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“She’s about the same.”
She turned aside towards the shop window.
“Who do they think is ever going to buy this junk? Look at that honey pail. Your dad and I used to take our lunch to school in pails just like that.”
“So did I,” I said.
“Did you?” She squeezed me. “You tell your folks I’m thinking about them, will you do that?”
Alfrida did not come to my father’s funeral. I wondered if that was because she did not want to meet me. As far as I knew she had never made public what she held against me; nobody else would know about it. But my father had known. When I was home visiting him and learned that Alfrida was living not far away-in my grandmother’s house, in fact, which she had finally inherited-I had suggested that we go to see her. This was in the flurry between my two marriages, when I was in an expansive mood, newly released and able to make contact with anyone I chose. My father said, “Well, you know, Alfrida was a bit upset.” He was calling her Alfrida now. When had that started? I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think of Alfrida’s objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to do with her.
“It wasn’t Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. “I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that.”
But as a matter of fact there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child.
“Well,” my father said. He was in general quite pleased that I had become a writer, but there were reservations he had about what might be called my character. About the fact that I had ended my marriage for personal-that is, wanton-reasons, and the way I went around justifying myself-or perhaps, as he would have said, weaseling out of things. He would not say so-it was not his business anymore.
I asked him how he knew that Alfrida felt this way.
He said, “A letter.”
A letter, though they lived not far apart. I did feel sorry to think that he had had to bear the brunt of what could be taken as my thoughtlessness, or even my wrongdoing. Also that he and Alfrida seemed now to be on such formal terms. I wondered what he was leaving out. Had he felt compelled to defend me to Alfrida, as he had to defend my writing to other people? He would do that now, though it was never easy for him. In his uneasy defense he might have said something harsh.
Through me, peculiar difficulties had developed for him.
There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting-set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.
Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else’s?
My father had said that Alfrida was living alone now. I asked him what had become of Bill. He said that all of that was outside of his jurisdiction. But he believed there had been a bit of a rescue operation.
“Of Bill? How come? Who by?”
“Well, I believe there was a wife.”
“I met him at Alfrida’s once. I liked him.”
“People did. Women.”
I had to consider that the rupture might have had nothing to do with me. My stepmother had urged my father into a new sort of life. They went bowling and curling and regularly joined other couples for coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton’s. She had been a widow for a long time before she married him, and she had many friends from those days who became new friends for him. What had happened with him and Alfrida might have been simply one of the changes, the wearing-out of old attachments, that I understood so well in my own life but did not expect to happen in the lives of older people-particularly, as I would have said, in the lives of people at home.
My stepmother died just a little while before my father. After their short, happy marriage they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners. Before either of those deaths Alfrida had moved back to the city. She didn’t sell the house, she just went away and left it. My father wrote to me, “That’s a pretty fu
There were a lot of people at my father’s funeral, a lot of people I didn’t know. A woman came across the grass in the cemetery to speak to me-I thought at first she must be a friend of my stepmother’s. Then I saw that the woman was only a few years past my own age. The stocky figure and crown of gray-blond curls and floral-patterned jacket made her look older.
“I recognized you by your picture,” she said. “Alfrida used to always be bragging about you.”
I said, “Alfrida’s not dead?”
“Oh, no,” the woman said, and went on to tell me that Alfrida was in a nursing home in a town just north of Toronto.
“I moved her down there so’s I could keep an eye on her.”
Now it was easy to tell-even by her voice-that she was somebody of my own generation, and it came to me that she must be one of the other family, a half sister of Alfrida’s, born when Alfrida was almost grown up.
She told me her name, and it was of course not the same as Alfrida’s-she must have married. And I couldn’t recall Alfrida’s ever mentioning any of her half family by their first names.
I asked how Alfrida was, and the woman said her own eyesight was so bad that she was legally blind. And she had a serious kidney problem, which meant that she had to be on dialysis twice a week.
“Other than that-?” she said, and laughed. I thought, yes, a sister, because I could hear something of Alfrida in that reckless, tossed laugh.
“So she doesn’t travel too good,” she said. “Or else I would’ve brought her. She still gets the paper from here and I read it to her sometimes. That’s where I saw about your dad.”
I wondered out loud, impulsively, if I should go to visit, at the nursing home. The emotions of the funeral-all the warm and relieved and reconciled feelings opened up in me by the death of my father at a reasonable age-prompted this suggestion. It would have been hard to carry out. My husband-my second husband-and I had only two days here before we were flying to Europe on an already delayed holiday.
“I don’t know if you’d get so much out of it,” the woman said. “She has her good days. Then she has her bad days. You never know. Sometimes I think she’s putting it on. Like, she’ll sit there all day and whatever anybody says to her, she’ll just say the same thing. Fit as a fiddle and ready for love. That’s what she’ll say all day long. Fit-as-a-fiddle-and-ready-for-love. She’ll drive you crazy. Then other days she can answer all right.”
Again, her voice and laugh-this time half submerged-reminded me of Alfrida, and I said, “You know I must have met you, I remember once when Alfrida’s stepmother and her father dropped in, or maybe it was only her father and some of the children-”
“Oh, that’s not who I am,” the woman said. “You thought I was Alfrida’s sister? Glory. I must be looking my age.”
I started to say that I could not see her very well, and it was true. In October the afternoon sun was low, and it was coming straight into my eyes. The woman was standing against the light, so that it was hard to make out her features or her expression.
She twitched her shoulders nervously and importantly. She said, “Alfrida was my birth mom.”
Mawm. Mother.
Then she told me, at not too great length, the story that she must have told often, because it was about an emphatic event in her life and an adventure she had embarked on alone. She had been adopted by a family in eastern Ontario; they were the only family she had ever known (“and I love them dearly”), and she had married and had her children, who were grown up before she got the urge to find out who her own mother was. It wasn’t too easy, because of the way records used to be kept, and the secrecy (“It was kept one hundred percent secret that she had me”), but a few years ago she had tracked down Alfrida.