The Romantic (16 page)

He checked his surprise. “Other people’s feelings. Family and friends.”

“Family and friends of
alcoholics.”

He tugged on his earlobe. Nodded.

“My
feelings,” I said, ignoring his discomfort.

He gave me a keen look. “Are they?”

I studied the page. “Not the last three.”

I put the pages on the top of the piano and he came over and began to rearrange them. With his head lowered he looked only preoccupied, a bit prim, but when he glanced up I caught an expression of pleasure so private it was almost obscene. He blinked, startled. Had he forgotten I was there?

‘You reduce your horizons,” he said,“and all the little things, the slightest things, they suddenly …” He shook his head.

“Matter,” I finished.

“Grow,” he said. “Expand out into the world.”

“They only seem to because you’re ignoring all the big important things.”

“That’s the idea. You have to go right in close and concentrate on every detail and on every move you make and then you start realizing how it’s all joined together. But so … so delicately. So delicately and eternally. It’s like overtones in music, they go on forever, we just can’t hear them. You put a pile of papers in order and the principle of order itself is solidified. You straighten a picture on the wall and a flock of birds corrects its flight path.”

I said woodenly,“You don’t have any pictures on the walls.”

He smiled like a man deeply charmed.

“If you love me,” I said,“why don’t you just straighten
yourself
out?”

And then I was crying.

“Oh, God.” I swiped at my tears. “Look at me. I suppose some plugged-up drain somewhere is starting to flow.”

“A seed is germinating.” He reached out and stroked my head. “A baby is being born.”

I flinched from his hand. “Why did you say that? Why would you say a thing like that?”

According to plan, my father drives me to the airport. “Happy to, delighted to!” he said, excited at the prospect of my seeing Pierre Trudeau. He asked if any of my classmates needed a ride, and I told him no. Straight to his eager, honest face I said,“Most of the them have already paid to take the bus.”

Now, sitting beside him in the car, I remember hearing Aunt Verna telling somebody over the phone that the real damage liars do is in forcing you to question your instincts. I think of how Alice blushes at even the idea of a lie. The news of my pregnancy, and my decision to confront Abel in person, Alice accepted with surprising composure, as if mentally ticking off items on a list of probabilities. It was when I got to the part about pretending to go to Ottawa on an outing funded by a school bake sale that her cheeks lit up, although she deflected the implied reproach by exclaiming,“Bake sale! I never would have come up with that!”

“It’s all for a good cause,” I reminded her … with a first quiver of doubt.

There is hardly any traffic so early on a Saturday. My father tunes the radio to classical music and conducts with his right hand. I press against the door, out of swatting range. A grey morning. Fog packed into the gullies and lowlying fields. I look for lucky birds: yellow finches or war-biers.
There are starlings. A flock the shape of a thumbprint moves diagonally up the sky. Are starlings lucky? I don’t know. I am sobered by the wooden telephone poles, which I see as a pageant of crucifixes, one for every aborted baby.

At the airport my father offers to help check me in. “Mr. Kline will do it,” I say, referring to the supposed chaperone. I am out of the car before my father can say that he’d like to meet Mr. Kline. I wear my mother’s white leather jacket. I carry her white overnight case. Waving goodbye to my father and, as I do, feeling the hike of my short skirt, I am overcome by the unpleasant sensation that I
am
my mother: glamorous and running away. My father leans over, rolls down the passenger window and tells me to give his regards to Trudeau. I pretend to laugh. “See you Sunday,” I say, another deceit. During the past several hours my plan has advanced to staying permanently at the Richters’ and, as people do in novels,“sending for my things.”

I’ve never been on an airplane before. I am amazed by how unspectacular it is—the smooth lift-off, the momentary view and then clouds. No
UFOS
, no angels. I soon fall asleep. The seat beside me is empty, and when I awaken with the serving of breakfast I find I have kicked off my new open-toed, too-small pumps (the right size made my feet look like canoes) and hoisted my legs over the armrest. I sit up straight, tugging at my skirt as the stewardess, whose blasé pantomime of the safety instructions I had admired, reaches across my legs, unfastens the little table on the seat back, bangs it down and then, still without a word, as if returning some repulsive thing I mislaid, hands me my breakfast tray.

