The Love of a Good Woman (18 page)

Mr. Wild was the proprietor of Wildfruit Orchards and had been a resident on the island for about fifteen years. He was a solitary man whose previous history had been in the military service but he was cordial to those he met. He was married some time ago and had one son. It is believed he was born in the Atlantic Provinces.

The house was reduced to ruin by the blaze and the beams had fallen in. The body of Mr. Wild was found amongst the charred remains burnt almost beyond recognition.

A blackened tin thought to have contained kerosene was discovered within the ruins.

Mr. Wild’s wife was away from home at the time, having on the previous Wednesday accepted a ride on a boat that was picking up a load of apples to be transported from her husband’s orchard to Comox. She was intending to return the same day but remained away for three days and four nights due to engine trouble with the boat. On Sunday morning she returned with the friend who had offered her the ride and together they discovered the tragedy.

Fears were entertained for the Wilds’ young son who was not in the house when it burned. A search was started as soon as possible and before dark on Sunday evening the child was located in the woods less than a mile from his home. He was wet and cold from being in the underbrush for several hours but otherwise unharmed. It appears that he took some food with him when leaving the house as he had some pieces of bread with him when found.

An inquest will be held in Courtenay into the cause of the fire which destroyed the Wilds’ home and resulted in the loss of Mr. Wild’s life.

“Did you know these people?” I said.
Turn the page.

August 4, 1923. An inquest held in Courtenay on Vancouver Island into the fire that caused the death of Anson James Wild of Cortes Island in April of this year found that suspicion of arson by the deceased man or by person or persons unknown cannot be substantiated. The presence of an empty kerosene can at the site of the fire has not been accepted as sufficient evidence. Mr. Wild regularly purchased and made use of kerosene, according to Mr. Percy Kemper, storekeeper, Manson’s Landing, Cortes Island.

The seven-year-old son of the deceased man was not able to provide any evidence about the fire. He was found by a search party several hours later wandering in the woods not far from his home. In response to questioning he said that his father had given him some bread and apples and told him to walk to Manson’s Landing but that he lost his way. But in later weeks he has said that he does not remember this being the case and does not know how he came to lose his way, the path having been travelled by him many times before. Dr. Anthony Helwell of Victoria stated that he had examined the boy and believes that he may have run away at the first sight of the fire perhaps having time to lay hold of some food to take with him, which he has no recollection of now. Alternately he says the boy’s story may be correct and recollection of it suppressed at a later date. He said that further questioning of the child would not be useful because he is probably unable to distinguish between fact and his imagination in this matter.

Mrs. Wild was not at home at the time of the fire having gone to Vancouver Island on a boat belonging to James Thompson Gorrie of Union Bay.

The death of Mr. Wild was ruled to be an accident due to misadventure, its cause being a fire of origins unknown.

Close up the book now.
Put it away. Put them all away
.

No. No. Not like that. Put them away in order. Year by year. That’s better. Just the way they were
.

Is she coming yet? Look out the window.

Good. But she will be coming soon.

There you are, what do you think of that?

I don’t care. I don’t care what you think of it.

Did you ever think that people’s lives could be like that and end up like this? Well, they can.

I
DID
not tell Chess about this, though I usually told him anything I thought would interest or amuse him about my day. He had a way now of dismissing any mention of the Gorries. He had a word for them. It was “grotesque.”

All the dingy-looking little trees in the park came out in bloom. Their flowers were a bright pink, like artificially colored popcorn.

And I began working at a real job.

The Kitsilano Library phoned and asked me to come in for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. I found myself on the other side of the desk, stamping the due date in people’s books. Some of these people were familiar to me, as fellow borrowers. And now I smiled at them, on behalf of the library. I said, “See you in two weeks.”

Some laughed and said, “Oh, a lot sooner,” being addicts like myself.

