The Governor of the Northern Province (4 page)

Waiting for Hortense to come up with some books conducive to her design, Jennifer again shot her voice through the library quiet. “Books on politics, that's what's wanted. Books on politics.” She said this with even more force when Hortense slipped behind a bookcase. To make sure she was being heard. The effect on Hortense, in her solemn hushed library, on Hortense, who had been raised to know that one never discussed politics, pregnancy or plumbing in polite company, was of extreme offence.

The librarian found three titles for the girl, one on Churchill, one on the Fathers of Confederation and a third on the American president Lyndon Baines Johnson. A fourth suggestion,
Macbeth
, was turned away as soon as Jennifer recognized the author's name from English class. The girl waited in stuffed silence as her books were stamped, enduring Hortense's brittle sermon on the many lessons the Elizabethans could teach those willing to listen—about love, friendship, betrayal and, with this play in particular, about women and politics. Hadn't Jennifer seen the production in Centennial Park last summer?

Hortense had thought it very lovely, entirely dark and rather deep, but perhaps a tad much, particularly the actress who had played Lady Macbeth like a malevolent Bea Arthur. But how the woods had moved, what with lit tallow dangling from each stand to light the actors' paths! That, with its symbolic suggestion of new light coming to vanquish the wickedness of Dunsinane, had been, she thought, very well done. She had rubbed these observations into a small humid glow on her walks to and from the grocers that August, in preparation for the first fall meeting of the Hoarfrost Romantics. But when Hortense told all of this to the lone and single and creative man in her book club, he had dismissed her with a sniff, declaring that showy stage props were the opium of the masses while he was of the Brecht school on such matters.

“Which,” he continued, snickering to himself so that his thin reed of a moustache seemed to hum and vibrate, “is why I happen to be so bloody estranged from everyone around me in this vaudeville of a township. Estranged, I said. Brecht! Doesn't anyone understand me? Brecht!”

Someone said “Gazoontite” and he was too pleased with himself to catch the sarcasm. He sniffed that he didn't care if no one else around here was as estranged as he was, or could even know what he was talking about.

In the kitchen slicing banana bread later that afternoon, Hortense learned from the hostess, Faye, that Grant had applied and been turned down for the position of stage designer for the
Macbeth
production.

“But then again, between us girls, given my husband's position in this town, George thinks he's just Viking gay is all,” the hostess concluded with a shrug as they gathered the teacups and dessert plates and eased their way back into the sitting room.

Hortense made a sour-cherry face. This was the expected and properly ambivalent response among women in town to hearing that an insensitive man like a husband figured that a sensitive one like an older, well-read bachelor had to be that way. The sour-cherry face condemned the evaluation and agreed with it and disapproved of the universal race of men all at once.

The girl's eye-blinking and shut mouth suggested to Hortense that she hadn't seen the play. When they had been stacked in front of her, Jennifer scooped the three books off the counter and made to leave. Staring a moment longer at a spinster face the colour and firm of eggshell, she was off.

Two weeks later, Jennifer was back, marching, her face shaped into expectancy and a smile impressed upon it as if by a baker prettifying a lump of pastry dough by turning a fork around its edges. She had returned to the library to drop off the books, two of them anyway. She had come for another reason as well. Jennifer found Hortense behind a book cart burdened with end-of-the-year returns. To be helpful, she took it from her and started pushing and pulling it across the library on its rickety shrill wheels, trailing Hortense around the shelves. The librarian was glad to have someone else manoeuvre the heaving cart but felt uneasy. Something was hanging in the air.

Her lips opened.

“Miss Spillway. You said women and politics. In that play by Shakespeare, you said. But I never saw it last summer. And I can't read that stuff very well on my own. But you could. Will you talk to me about it maybe sometime, maybe when school's done?” Her white teeth dug into her lower lip as she smiled.

