The Progress of Love (30 page)

Lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one.

No more insults of that kind anywhere up in that country.

No more.

(The insults had to do with being a bastard. He didn’t say so, but Violet figured it out from her mother’s muttering. “Your daddy didn’t have
no people
,” Aunt Ivie said, in her dark, puzzled, grudging way. “He never did. He just didn’t have
no people
at all.”)

Violet was five years older than her sister Dawn Rose, and six years older than Bonnie Hope. Those two were thick as thieves, but mainly docile. They were redheads, like King Billy. Dawn Rose was chubby and ruddy and broad-faced. Bonnie Hope was small-boned and big-headed, with hair that grew at first in wisps and patches, so that she looked like a wobbly young bird. Violet was dark-haired, and tall for her age, and strong like her mother. She had a long, handsome face and dark blue eyes that looked at first
to be black. Later on, when Trevor Auston was in love with her, he had some nice things to say about the color of her eyes matching up with her name.

Violet’s mother, as well as her father, had an odd name, being called Aunt Ivie most of the time even by her own children. That was because she was the youngest of a large family. She had plenty of people, though they didn’t often come to see her. All the old or precious things in the house—those things in the parlor, and a certain humpbacked trunk, and some tarnished spoons—came from Aunt Ivie’s family, who had a farm on the shores of White Lake. Aunt Ivie had stayed there so long, unmarried, that her nieces’ and nephews’ name for her became everybody’s name, and her daughters, too, chose it over Mama.

Nobody ever thought she would marry. She said so herself. And when she did marry the little bold redheaded man who looked so odd beside her, people said she didn’t seem to stand the change too well. She lost those first boy babies, and she didn’t take too happily to the responsibility of running a house. She liked to work outside, hoeing in the garden or splitting wood, as she had always done at home. She milked the cows and cleaned out the stable and took care of the hens. It was Violet, getting older, who took over the housework.

By the time she was ten years old, Violet had become quite house-proud and dictatorial, in a sporadic way. She would spend all Saturday scouring and waxing, then yell and throw herself on the couch and grind her teeth in a rage when people tracked in mud and manure.

“That girl will grow up, and she won’t have nothing but stumps in her mouth, and serve her right for her temper,” Aunt Ivie said, as if she was talking about some neighbor child. Aunt Ivie was usually the one who had tracked in the mud and ruined the floor.

Another Saturday there would be baking, and making up recipes. One whole summer, Violet was trying to invent a drink like Coca-Cola, which would be famous and delicious and make them a fortune. She tried out on herself and her sisters all sorts of combinations
of berry juice, vanilla, bottled fruit essences, and spices. Sometimes they were all off in the long grass in the orchard, throwing up. The younger girls usually did what Violet told them to, and believed what she said. One day, the butcher’s man arrived to buy the young calves, and Violet told Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope that sometimes the butcher’s man was not satisfied with the meat on the calves and went after juicy little children to make them into steaks and chops and sausages. She told this out of the blue and for her own amusement, as far as she could recall later on when she made things into stories. The little girls tried to hide themselves in the haymow and King Billy heard their commotion and chased them out. They told what Violet had said and King Billy said they should be smacked for swallowing such nonsense. He said he was a man with a mule for a wife and a hooligan daughter running his house. Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope ran to confront Violet.

“Liar! Butchers don’t chop up children! You told a lie, liar!”

Violet, who was cleaning out the stove at the time, said nothing. She picked up a pan of ashes—warm but, fortunately, not hot—and dumped it on their heads. They knew enough not to tell a second time. They ran outside and rolled in the grass and shook themselves like dogs, trying to get the ashes out of their hair and ears and eyes and underwear. Down in a corner of the orchard, they started their own playhouse, with pulled grass heaped up for seats and bits of broken china for dishes. They vowed not to tell Violet.