It turned out that this was a job I could handle. No cash register—when fines were paid you got the change out of a drawer. And I already knew where most of the books were on the shelves. When it came to filing cards, I knew the alphabet.

More hours were offered to me. Soon, a temporary full-time job. One of the steady workers had had a miscarriage. She stayed away for two months and at the end of that time she was pregnant
again and her doctor advised her not to come back to work. So I joined the permanent staff and kept this job until I was halfway into my own first pregnancy. I worked with women I had known by sight for a long time. Mavis and Shirley, Mrs. Carlson and Mrs. Yost. They all remembered how I used to come in and mooch around—as they said—for hours in the library. I wished they hadn’t noticed me so much. I wished I hadn’t come in so often.

What a simple pleasure it was, to take up my station, to face people from behind the desk, to be capable and brisk and friendly with those who approached me. To be seen by them as a person who knew the ropes, who had a clear function in the world. To give up my lurking and wandering and dreaming and become the girl in the library.

Of course, I had less time for reading now, and sometimes I would hold a book in my hand for a moment, in my work at the desk—I would hold a book in my hand as an object, not as a vessel I had to drain immediately—and I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.

But this scare would vanish in a minute.

The women I worked with recalled the times they had seen me writing in the library.

I said I had been writing letters.

“You write your letters in a scribbler?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s cheaper.”

The last notebook grew cold, hidden in the drawer with my tumbled socks and underwear. It grew cold, the sight of it filled me with misgiving and humiliation. I meant to get rid of it but didn’t.

Mrs. Gorrie had not congratulated me on getting this job.

“You didn’t tell me you were still looking,” she said.

I said I’d had my name in at the library for a long time and that I’d told her so.

“That was before you started working for me,” she said. “So what will happen now about Mr. Gorrie?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That doesn’t do him much good, does it?”

She raised her pink eyebrows and spoke to me in the high-falutin’ way I had heard her speak on the phone, to the butcher or the grocer who had made a mistake in her order.

“And what am I supposed to do?” she said. “You’ve left me high and dry, haven’t you? I hope you keep your promises to other people a little better than your promises to me.”

This was nonsense, of course. I had not promised her anything about how long I’d stay. Yet I felt a guilty unease, if not guilt itself. I hadn’t promised her anything, but what about the times when I hadn’t answered her knock, when I’d tried to sneak in and out of the house unnoticed, lowering my head as I passed under her kitchen window? What about the way I’d kept up a thin but sugary pretense of friendship in answer to her offers—surely—of the real thing?

“It’s just as well, really,” she said. “I wouldn’t want anybody who wasn’t dependable looking after Mr. Gorrie. I wasn’t entirely pleased with the way you were taking care of him, anyway, I can tell you that.”

Soon she had found another sitter—a little spider woman with black, netted hair. I never heard her speak. But I heard Mrs. Gorrie speaking to her. The door at the top of the stairs was left open so that I should.

“She never even washed his teacup. Half the time she never even made his tea. I don’t know what she was good for. Sit and read the paper.”

When I left the house nowadays the kitchen window was flung
up and her voice rang out over my head, though she was ostensibly talking to Mr. Gorrie.

“There she goes. On her way. She won’t even bother to wave at us now. We gave her a job when nobody else would have her, but she won’t bother. Oh, no.”

I didn’t wave. I had to go past the front window where Mr. Gorrie was sitting, but I had an idea that if I waved now, even if I looked at him, he would be humiliated. Or angered. Anything I did might seem like a taunt.

