The Republic of Love by Carol Shields
This last they don’t actually say, but Fay believes they sense it as the ultimate horror: ending up alone.
PEGGY MCCREARY, Fay’s mother, became Peggy McLeod at the age of twenty-two. Hers was an afternoon wedding, a golden postwar autumn day. She was a virgin (she has confided this fact to Fay), which was not in those days the least remarkable. There was a matron of honor (Muriel Brewmaster, already four years married to young skinny-as-a-broom-handle John Brewmaster) and six bridesmaids and a reception at the Manitoba Club; before the event she had been given seven separate showers by her various friends, accumulating measuring cups, sets of towels, and egg beaters enough to last a lifetime. She and her new husband, Richard McLeod, whom she had known since the age of ten, honeymooned in Banff, and when they returned two weeks later, they moved directly into the Ash Avenue house, which was a wedding present from Richard’s family; her own family provided furniture and curtains and carpets. Richard went to work the very next day for his family’s dry-cleaning firm, where before long he was made a partner. Peggy stayed home for a year, “playing house,” as she put it, and then matriculated in medical school – and this really did take everyone by surprise.
“I was showing off, that’s what I was doing. Being flamboyant. Oh, it was a perfectly respectable thing to do, going to medical school, but still pretty rare at that time for a woman, especially a woman with a nice new husband and a nice big house. I suppose you could say I did it for attention, although I don’t know why I should have been in need of attention, I’d always had my fair share. I certainly hadn’t received a ‘call,’ as people used to say back then. I had no idea, in fact, what medicine would entail. You’ve heard about people who go into law because they like the look of those black courtroom gowns? Well, I think that was how I saw medicine. I think I thought I might look pretty important with a stethoscope around my neck. The standard fantasies. My father paid my tuition, not a loan but an outright gift. He and your father sat down in the living room of this house and discussed the financial arrangements, the two of them – can you imagine! – but even he seemed to think it was a sort of girlish hobby. It didn’t consume me, going to medical school, not at all. We were always going to parties or dances or playing bridge or tennis, your father and I. There seemed to be time for everything, and then, before I knew it, I was interning, and just when that was halfway through, I discovered I was pregnant. It was you. ‘Well,’ people said, ‘you certainly timed that well.’ Hah! We didn’t time it at all; but as soon as it happened, I knew it was what I wanted. More and more I believe people end up doing what they really want to do. It only looks like they’re drifting or fumbling or wrestling with decisions or making arbitrary choices. They’re really chopping their way straight through to what they want. Even people like Muriel Brewmaster who somehow end up doing nothing, well, that’s what they really want to do. Nothing.”
FAY SEES HER parents once or twice a week, so frequently that she’s scarcely aware at all of how they’ve aged, the graying of their hair, the facial wrinkles, the few extra pounds they carry, their softening flesh. Recently, having lunch with her mother in a downtown restaurant, she caught a glimpse of her mother’s bared elbow as she reached for her coffee cup and saw how shriveled and nut-brown it looked, like something knitted, like the elbow of a very old woman. Her father’s face has lost its sharp lines; the edges of his mouth, eyes, and chin have given up their distinction, are blurred now like smudges in an old drypoint. Occasionally he is irritable.
What she has noticed are the changes in the house, chiefly the attempts to make it ever and ever lighter, so that a kind of transparency seems to have overtaken it. The house feels rinsed, cleansed, more organized, more aligned, more deliberate.
When Fay was a child, there were boxes of old clothes and curtains in the attic, and in the basement there were cartons of glass jars, paperback novels. Fay could open an odd drawer in her mother’s desk or in the kitchen and come across a stray hairpin or a wooden golf tee, a packet of bridge tallies, a book of matches, old letters, odd coins, a deck of cards, a tennis ball, a Christmas-tree bulb, a key – all the spicy decomposing miscellany that families create, the unsortable and valueless relics of happy, busy, useful people. Whenever she looked at these items or held them in her hand, she seemed to be reading something of her parents’ private and obscure youth, and also something of her own future.
