Things as They Are (14 page)

Pam’s harsh reaction to his story surprised him. She didn’t find it funny at all. The word she used was “sick.”

“What’s sick about it?” Ray wanted to know.

“For starters, what man in his right mind would insist that his kid play bartender and make him a witness to such a sickening spectacle? And what about winning all your money back and keeping it? That sounds to me like a pretty cruel thing to do to a ten year old.”

Ray disputed all this, which was unusual. He seldom disputed anything Pam said. He hated disagreements.

“If you ask me, Ray,” Pam said, “your father has never treated you very well.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re not a very good reader of human nature, are you?” snapped Pam.

Ray supposed he wasn’t. People were always seeing subtly shaded motives where he only saw black and white. Maybe when it came to judging people he suffered from something akin to colour blindness. Living in the university-student residence he had been everybody’s favourite mark, continually beset by practical jokers, borrowers and plagiarists begging for a peek at his assignments. He was always taken in.

Nevertheless, he instinctively avoided any of those subjects (philosophy, psychology, sociology) which purported to grapple with the puzzle of human behaviour. A modest talent with numbers saw him safely through the College of Commerce, although the compulsory first-year English course was a close shave, throwing him utterly at sea whenever the complicated motives and actions of bizarre characters were confidently probed and analyzed. Ray never forgot one of the questions on his first English quiz. The professor wanted to know why it was significant that the rescue boat in
Lord of the Flies
was a warship. Ray couldn’t detect any significance unless it was that the navy was the logical branch of the armed forces to effect a rescue at sea, rather than, say, the army. So that was what he had answered. But that wasn’t right. No, the significance lay in the irony of the boys being saved by a warship, symbol of the murderous impulses responsible for crashing them on the island in the first place, and of the murderous
impulses which destroyed their idyllic paradise. Of course, once it was all explained, Ray grasped the professor’s point. And all along he thought Mr. Golding only wanted him to feel sorry for poor Piggy.

Although stubbornly defending his father against Pam’s charges, an irritating speck of uneasiness was introduced. He could not deny he had been wrong about this or that person before. Yet when Pam drew unflattering comparisons between his and
her
father, Ray couldn’t help feeling it was unfair, like comparing apples with oranges. One was khaki work clothes. The other, white shirt and tie. A prosperous businessman could pet, indulge, and dote upon a beloved daughter. Boys needed a different preparation for the world. Maybe his father kept the money won in the card game not out of any meanness, but to teach Ray a useful lesson about the world. That was all.

If criticism of his father had come from anyone but Pam, it’s likely Ray would have shrugged it off. But he genuinely admired his wife (perhaps even more than he did his father) and found it difficult to dismiss any of her opinions. Ray was convinced of her superiority to him in every respect.

It was this capacity for admiration that had brought Ray and his wife together in the first place. The daughter of the Ford-Mercury dealer, and mayor of a town of 800, meant Pam was small-town royalty, raised with the conviction that she was special. And it could not be denied that she was a reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent young lady. Unlike other girls in town, Pam’s hair was permed regularly at the beauty parlour, her dresses purchased in the city instead of from the catalogue, and she drove her own car, a 1965 Ford
LTD
convertible. The car alone would have made her somebody special.

In such a tiny parish, with its limited pool of talent, she passed for extraordinary. Pam was the perennial female lead in the Drama Society’s productions, she sang the solos in the Glee Club, and played clarinet in the school band. Three times she was crowned Snow Queen at the Winter Carnival and it
would have been four if there hadn’t been a stupid rule against freshies competing. Her senior year she was unanimously chosen class valedictorian, as she knew she would be. Pam Ferguson was the planet around which her satellites gratefully arranged their orbits.

University had come as a dreadful shock to her. Suddenly she found herself demoted to ordinary. The professors did not listen respectfully to her opinions in class the way her high-school teachers had, and the boys favoured her with perfunctory attentions. In residence, on her floor alone, there were two girls better dressed than she was. At the end of two months, Pam was so desperately unhappy that she seriously considered returning home to let her father arrange a job for her in the local bank.