Before I was half a block away I forgot about both of them. The mornings were bright, and I moved with a sense of release and purpose. At such times my immediate past could seem vaguely disgraceful. Hours behind the alcove curtain, hours at the kitchen table filling page after page with failure, hours in an overheated room with an old man. The shaggy rug and plush upholstery, the smell of his clothes and his body and of the dry pasted scrap-books, the acres of newsprint I had to make my way through. The grisly story that he had saved and made me read. (I never understood for a moment that it was in the category of the human tragedies I honored, in books.) Recalling all that was like recalling a period of illness in childhood when I had been willingly trapped in cozy flannelette sheets with their odor of camphorated oil, trapped by my own lassitude and the feverish, not quite decipherable messages of the tree branches seen through my upstairs window. Such times were not regretted so much as naturally discarded. And it seemed to be a part of myself—a sickly part?—that was now going into the discard. You would think marriage would have worked this transformation, but it hadn’t, for a while. I had hibernated and ruminated as my old self—mulish, unfeminine, irrationally secretive. Now I picked up my feet and acknowledged my luck at being transformed into a wife and an employee. Good-looking and competent enough when I took the trouble. Not weird. I could pass.

•    •    •

M
RS
. G
ORRIE
brought a pillowcase to my door. Showing her teeth in a hopeless, hostile smile, she asked if it might be mine. I said without hesitation that it wasn’t. The two pillowcases that I owned were on the two pillows on our bed.

She said in a martyred tone, “Well, it’s certainly not mine.”

I said, “How can you tell?”

Slowly, poisonously, her smile grew more confident.

“It’s not the kind of material I’d ever put on Mr. Gorrie’s bed. Or on mine.”

Why not?

“Because—it—isn’t—good—enough.”

So I had to go and take the pillowcases off the pillows on the alcove bed and bring them out to her, and it did turn out that they were not a pair, though they had looked it to me. One was made of “good” fabric—that was hers—and the one in her hand was mine.

“I wouldn’t believe you hadn’t noticed,” she said, “if it was anybody but you.”

C
HESS
had heard of another apartment. A real apartment, not a “suite”—it had a full bathroom and two bedrooms. A friend of his at work was leaving it, because he and his wife had bought a house. It was in a building at the corner of First Avenue and Macdonald Street. I could still walk to work, and he could take the same bus he took now. With two salaries, we could afford it. The friend and his wife were leaving some furniture behind, which they would sell cheaply. It would not suit their new house, but to us it seemed splendid in its respectability. We walked around the bright third-story rooms, admiring the cream-painted walls, the oak parquet, the roomy kitchen cupboards, and the tiled bathroom
floor. There was even a tiny balcony looking out onto the leaves of Macdonald Park. We fell in love with each other in a new way, in love with our new status, our emergence into adult life from the basement that had been only a very temporary way station. It would be featured in our conversation as a joke, an endurance test, for years to come. Every move we made—the rented house, the first house we owned, the second house we owned, the first house in a different city—would produce this euphoric sense of progress and tighten our connection. Until the last and by far the grandest house, which I entered with inklings of disaster and the faintest premonitions of escape.

We gave our notice to Ray, without telling Mrs. Gorrie. That raised her to a new level of hostility. In fact, she went a little crazy.

“Oh, she thinks she’s so clever. She can’t even keep two rooms clean. When she sweeps the floor all she does is sweep the dirt into a corner.”

When I had bought my first broom I had forgotten to buy a dustpan, and for a time I had done that. But she could have known about it only if she let herself into our rooms with a key of her own while I was out. Which it became apparent that she had done.

“She’s a sneak, you know. I knew the first I saw of her what a sneak she was. And a liar. She isn’t right in the head. She’d sit down there and say she’s writing letters and she writes the same thing over and over again—it’s not letters, it’s the same thing over and over. She’s not right in the head.”

Now I knew that she must have uncrumpled the pages in my wastebasket. I often tried to start the same story with the same words, As she said, over and over again.

The weather had turned quite warm, and I went to work without a jacket, wearing a snug sweater tucked into my skirt, and a belt pulled to its tightest notch.

She opened the front door and yelled after me.

“Slut. Look at the slut, the way she sticks her chest out and wobbles her rear end. You think you’re Marilyn Monroe?”

And “We don’t need you in our house. The sooner you get out of here the better.”