveness. Rudi was a rounder smaller version of Conner, or this is how Hope saw him. He was ten now, and had gained some pounds. He seemed to be only interested in the food. She tried to get him to sit beside her and though he did this briefly, he soon disappeared. That was Conner way back, she thought.

Ling, from Merry Maid, was at the service and Hope was surprised by her strength when they hugged and the ferocity of feeling in her face. “I remembered all the stories you told about Roy,” Ling said. “He was a funny man. And kind. And I never met him.” She laughed and squeezed Hope’s hands.

Hope introduced her to her children. She was proud to be seen with Ling, who represented a world separate from Eden and Mennonites. It gave her some worldly purchase. Her life had become bigger after the bankruptcy. Though this might not be true, she imagined others might think it was.

At the reception, which took place in the church basement, a man in a yellow suit stood at the microphone and praised Roy. What are you doing? Hope thought. It’s too late. Where were you when he needed you? This was during the
freiwilliges,
the Mennonite term for “open mike.” Hope hadn’t wanted to have an open mike, but everyone insisted. She knew what they wanted: redemption. No one would speak ill of the dead, and all reports would be glowing, and Roy would be remembered as a quality man. Well, she ‘d always known who Roy was, and she didn’t have to have some stranger going on and on about how
he
had known Roy. In fact, when Rollie Tiessen, the bank manager from Eden, approached the mike, she sat up straight and clutched her coffee cup. She smiled carefully and looked off into the distance and heard not a word Rollie said. Later, when someone told her that Rollie’s acknowledgment of Roy’s tenacity had been wonderful, she smiled and said, “Yes, he was tenacious, wasn’t he.”

Her children surrounded her. Melanie, unfortunately, wore a very short black dress, and it seemed that whenever Hope looked this way or that she saw Melanie’s long legs flashing, and she wished it weren’t so. The girl had every physical charm imaginable, but she lacked a certain social sensibility. Hope wondered if her sexual leanings made her more flamboyant, less aware of what was acceptable. She knew that she couldn’t ask Melanie that, but as she had discovered long ago, private thoughts were private and therefore safe, though her children might be surprised by
her
private thoughts. Judith had flown in from Paris alone. Jean-Philippe was busy with meetings he couldn’t postpone and this seemed fine with Judith, who spent her time complaining about Jean-Philippe, who was predictably French.

“Well, what else should he be?” Penny had asked.

“Mature. Kind. Thoughtful. Like Ted.”

Judith thought that Ted was dreary, but then so did Penny. She was quite vocal about the fact that she preferred a predictable dreary man to some French playboy who was probably bedding a young Catalan girl right at that moment. It was known that Judith and Jean-Philippe’s relationship was somewhat “open,” and that Judith suffered jealousy in a larger way than Jean-Philippe. Hope had talked to Judith only once about this, about a year earlier, and all Hope had said was “Do you think that’s smart, to share yourself in that way?”