This is no longer the case. The attic and basement have both been cleared and swept clean. Drawers hold what they were intended to hold and nothing else. There is a place, at last, for everything. Fay, when she thinks about these changes, can’t help wondering how much effort has gone into this immense reordering and what it means.
PEGGY MCLEOD, writing her book on menopause and running her full-time medical practice, still has time to take care of her husband. Fay can hardly believe some of the things her mother does.
She carries, for instance, a three-by-five index card in her handbag, and on this card is printed her husband’s collar size, his sleeve length, his inseam, and his preference in socks and ties, and when she happens to find herself in the men’s department of a downtown store, she buys whatever is needed, underwear, suits, even overcoats.
When Richard McLeod in the long winter evenings sits working on his windmill models at a table in a corner of the living room, inevitably a drift of sawdust falls on the pale carpet and the smell of glue fills the air. Peggy McLeod never says to him, “I wish you’d work in the basement or in the garage the way other men do.” It seems that it gives her pleasure to see him at the center of this contained chaos with its exotic fumes rising around him.
When he’s reading, she tiptoes past his chair and keeps the radio turned low.
She and Richard play bridge every Wednesday night with John and Muriel Brewmaster – or they did until John died in May – even though she finds bridge a slow, mindless, and dreary game.
She visits her husband’s incontinent, senile Aunt Velma in a hospital on Eastgate Avenue every Saturday morning, whereas he goes only once every couple of months at the most.
She renews the fire insurance on the house.
She circles with a pencil those items in the newspaper she thinks might amuse him, but which he may overlook.
She censors her concern over Clyde’s stammer, over Bibbi’s eccentric choices, over Fay’s recent despondency.
She restricts his salt; counts out his vitamin pills in the morning; praises him for his recent weight loss; renews his magazine subscriptions; sorts and pairs his socks; carries with her at all times an antihistamine tablet in case of bee stings. And she mails him a valentine every year – actually buys one, puts a stamp on it, and mails it to her own address, the pinkest, laciest, most sentimental valentine she can find.
AT LEAST FAY’S MOTHER, while clearing out the house, didn’t throw away her old clothes. Instead she offered them, with an abject shrug, to her two daughters, who seized on the wonderful old pleated skirts in their muted tartans and the New Look blouses and the chiffon evening dresses. Bibbi claimed a pair of authentic 1940s dungarees, boxy and riveted and topstitched in red, and Fay, momentarily covetous, pounced on the broomstick skirt.
This is a skirt in flowered cotton which, after being laundered, is dipped in cold water and then tied with string in several places around a broom handle and allowed to dry in a thousand crisp irregular pleats.
She wears it tonight when she goes with Robin Cummerford to a production of Shakespeare in the Park, the third consecutive Thursday evening they’ve spent together. She doesn’t know what to make of him, this diffident and old-fashioned man. He seems mildly embarrassed to be spreading a blanket on the grass, a blanket they will share, and embarrassed, too – but nonetheless determined – as he unpacks from a canvas bag a tube of mosquito repellent, a Pepsi bottle filled with light red wine, two plastic cups, a small cushion for her head, a well-wrapped section of brie, and a packet of rye wafers. He has not forgotten a folding knife for the cheese.
&n
Why is it that certain people elect this role, while others sit back and accept what is offered, grateful to be served, but never quite grateful enough?
∼ CHAPTER 14 ∼
Entering a Period of Good Fortune
BY ACCIDENT, TOM HAS MISSED OUT ON A NUMBER OF MAJOR EPISODES in his own life.
On the day that Kennedy died, that gray overcast morning, he was standing with his good friend, Finn Hoag, in the principal’s office at Duck River Consolidated School. Both boys were trembling, but standing their ground. Old Ash Can, as he was commonly known, wore a look of blue thunder; this was serious, but what was it? Smoking? Setting off firecrackers? Mr. Ashton’s telephone rang; he bent over stiffly and picked it up, listened, made a choking sound that turned into a cough. “You may go back to class,” he told the boys when he’d replaced the receiver, and afterward Tom was never able to think of Kennedy’s assassination without a shudder of reprieve.