But they couldn’t keep away from her. She put their hair up in rags to curl it; she dressed them in costumes made from old curtains; she painted their faces, using concoctions of berry juice and flour and stove polish. She found out about the playhouse and had ideas for furnishing it that were superior to theirs. Even on the days when she had no time for them at all, they had to watch what she was doing.

She was painting a design of red roses on the black and worn-out kitchen linoleum.

She was cutting a scalloped edge on all the old green window blinds for elegance.

It did seem as if ordinary family life had been turned upside
down at their place. At other farms, it would usually be the children you would see first as you came up the lane—children playing, or doing some chore. The mother would be hidden in the house. Here it was Aunt Ivie you would see, hilling up the potatoes or just prowling around the yard or the chicken run, wearing rubber boots and a man’s felt hat and a dingy assortment of sweaters, skirt, droopy slip and apron, and wrinkled, spattered stockings. It was Violet who ruled in the house, Violet who decided when and if to pass out the pieces of bread and butter and corn syrup. It was as if King Billy and Aunt Ivie had not quite understood how to go about making an ordinary life, even if they had meant to.

But the family got along. They milked the cows and sold the milk to the cheese factory and raised the calves for the butcher and cut the hay. They were members of the Anglican church, though they didn’t often attend, owing to the problems of getting Aunt Ivie cleaned up. They did go sometimes to the card parties in the schoolhouse. Aunt Ivie could play cards, and she would remove her apron and felt hat to do so, though she wouldn’t change her boots. King Billy had some reputation as a singer, and after the card-playing, people would try to get him to entertain. He liked to sing songs he had learned from the loggers that were never written down. He sang with his fists clenched and his eyes closed, resolutely:

Who was Hooligan? Who was Hayes?

“Some outfit,” said King Billy, expansive from the singing.

Violet went to high school in town, and after that to normal school in Ottawa. People wondered where King Billy got the money. If he still had some put by from his railway pay, that meant he had got some money from Aunt Ivie’s family when he took her off their hands and bought the farm. King Billy said he didn’t grudge Violet
an education—he thought being a teacher would suit her. But he didn’t have anything extra for her. Before she started at high school, she went across the fields to the next farm, carrying a piece of Roman-striped crepe she had found in the trunk. She wanted to learn to use the sewing machine, so that she could make herself a dress. And so she did, though the neighbor woman said it was the oddest-looking outfit for a schoolgirl that she ever hoped to see.

Violet came home every weekend when she was at high school, and told her sisters about Latin and basketball, and looked after the house as before. But when she went away to Ottawa, she stayed until Christmas. Dawn Rose and Bonnie Hope were big enough by then to take care of the house, but whether they did or not was another matter. Dawn Rose was actually big enough to be starting high school, but she had failed her last year at the local school and was repeating it. She and Bonnie Hope were in the same class.

When Violet came home for the Christmas holidays, she had changed a great deal. But she thought it was everything and everybody else that had changed.

She wanted to know if they had always talked this way. What way? With an accent. Weren’t they doing it on purpose, to sound funny? Weren’t they saying “youse” on purpose, to sound funny?

She had forgotten where some things were kept, and was astonished to find the frying pan under the stove. She took a dislike to the dog, Tigger, who was allowed to stay in the house now that he was getting old. She said he smelled, and that the couch blanket was full of dog hairs.

She said the parlor smelled moldy and the walls needed papering.

But it was her sisters themselves who got the full force of her surprise and displeasure. They had grown since the summer. Dawn Rose was a big stout girl now, with loose breasts jiggling inside her dress, and a broad red face whose childish expression of secretiveness had changed to a look that seemed stupid and stubborn. She had developed womanly smells, and she did not wash. Bonnie Hope was still childish in body, but her frizzy red hair was never combed out properly and she was covered with fleabites that she got from playing with the barn cats.

Violet hardly knew how to go about cleaning these two up. The worst was that they had become rebellious, looked at each other and snickered when she talked to them, avoided her, were mulish and silent. They acted as if they had some idiotic secret.