Then an acquaintance took her to a house party. Within an hour of arriving, the acquaintance was picked up by an engineering student and disappeared, leaving Pam to fend for herself. As she ranged through rooms plugged with strangers, looking for a familiar face, Pam bumped into a shy-looking boy with a gentle voice. This was Ray and he swiftly put Pam at ease by appreciating her the way she was used to being appreciated. In no time at all she confided to Ray her father’s foolish insistence that all her Best Actress trophies be lined up on the mantel for the whole world to see. It was so embarrassing! He was also treated to a blow by blow account of her troubles editing the high-school year book. The evening flew by for both of them.

There was nothing much attractive about Ray. His rear end was still too big, his thighs too plump, and his face too innocent to be appealing to any woman under the age of forty. But his fervent devotion outweighed these handicaps and gave Pam a new lease on life. She found it possible to continue. They dated through all four years of university, although several times Pam broke it off. On each of these occasions Ray begged her to take him back and she consented – without Ray she felt common, plain, neglected. A month after they
graduated Ray landed a job as a government accountant and she agreed to marry him.

Pam harboured ill will against her father-in-law from the start. The size of the cheque he presented as a wedding gift struck her as insulting. Added to that there was the annoyance of Ray having to repay a student loan.

“Why is it that your father didn’t help you through university?” she asked Ray one day.

“Why?” Ray said. “Because he hasn’t any money. He’s just a working stiff.”

“But I thought you mentioned he bought his
R. V
. while you were going to school.”

“I guess he did,” said Ray.

“It’s nice he had his priorities straight,” said Pam.

Ray began to wonder if there mightn’t be something to what Pam said. He became less eager to phone his parents long distance when Pam called attention to the fact that it was Ray who always called, never his dad. Other sore spots developed. When Ray got a promotion after three years of work with the government he looked forward to impressing his father with the news. The old man interrupted him in mid-sentence and commenced his own story about how an expensive piece of machinery had been wrecked by the carelessness of a young miner. “The young ones are no damn good,” he concluded. “I’m sure it’s the same in your business.” Ray would never have stopped to think that he, too, qualified as a “young one” if Pam hadn’t pointed it out to him.

These insights of his wife’s sometimes made him sad, but Ray was not a man inclined to dwell on the gloomy side of life; he consoled himself with his good fortune in having a woman like Pam to love. It was true that life was not always a bed of roses with Pam, she sometimes caught the blues and Ray had to do his cheerful best to raise her sinking spirits or keep her from turning sour. When she complained that her anthropology degree made her unemployable, condemned her to housewifery, Ray suggested perhaps she would like to return
to school. When she charged six years of marriage with causing her to gain forty pounds, Ray assured her that she was every bit as beautiful and desirable as she had ever been.

“Can’t you see how upsetting it is to me?” she would scream at him. “I’m not beautiful. I’m fat. You only say I’m beautiful so you won’t have to talk about my problems with me. You’re just like your father, Ray. You don’t care about anybody but yourself. You’d tell me anything in the hope it would shut me up. You’re selfish and uncaring – just like him.”

It had been hard for Ray to accept Pam’s view of his father but now that he did, he felt no hatred for him. Instead, he felt an odd shame, like the man who discovers he has been invited to a party because there was no way of
not
inviting him. As much for his father’s sake as his own, Ray began to avoid him.

Shortly after Ray and Pam celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary, steering clear of his father became easier. His parents, two old gypsies, moved again, to Pine Point in the Northwest Territories. The distance between them, a distance compounded by bad roads and the horrors of winter driving, gave Ray a plausible excuse for paying fewer visits. This was a satisfactory solution for a time, then Ray began to be plagued by mysterious premonitions of a disaster about to befall his father. As a small boy, he had known children whose fathers or brothers had been killed in mine accidents, and the possibility that one day the mine would slay or maim his father had always been there. Now it came forward and took possession of him. He imagined electrocutions, catastrophic explosions, cave-ins, entanglements with machinery. Whenever the imagined scenes became too real, too horrific, he would phone Pine Point. If he got his mother, he would speak. If his father answered, he simply hung up, comforted to know he was all right. Pam began to question him about the phone bill. “Five calls to Pine Point in two weeks? Why Ray?”