He’d missed his chance to witness the Beatles’ triumphant North American TV debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (though later he was to see it frequently on tape). At the time of the famous tour, television reception in Duck River was at best irregular, so that the strains of “She Loves You,” Tom’s all-time favorite song, the one that still sways and drifts through his dreams, reached him through a snowstorm of dots.
He was eighteen years old at the time of Woodstock, but didn’t know that it existed until he saw the photo spread in Time, nude bathing, drugs, a rainbow of colors, a realm of sweet splendor from which, through some cosmic carelessness, he had been excluded.
During the early seventies, in the days of student riots and rebellions and marching in the streets, he had gone on attending classes at the University of Toronto with fair regularity, handing in his term papers more or less on time, bending with acceptable seriousness over his examination booklets. His jeans and poncho, his beard, his shoulder-length hair – all this was a disguise; he was toeing the line, about to graduate, ready to get out there and look for a job.
HE DIDN’T HAVE to look far. A woman named Val Webber from CFRA in Toronto telephoned him one day during his final term and offered him a part-time job as disc jockey on a Saturday-afternoon show. He had been recommended, she said, by someone who’d caught him on the university station, where he sometimes filled in on a program called “Brass Alley.” She liked his voice. She told him that radio voices were moving away from the old sixties gravel into seventies hip. People were relaxing, healing.
He stayed a year with CFRA and then took a better-paying job with CKND in Winnipeg. From there he moved across the street to CFWG, then down the dial to CJBR, and finally, six years ago, to CHOL’s “Niteline.”
In the tone-sensitive world of radio Tom has what is known as an “up” voice. It’s got a bit of infrared in it, his first wife, Sheila, used to say; that’s what attracted her to him. People tune in to “Niteline” and say to themselves: This is the voice of a healthy and optimistic human being who if he has dark visions keeps them to himself.
All this is partly true, since despite the moments of melancholy that nip at his heels, despite his occasional loneliness and sense of failure and his fear of aging, despite all this he wakes up most mornings believing that he is about to enter a period of good fortune. He is making progress; he knows this because he can look back at the follies of recent years, at his terrible and fragile arrangements, and sort them into bundles, saying – to the ceiling, to the shower tile, to Ted Woloschuk, who is right this minute giving him the one-minute-to-air signal from the control room – those brave words: Never again.
NEVER AGAIN will he attend a meeting of the Newly Single Club. No matter how restless he finds himself on a Friday night, no matter how the width of a vacant evening yawns and beckons, no matter how fiercely his guilt yearns for the punishment of Patsy MacArthur’s sharp, minty merriment, he will stay away.
He should have guessed that Elizabeth Joll would be there waiting for him. All during the lecture – one he’d heard before, “Hanging Out, Hanging In, Hanging On” – he felt the rage of her dark sideways stare. Afterward, on the steps outside the Community Center, she caught up with him.
“Excuse me, Tom? Can you spare a couple of minutes? There’s something I want to ask you.”
Her voice was moderate, polite, yet he felt he was about to be bayoneted. He resented her hand on his arm. He resented having to turn his head and acknowledge her.
“Okay,” she breathed, “I’ll be very, very brief. I thought of phoning you, but I held off. For days, and then weeks. And then I thought I’d maybe write you a note, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to intrude on your space. I mean, we only had one date, big deal, so that doesn’t give me the right to ask questions, does it? Oh brother, do I ever know that. But I’m trying to make a new life for myself now that I’m on my own. I come to these Friday-night things and try to figure out what I should be doing to get on my feet again. Do you have any idea how hard it is for someone on her own to meet someone? I’m doing something wrong, I know that much, and I just want to know what. We had a nice time that night, didn’t we? I mean, I’m no Linda Evans, but I’m not Count Dracula, either. Was it something I said? I don’t think it could have been. I thought about it, and I don’t think I said anything off-putting or dumb. What I figured out was, it was because I’ve got a kid, this nice little kid. Is that it? Are you scared to get involved with a woman who happens to have a kid? Is that it? Or is it something else? Something about me? I know you’re this big media honcho. I mean, I see your face plastered all over town, and maybe you think I’m just not up to your level or something, not worth bothering about, but don’t you think you could at least give me some kind of idea, like is it bad breath or bad vibes or what?”