Hortense politely, cautiously, apologetically started to say—but then she agreed, remembering with heart-sink that it was soon to be lonely summer Saturdays and that here was someone who just might be made to understand the terror and beauty of Birnam Wood and the virtues of cloth napkins and other such fancies of the civilized imagination. Jennifer made a date and time and took directions. She left the cart still swaying a little from her twisting and turning.

IV.

During the summer after she graduated from high school, Jennifer visited the librarian on a series of Saturdays and then one Sunday, after which there were no further meetings. She visited Hortense Spillway and her crinkling doilies and porcelain cats and ballerinas and CBC FM always in the background. This was where Jennifer took her lessons about Shakespeare and scones in the time before she started her HR program at a nearby community college. But going to see Miss Spillway, Jennifer liked to think, had not been only for herself. She also went because, she decided, this chalk stick of a woman probably needed another human face to look at now and then. It was well known that Miss Spillway had lost both parents and had only a younger sister left, who lived and married well outside of town. So her going over there was also an act of community service, a response to the needs of the lonely and the alien.

She'd asked for the meetings because reading those books on politics had taught her that anyone who became a Beloved Leader had to have something to do with Shakespeare. The problem was,
she
had never had anything to do with him except read the Coles Notes before her grade ten Christmas final. She wanted clarifications. To know what made it a compliment to say that “Sir John A. was perhaps the only figure for the premiership because he alone inspired hatred from neither the Capulets in Upper Canada nor the Montagues in Lower Canada.” To find out what she was supposed to take from “Churchill, who, from a middling mediocrity after his Navy stint, enjoyed a meteoric rise to an historical greatness that made lazy Prince Hal's ascent to valiant King Henry the Fifth seem little more than changing seats on the West Hampstead lorry.” She didn't have questions about the book she had held on to well past the due date, which was about that American President from Nowhere, Texas. She didn't care to know why “Johnson had raged across the Oval Office like Lear upon the heath when Party elders told him that they didn't want him to stand for re-election in 1968.” She didn't have any questions about that book because it was immediately taken on as something of a saint's life, an exemplar after which to model herself. Johnson's story was one that Jennifer hoped to reflect on, later in life, as resonant. An unremarkable man from an unremarkable place who wanted, needed, had to have at any cost to himself and those around him recognition and admission that he was capable of more than his blood and drawl allowed for. Which could come not from wealth or beauty or fame but only from power, the hard power of ruling others and being feared and loved for it. But it was how Johnson did it that took Jennifer. He never stopped at the getting. She also studied the biography's pictures of Johnson at his business, politicking himself onto others, with his deep lean-ins and collar grabs and extorted promises of support for his programs and slogans. Johnson, she thought, was like a defenceman who couldn't keep up with the snipers, so he turned his bulk into an asset and crushed them along the boards. She found her method there.

Her own parents were not people to ask for help. Their interest in periodicals ran from farming journals to
Reader's Digest
and, after one surprisingly good crop some years earlier,
TV Guide
. Also, the annual Sears catalogue, and occasional church bulletins whenever Sunday mornings were just too blank to be spent at home waiting for that evening's roast to thaw.

Wanting to bust and slug through mere Thickson expectations, Jennifer visited the librarian at her home in hopes of having these questions about Shakespeare and great men answered. She also sensed that this could be something like “a broadening experience,” which, she knew, the richer girls from her school were given as graduation gifts. Weekend shopping excursions to Montreal and even to Toronto; the daughter of the richest man in town—he owned the lone car, truck and RV dealership—was sent for half a summer to some kind of young ladies' camp in New York where, it was rumoured, they had sailing lessons and Jews and other such fancy things. Her own graduation gift had been, in truth, a very nice surprise: a distended encyclopedia set that had sat through the spring thaw in a half-flooded basement. Its age was evidenced by the overwhelming length of an entry on the Lindbergh Baby. Her mother, with gift money granted by her father, had purchased it at significant discount at one of the first May yard sales. But it was also Barb Thickson's attempt to match what seemed to be her daughter's new interest in books. She was worried that Jennifer might fail to attract a husband and leave them with no way to continue the farm. This was certainly possible, what with the girl's overgrown gourd of a body, and with more scrub grass than corn rows on Thickson land these last couple of years. She thought the books, which the seller advertised as “four years at Carleton for forty bucks,” might save her. Or at least help a little with what she was looking to do for herself.

