The Birthday Lunch

H
al McNab made love to his wife for the last time the morning of the day she was killed. Lily preferred making love in the mornings, in the dreamy space between wakefulness and sleep. Morning or nighttime were one and the same to Hal, but he went along with his wife’s preference, though it meant having to wait until Lily stirred before his hands and lips began travelling a body whose terrain he knew by heart, having explored every path, curve and hollow during their thirty-three years of marriage.

By nine-thirty that morning the top sheet had been tugged from its moorings and their naked bodies were slippery with sweat both from lovemaking and from the moist creek air that had been easing through the open window while they slept. The creek was one of three that meandered through town
before joining the Kennebecasis, a tributary of the mighty Saint John whose waters rose in the Appalachians of Maine and emptied into the Bay of Fundy. The sloping hills on either side of the Kennebecasis were patched with hayfields and pastures where cattle and horses grazed. In such a countryside a traveller could easily come across a covered wooden bridge built long before snowplows were used to clear the roads. But on this late June morning, no one was thinking of winter. The cloudless blue sky, the soporific warmth, the siren sea air drifting inland across fields and lawns had cast a spell of perpetual summer upon the town. Softened by the heat, townspeople seldom gave a thought to their Loyalist forebears, the settlers who had endured far worse winters, fording icy rivers, burning snowclad forests to open up farmland and to make space for the town they named Sussex after the fifth son of Mad King George.

Before heading for the kitchen to put on the coffee, Hal belts his bathrobe, a habit drummed into him by his mother, Grace, who insisted her sons cover their manhood even as their father, Murray, strode naked down the hallway, barged into the bathroom, noisily urinated and flushed the toilet, without a thought given to the unlucky son who happened to be under the shower. The belted bathrobe now has less to do with Grace than with Hal’s wish to protect the innocence of the next-door daughters whose upstairs windows are a scant thirty feet away from his kitchen windows. The new neighbours moved in four months ago but there are still no curtains on their bedroom windows. There are no curtains on the kitchen windows either. Lily
claims they would shut out the light, making the kitchen darker than it already is. Instead she has put up a frilled valance that matches the ivy wallpaper. Easy for Lily to ignore the next-door girls when they streak past the upstairs windows, naked as the day they were born. Much harder for Hal to ignore, but he knows better than trying to explain the prudery drummed into him by his mother. When his daughter, Claudia, was the age of the next-door children, she would run around the house after a bath, dancing and wiggling her bare bottom. Once she tried to climb onto Hal’s lap and when he pushed her away, she ran crying to her mother. No need to act like Billy Goat Gruff, Lily scolded.

Hal spoons coffee into the basket, plugs in the percolator and heads for the shower. After a shave he splashes on Old Spice, Q-tips his ears and conceals the bald spot by side-combing his hair. “Hello, William,” he says to the mirror, a joke he sometimes uses to remind himself that he is handsome, a fact that is seldom acknowledged by his wife or children. Hal has never seen a William Holden movie but Jackie, the Scotiabank teller, often teases him about looking like the actor and later today, when he steps onto the carpet of the Admiral Beatty Hotel with Lily on his arm, Hal wants to believe it.

Laverne’s brother-in-law is an early riser and most mornings by seven o’clock she hears running water from the upstairs bathroom at the back of the house, which means that soon he will be leaving for work. On weekdays Laverne and Hal leave the house on either side of eight-thirty, but not this morning
because according to her wristwatch, which is punctual, it is almost ten.

Although she won’t be going to school today, out of habit Laverne has already finished her morning ablutions: chin hair plucked, face powdered and rouged, red pincurls brushed out. She has always taken care with her appearance and today has chosen to wear a denim skirt and cotton blouse, casual clothing she never wears in the classroom. Some of the younger teachers try to cozy up to students by wearing T-shirts and sneakers. Not Laverne. Students are more apt to respect a teacher who looks professional, and on school days she wears tailored slacks, a silk blouse or pullover, a gold chain and pearl-sized gold earrings.

Earlier this morning when Laverne was in her tiny kitchen apartment drinking a cup of coffee and gazing out the open casement window, she saw Sophie Power come down the veranda steps, pass the lilac bush and head downtown. Laverne rarely sees Sophie and apart from the appearance of half the rental payment on her monthly bank statement, she ignores the fact that a tenant occupies the first floor apartment directly below Lily and Hal’s.

The Old Steadman House was built by Grover Steadman, a lumber baron with a large family. Originally the bedrooms on the second floor were occupied by Grover, his wife and children while the servants’ quarters were attached to the back of the house and connected to the second floor by a stairway that now leads to the upstairs kitchen. Following the Steadmans’ departure, the house was divided into apartments which for many years were occupied by a succession of families. During
this time, the servants’ quarters fell into disrepair. Laverne could have chosen to live in what is now Sophie Power’s apartment, but instead chose to live in what had been the servants’ quarters. Not only did those particular rooms provide the amount of space she wanted, they were connected to her sister’s apartment by the inside stairway. There was also the benefit of a U-shaped space between Laverne’s rooms and the house. Having occupied a trailer for thirty-one years, Laverne was enticed by the fact that not only would she would be living close to her sister, she would also have a garden of her own, and once the renovations were finished, she lost no time in planting a cherry tree and a variety of herbs in the new soil beneath the casement window.

On weekday mornings, Laverne seldom has the pleasure of drinking a second cup of coffee while gazing out the kitchen window. She drinks her coffee standing up, not sitting on the kitchen stool admiring her small garden whose centrepiece is the spindly cherry tree, which for the first time holds the promise of fruit. So far the cherries are bullet hard, but if the heat wave continues, they may be edible in a week or two. Although the garden is still in shade, the basil is beginning to droop, and sweat is already gathering in Laverne’s armpits and behind her knees. Closing the casement window, she moves into the interior of the apartment. Here the light, a smudge of greenish gold on the wall opposite the side window, is muted and soothing. The room is cool but it is not its coolness that Laverne finds most pleasing. It is the room’s secret, a secret she has shared with no one, not even her sister, Lily.

——

Four years ago, Laverne accepted an invitation from Jan Pronk, a former teaching colleague, to visit Amsterdam. She was immediately impressed by Holland, a compact, efficient country where, unlike France, her former summer destination, people spoke English and there was little risk of being corrected or dismissed.

It was Jan’s lover, Lucas Verduyn, who showed Laverne Pieter de Hooch’s
Woman and Child in an Interior
in the Rijksmuseum. Lucas proclaimed that of all the paintings by the Dutch Masters, de Hooch’s painting was his favourite. “The painting is so calm and restful,” Lucas told her, “I would live inside it if I could.” Laverne was captivated by the painting and by the idea of living inside it. And she was more captivated by Lucas’s love of art than she was with Lucas. She was not in love with Lucas or with Jan. She had never been in love, never risked a full-blown love affair. There was too much to lose if a love affair didn’t work out, which is why she settled for an infatuation, usually with a younger man. When she taught school in Bridgewater in her thirties, Laverne had a crush on Bill Nauss, the handsome young teacher fresh out of college who accompanied her to staff parties and was a regular bridge partner until the night he drove her home. When she invited him into her trailer for a cup of tea, he pinned her against the padded settee, smacked her wetly on the lips and squeezed her breasts. Offended that he had taken such liberties, she ordered him to leave the trailer at once. From then on, she attended staff parties alone.