Her voice cracked and closed; her face turned red and then blotchy as the blood settled. She let go of his arm, at last, and pushed past him down the stairs, but he managed to catch up with her. All the parts of her body were writhing, her mouth, her hair, but he caught her elbow and held on.
“Look,” he said to her, “I’m not in very good shape at the moment.” He took a breath. “This isn’t easy to talk about, but I’ve been going through a pretty bad time. You’re an attractive woman, I really enjoyed our evening together, we had a nice time.”
“Yeah,” Her voice was ugly. “Some nice time.”
“And I’ve got nothing against kids. I like kids. I wish to hell I had a couple – ”
“I’ll just bet.”
“And I wish I was in better shape.”
“So what is it, then? Your big problem.”
“Look, what if we went and had a cup of coffe – ”
“Christ, no,” she said, yanking her elbow away. For a minute he thought she was going to punch him, but all she did was shrug. A monumental, careless shrug. “Just fuck off, why don’t you, just get out of my way.”
NEVER AGAIN would he marry a woman who rated his sexual performance on a one-to-ten scale (Sheila) and invited him to rate hers, but sulked when he did.
Never again would he marry someone who was hooked on tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and codeine (Clair) and who bit the skin of his back during the act of love, bit it so hard she drew blood, and in the morning couldn’t remember.
Never again would he marry a woman he’d known only three months (Suzanne) who thought dinner was a boiled egg or an apple salad.
Never again would he marry a woman who didn’t want to have children because it would take too much time (Sheila) or because it was too heavy a responsibility (Clair) or because she didn’t want to get stretch marks on her abdomen (Suzanne). He didn’t know if he wanted children, never mind what he told Elizabeth Joll. Some kids he liked, others he didn’t. Chrissie Chandler was a brat, everyone said as much, but Gary Waring was a great little guy with a bright contagious laugh. Anyway, whether he wanted to have children or not was beside the point; what he wanted was a wife who want
Never again would he marry a woman who didn’t have the energy to take her clothes to the dry cleaner (Suzanne) or a woman who hid a bottle of brandy in the linen cupboard (Clair) or a woman (Sheila) who, for no reason he could determine, was untutored in small acts of tenderness such as smoothing his coat collar or brushing lint from his sleeve.
Never again a woman like Clair who accused him of cruelty when he insisted she see a doctor or a woman like Sheila who, though otherwise intelligent, addressed him as Baby, as in “Let’s screw each other silly, Baby,” or a woman like Suzanne who tweezed the hair off her legs one by one, whimpering with the pain of it, glorying in it. Never again a woman (Suzanne) who read the National Enquirer and believed what was in its pages, or someone (Sheila) who wanted him to take rumba lessons, or a poor lost soul (Clair) who lay awake night after night and who once struck him across the chest with a belt as he slept because a voice had directed her to do so.
NEVER AGAIN would he live the way he’d been living for the last year, surrounded by unpacked cartons, with no furniture, an empty refrigerator, and inadequate cooking equipment.
No, things were going to be different. They already were different. Saturday he went down to Sears and bought a decent bed, a bedside table and a lamp, a desk, two small tweedy sofas, a coffee table, a bookcase, more lamps, a rug. He wrote a check for all these items and asked for a Monday-morning delivery. It’s extremely urgent, he explained. Then he went to Safeway and bought meat, cheese, butter, milk, fresh vegetables and fruit, cans of soup, a paring knife, a new Teflon frying pan, an efficient coffeepot. He bought a hammer, a screwdriver, and a small pair of pliers so he could fix the bathroom tap. He bought a plastic drinking glass for the bathroom. Never again would he stumble toward the basin in the middle of the night and slurp water out of his hands. He bought two sets of sheets and four bath towels, two kitchen towels and a pair of striped oven mitts. It was all so easy. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?