And so they did, they had a secret, but it did not come out until quite a while later, not until after the events of the next summer, and then indirectly, with Bonnie Hope telling some girls who told another who told another, and others getting to hear about it, then a neighbor woman, who finally told Violet.

In late fall of that year—the year Violet went away to normal school—Dawn Rose had begun to menstruate. She was so affronted by this development that she went down to the creek and sat in the cold water, resolved to get the bleeding stopped. She took off her shoes and stockings and underpants and sat there, in the shallow, icy water. She washed the blood out of her underpants and wrung them out and put them on wet. She didn’t catch cold, she didn’t get sick, and she didn’t menstruate again all year. The neighbor woman said that such a procedure could have affected her brain.

“Driving all that bad blood back into her system, it could have.”

Violet’s only pleasure that Christmas was in talking about her boyfriend, whose name was Trevor Auston. She showed her sisters his picture. It was cut from a newspaper. He wore his clerical collar.

“He looks like a minister,” said Dawn Rose, snickering.

“He is. That picture’s from when he was ordained. Don’t you think he’s handsome?”

Trevor Auston was handsome. He was a dark-haired young man with narrowed eyes and a perfect nose, a chin flung up in the air, and a thin-lipped, confident, even gracious smile.

Bonnie Hope said, “He must be old, to be a minister.”

“He just got to be a minister,” said Violet. “He’s twenty-six. He isn’t an Anglican minister, he’s a United Church minister,” she said, as if that made a difference. And to her it did. Violet had changed churches in Ottawa. She said that at the United church there was a lot more going on. There was a badminton club—both she and Trevor played—and a drama club, as well as skating parties, tobogganing parties, hayrides, socials. It was at a Halloween social
in the church basement, bobbing for apples, that Violet and Trevor first met. Or first talked, because Violet of course had noticed him before in church, where he was the assistant minister. He said that he had noticed her, too. And she thought that maybe he had. A group of girls from the normal school all went to that church together, partly on Trevor’s account, and they played a game, trying to catch his eye. When everybody was standing up singing the hymns, they stared at him, and if he looked back they dropped their eyes at once. Waves of giggles would spread along the row. But Violet sang right back at him as if her eyes had just lit on him by accident:

Locked eyes during the hymn-singing. The virile hymns of the old Methodists and the scourging psalms of the Presbyterians had come together in this new United Church. The ministry then, in that church, attracted vigorous young men intent on power, not too unlike the young men who went into politics. A fine voice and a good profile did no harm.

Locked eyes. Kisses at the door of Violet’s boarding house. The cool, nicely shaved, but still slightly bristling and foreign male cheek, the decent but promising smell of talc and shaving lotion. Soon enough they were slipping into the shadows beside the doorway, pressing together through their winter clothing. They had to have serious talks about self-control, and these talks were in themselves inflammatory. They became more and more convinced that if they were married, they would be having the kind of pleasures that nearly make you faint when you think about them.

Soon after Violet got back from her Christmas holidays, they became engaged. Then they had other things to think about and look forward to besides sex. A responsible and important sort of life lay ahead of them. They were asked to dinner as an engaged couple, by older ministers and rich and powerful members of the congregation. Violet had made herself one good dress, a cranberry wool
serge with box pleats—a great improvement over the Roman-striped crêpe creation.

At those dinners, they had tomato juice to start with. Pitchers of iced water sat on the tables. No one in that church could touch alcoholic beverages. Even their Communion wine was grape juice. But there were great roasts of beef or pork, or turkeys, on silver platters, roasted potatoes and onions and slatherings of gravy, then rich cakes and pies and divinely molded puddings with whipped cream. Eating was not a sin. Cardplaying was a sin, except for a specially created Methodist card game called Lost Heir; dancing was a sin for some, and moviegoing was a sin for some, and going to any kind of entertainment except a concert of sacred music for which one did not pay was a sin for all on Sundays.