I take it, although I have no appetite. I even eat the fruit cocktail and one piece of toast, my fear of vomiting not as strong as my fear of annoying the stewardess if I don’t at least make a dent. Yesterday, when I got home from school, I ate half a dozen chocolate chip cookies and a minute later threw up into the kitchen sink. Mrs. Carver herded me to a chair and began brewing one of her awful stomach-settling teas. Over her shoulder she gave me that penetrating look again.

“What?” I challenged her.

She turned back to the stove.

“This flu is hanging on,” I said. I didn’t put it past her that by some voodoo indicator she had lit on the truth.

The stewardess reappears and snatches away my tray without offering me any coffee. To comfort myself I think of how I’ll be seeing Abel in only a few hours. But the prospect, now that it is almost a certainty, unnerves me. “Are you on the pill?” he asked. Since getting the pregnancy test I haven’t allowed myself to remember this, how solemn he sounded. More than solemn, frightened. “I can’t be pregnant,” I said,“it’s impossible.” By which I guess I meant impossible to imagine.

From the Prairies to Vancouver the sky is overcast. We land in rain. Because I haven’t checked any luggage I keep walking, past the carousels and through the exit doors. Spotting a phone, I go over, fish a dime out of my change purse, put it in the slot.

Hang up.

Better to show up in person. That was the original plan.

A white-pages directory lies open on the ledge under the phone. Hardly aware of what I’m doing, I leaf through to
the K’s. There’s half a column of Kirks, none of them preceded by the initial G., though. Or H. (my mother might be going by Helen these days). Or S. (she might have listed herself under my father’s first name).

I leaf back to the H’s. Haggerty. Hague. Hahn, her maiden name. No H. or S. Hahn, but—what do you know?—a G.

I check my watch. Nine-fifteen. I drop the dime back into the slot and dial the number. One ring, two rings. The blood booms in my head.

“Hello?” says a woman’s voice. She sounds impatient, interrupted. “Hello? Who is it?”

Noiselessly, as if I’d been eavesdropping on an extension, I hang up.

I head for the taxi stand. Halfway there I stop in delayed shock. I take a breath and keep walking. Was it her? I don’t know, I don’t
know!
It might have been. An older, more jagged voice than I remember, but she
is
older. Why would she be living in Vancouver, though? And if she is, why would she use her real name?

Why did I phone? That’s the real question. What did I expect? If she wanted to get in touch with me, she’d have done so long ago. I should have at least said something. I imagine the following exchange:

Me: “Is this Helen Grace Kirk? Formerly Hahn?”

Her (after a pause): “Who’s calling?”

Me: ‘Your daughter, Louise. I thought you might be interested in knowing that you’re going to be a grandmother.”

Her (with a sarcastic snort): “Oh, great.”

Me: “If it’s a girl I’m calling her Millicent” (after my grandmother, her mother and enemy). “But if she only lives
a few hours, that is to say, if she
fucks off,
I’m calling her Helen Grace.”

Just as well that I hung up.

Me: “What did the mother cow say to the daughter cow?”

Her: “What?”

Me: “Any cow can get herself pregnant.”

Her: “That’s not funny.”

The rain stops during the drive into the city. A few minutes later, the fog thins and I glimpse mountains, water. So I really am in Vancouver. I made it.

I wonder if my mother, when she first arrived at wherever she disappeared to, experienced this dull astonishment, this strange letdown.

I wonder if she was pregnant.

The thought hardly stirs me. It is as though I have alighted on the proper expression for something, an odd behaviour, say, or a circumstance, that I’ve been dimly conscious of for years. My mother pregnant by another man. By fancy Dan. The surprising part is that nobody ever suspected it. Or maybe everybody did, and it was just that nobody mentioned it in front of me.

Which would mean I’d have a half-sister or half-brother somewhere. Right here in Vancouver, it’s possible. If it’s a girl, she’d be Louise, given my mother’s views on wasting a perfectly good name. “Let’s hope for her sake she’s ravishingly beautiful,” I think with a tremor of resentment that dismantles the entire fantasy. If there
is
another Louise (or Louis), it’s none of my concern. My mother did as she pleased. She minded her own business and wasn’t very curious about anyone else’s, except as it seemed to bear out
what she already thought. I can’t remember her ever once asking me how I felt about something, or even paying much attention to me, other than to be entertained by one of my jokes or to fuss over how I looked. “Louise knows how to work the washing machine,” she wrote in her goodbye note. No, I didn’t.