Two years after his parents moved north, the news Ray had been dreading broke. It didn’t matter that his father wasn’t killed in an accident at the mine but had drowned in a boating
mishap, Ray couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that somehow his dark reveries had dragged his poor father down through fathoms of icy water to his death.

Pam reminded Ray that life goes on and waits for no man. That he was responsible for managing his loss. But every time Ray made a step in that direction he suffered cruel setbacks. The worst was his mother’s treachery. He encouraged her to move south after the funeral but she refused. The beauty of the north was in her blood, she said, Pine Point was home, she was perfectly happy where she was and knew her own mind, thank you very much. Not long after the first anniversary of his father’s drowning Ray discovered what had really got into his mother’s blood – a mechanic at the mine. In a tremulously defiant voice, she told Ray over the telephone that she and this man were getting married. Ray was not a person to be rude and cutting to anyone, let alone his own mother. But he was shocked and hurt by what she was doing – for his father’s sake.

According to Pam he was acting like a child. “If you ask me,” she said, “you ought to be glad your mother is getting married. At least she has someone to look after her and save you the worry. Besides, everyone deserves a chance at happiness.”

Ray demanded to know what that was supposed to mean.

“Oh, nothing. Except that you never really saw how it was with your parents. You know, your mother was never happy with him.”

“What do you know about it?” said Ray, using a peevish tone of voice Pam seldom heard.

“I know habit is only habit. It isn’t love.”

Ray credited two things – Pam and the grind of his professional life – with keeping him in balance. He was thankful for both. For nine years he had worked in government service,
slowly and steadily riding a wave of modest promotions. There was no man better suited to the task he was called upon to perform than Ray; his unflinching doggedness and diligence were bywords in the office. The most recalcitrant accounting foul-ups were turned over to him to solve, tough nuts that never yielded to a single blow but only the most persistent knocking and rapping. He worked calmly and methodically on all problems, often remaining at his desk long after he had cheerfully waved his colleagues out the door. He did not begrudge the extra hours in the least, except for the inconvenience they caused his wife. To make up for this, Ray was always ready with small gifts, flowers, and dinners out in expensive restaurants.

It was at Ray’s prompting that Pam renewed an old interest from high-school days and joined an amateur theatre group. To Ray’s delight, his wife came to life, seemed happier than ever before. She enjoyed her new circle of friends and even shed twenty-five pounds so that she could get a crack at better parts. As she said to Ray, “It’s difficult to play Blanche Du Bois tipping the scales at one-sixty.”

What particularly gladdened Ray’s heart was the revelation that his wife could really act. Of course, he didn’t rely on his taste to come to this conclusion, Ray realized that he didn’t know beans about good acting. But from the way she was treated at cast parties, or at the readings sometimes held in the living room of their home, he could see that everyone respected Pam, even deferred to her. She was on her way to becoming a star in the small world of local theatre. Now it seemed she was out more evenings than he was himself, always at rehearsals, attending productions of the local professional company, or taking part in something curiously called workshops. Her happiness was proclaimed by a more flamboyant style of dress and the variety of accents in which she spoke to him, English, Irish, even German. When she said she was on her way to becoming a new person, Ray could well believe it. Sometimes he didn’t know her himself.

Then she got her break, the artistic director of the city’s one professional company offered her a role. It was a small part, the nurse in
Equus
, but for the first time in her life Pam would be paid to act.
Equus
played for two weeks, and during the course of the run, Ray attended four performances. He joked to the other accountants that if he went to all fourteen, he still wouldn’t know what the play was supposed to be about, he was that dense.