The Thickson family, being firmly Middle Canadian, prided itself on permafrost reticence whenever anything close to the inner life came up; this was as much of a virtue for them as sending prompt funeral flowers and filing early tax returns. Which meant that Barb never entirely told her daughter that she was also a little sympathetic with her wanting to go and get for herself something more than just okay in life. Equally, Jennifer, though moved some by the graduation gift, by its implications and the quiet sanctioning for her designs that it suggested, had simply nodded and purse-lipped her mother's cheek and grazed up at her father's neck stubble in thanks. But then she noticed how her mother was lingering nearby as she thumbed through the first few books in the collection while her father packmuled the rest to her room. Jennifer caught a look at how Barb's fingers were wriggling and her hands hovering around her blouseflounced waist. Waiting to say, wanting to hear.

“You know, Mum,” Jennifer began, her lungs feeling a little more than pinched by the breathing necessary to say something of matter to a near relation, “there's a lot of information in these pages, just an awful lot. Which is, well, pretty good.”

“More than that, Jennifer. More than simply information, because that's what's in the phone book, you know. There's knowledge in these books.” In answering her daughter, Barb was low-voiced and kitchen-retreat-ready in case she heard Gus's tread on the topmost step. But this was her chance to tell, to tell what she dared to. “And knowledge, they say someone said, well, knowledge is power. And power—” Now this was getting to be too much, so Barb got up to check on their chicken dinner and reread those directions for softening the ice cream cake brought home in honour of Jennifer's graduation. “—power just might do you fine. In fact, it might be worth more to you”—now she was verging on the autobiographical—“than a clammed-up fist of from-the-field flowers and what, well, what he'll probably call a champagne diamond. At least that's what they used to call them.”

After this, Barb Thickson almost always mouthed the proper lines about the superior goods of marriage and children to her daughter, and agreed in nodding silence with Gus that politics was like urinals and moustache combs: they were designed for men and God help the woman who tried them out. But that one time, just that once, after giving her daughter the encyclopedia set, Barb wanted her to know that it was okay to look for, and want, more in life than smiling at your husband's news that he found a sale on wiper blades in the middle of January, or accepting that a
Canadian Homemaker
's report about interesting variations on the butter tart was, in fact, interesting.

Jennifer hadn't openly responded to Barb's words about the encyclopedias and power at the time—this was prevented by simple shock at her mother's capacities, by a little fear in Jennifer about what her mother thought about her own marriage, by Barb's mad dash into the kitchen, and by her father's return downstairs to get the rest of the books and loudly predict a visit to the chiropractor later that week— but they went to work on her even more than the books themselves, pulling and pushing like some Old Testament prophecy. Like double yeast baking in a hot summer kitchen.

V.

At Jennifer's first visit, on a Saturday mid-morning in early July, Miss Spillway served spongy angel food cakes covered in confectioner's sugar that left a fine white dust in the webbing between the thumb and index finger. Nervous, hungry and accustomed to such finery only at funerals and weddings, where meat-handed cousins were always lurking open-mouthed, she ate three off the platter right away. Like they were dressed-up potato chips. Her face went reddish when she saw Hortense pick up a tiny fork and eat her own, her one cake, in moused nibbles, while telling Jennifer the stories of the Henry plays and
Romeo and Juliet
in response to the opening volley of questions. Hortense had noticed without comment what had happened to the other cakes and took this, courageously, as a sign of the magnum opus work-in-progress before her. Meanwhile, Jennifer successfully resisted the urge to suck her hand clean. This was, for her, an indication of how far she'd come already.