We have left the highway and are driving along a street lined with rundown furniture and hardware stores, a Chinese restaurant called O.K. Happy Food. After a couple of blocks the places begin to look and sound more respectable: Everton Flower Shop, Cedric’s Antiques. Elegant Fashions—the same name as the store where I work, or
used to
work (I had to quit to get this weekend off). Behind the stores you can see wooden houses on wide lots, many of them surrounded by high, dense hedges like ramparts. We turn onto one of these residential roads, and almost immediately pull over in front of a ranch-style bungalow whose front lawn is a jungle of flowers.

“Are we here?” I say with a feeling of having just woken up.

“Twenty-four Saint Clarens,” the driver says.

I pay him, get out. Why doesn’t he stop me? Why doesn’t somebody shout,“Wait!”

A German shepherd watches from the living-room window. Sirius, it would be, Cane’s replacement. He sits in the gap between the drapes, his big patrician head cocked. Oh, and there’s the station wagon! I hadn’t noticed it under the carport. The same old station wagon with the woodpanelled sides. “It goes with the house,” I think and drift for a moment, disoriented.

The sound of an approaching car rouses me. I step onto the sidewalk and look at my watch. Twenty to ten.

Abel might still be sleeping. In all my plans (they now seem insanely provisional) I never pictured anyone other than him answering the door. Well, if the station wagon can undo me, I’ll be a wreck with Mrs. Richter. She’ll only have to say my name and I’ll start crying and confessing. I can’t let that happen. Before I tell anyone else I have to tell Abel.

I look around. There aren’t any houses on the other side of the street owing to a drop-off down to a ravine. Between the drop-off and the street is a strip of public lawn landscaped with cedar trees and shrubs, a few slabs of granite, a drinking fountain. I cross over and go behind the cedars. Several of the slabs are arranged like chairs, a tall one abutting a squat one. I choose the pair offering the best view, set my case beside them on the grass, remove my mother’s leather jacket (a previously forbidden treasure—flare-waisted, soft as raw meat—that my father allowed me to wear for this “rare and important occasion”), fold it and lay it on top of the squat slab, which is still damp from the rain. I sit. Now I’m chilly. I open the case and get out my blue jeans. That’s all I packed, except for a change of underpants and powder-blue baby-doll pyjamas I bought from Elegant Fashions on my salesgirl discount a few minutes before I quit. I should have put the jeans on the slab. But the jacket will be wet on the underside; I may as well leave it. I drape the jeans around my head and shoulders. It doesn’t matter what I look like, I’m hidden from the street. I can see out, however. By moving a few branches I can see the Richters’ garden, front door, driveway. Anybody leaving the place, I
won’t miss. I’ll just wait. The sun is shining, it’s warming up. Unless Abel is sick, he’ll come outside sooner or later.

I’m good at waiting.

And I’ve done this before. Seven and a half years ago, day after day, I hid in shrubbery and waited for Mrs. Richter to walk past her windows. I have also (the Presbyterian church episode) sat on a cold surface in an odd headdress as I prepared to spring myself on my beloved. The coincidences strike me as portentous … and unsettling, that my life should be repeating itself in this eccentric, hazardous way.

“He loves me too much, he loves me too much,” I say to banish anxiety. I consider the lilies of the yard: white gaping flowers with petals like splayed limbs. I contemplate the house and hallucinate a fish from the sleek length, the shingled siding and a bathroom window whose partly opened
Venetian
blind gives the impression of gills.

Abel’s room is at the back, he told me once. Abel, asleep. The whole neighbourhood asleep, caught in an enchantment until he wakes up. So you’d think.

An hour elapses before a single person—a bald man carrying a rolled-up newspaper under his arm—strolls past. His silver hound noses into the park, stops, hunches, trembles all over, casts me a mournful, abject glance, then defecates. About fifteen minutes later, a boy flies down the middle of the road on a high-speed bicycle, which, before I see it, I hear as crickets.

I am, by this association, reminded of the five types of North American cricket: house, field, California tree, snowy tree and black-horned tree. I try to remember what insect family crickets belong to. Can’t. I turn, then, to
remembering jokes from
A Thousand and One Side-Splitters.
(“What did the mother cow say to the daughter cow? We owe all we have to udders.”) I drift to song lyrics. “Baby, baby, where did our love go.” No. “Be my, be my little baby.” No, I don’t want to think about babies, mine growing down there, bones brewing, fingernails forming, a fetal shape. See it? In that cloud of cells, see the big bean head? Well, no, I see a bomb. Make that a hand grenade.