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“Let us not overdo it with the French,” said Lionel.
Lorna was not even sure what that meant. Belle-amie. Beautiful friend? Mistress?
Lionel had raised his eyebrows at her, over his mother’s head. As if to say, whatever she’s come up with, it’s no fault of mine.
Lionel had once been Brendan’s student at the university. A raw prodigy, sixteen years old. The brightest mathematical mind Brendan had ever seen. Lorna wondered if Brendan was dramatizing this, in hindsight, because of his unusual generosity towards gifted students. Also because of the way things had turned out. Brendan had turned his back on the whole Irish package-his family and his Church and the sentimental songs-but he had a weakness for a tragic tale. And sure enough, after his blazing start, Lionel had suffered some sort of breakdown, had to be hospitalized, dropped out of sight. Until Brendan had met him in the supermarket and discovered that he was living within a mile of their house, here in North Vancouver. He had given up mathematics entirely and worked in the publishing office of the Anglican Church.
“Come and see us,” Brendan had said. Lionel looked a bit seedy to him, and lonely. “Come and meet my wife.”
He was glad to have a home now, to ask people to.
“So I didn’t know what you’d be like,” Lionel said when he reported this to Lorna. “I considered you might be awful.”
“Oh,” said Lorna. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Wives.”
He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life-the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying about on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic-all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel’s tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face. There had to be a pause then, a shifting back to the level of worthwhile human contact. Once he sang very softly, to the tune of “O Ta
Lionel rode up the hill on his high, old-fashioned bicycle-this at a time when hardly anybody but children rode bicycles. He would not have changed out of his workday outfit. Dark trousers, a white shirt that always looked grubby and worn around the cuffs and collar, a nondescript tie. When they had gone to see the Comédie Française he had added to this a tweed jacket that was too wide across the shoulders and too short in the sleeves. Perhaps he did not own any other clothes.
“I labor for a pittance,” he said. “And not even in the vineyards of the Lord. In the Diocese of the Archbishop.”
And, “Sometimes I think I’m in a Dickens novel. And the fu
He talked with his head on one side, usually, his gaze on something slightly beyond Lorna’s head. His voice was light and quick, sometimes squeaky with a kind of nervous exhilaration. He told everything in a slightly astonished way. He told about the office where he worked, in the building behind the Cathedral. The small high Gothic windows and varnished woodwork (to give things a churchy feeling), the hat rack and umbrella stand (which for some reason filled him with deep melancholy), the typist, Janine, and the Editor of Church News, Mrs. Penfound. The occasionally appearing, spectral, and distracted Archbishop. There was an unresolved battle over teabags, between Janine, who favored them, and Mrs. Penfound, who did not. Everybody munched on secret eats and never shared. With Janine it was caramels, and Lionel himself favored sugared almonds. What Mrs. Penfound’s secret pleasure was he and Janine had not discovered, because Mrs. Penfound did not put the wrappers in the wastepaper basket. But her jaws were always surreptitiously busy.
He mentioned the hospital where he had been a patient for a while and spoke of the ways it resembled the office, in regard to secret eats. Secrets generally. But the difference was that every once in a while in the hospital they came and bound you up and took you off and plugged you in, as he said, to the light socket.
“That was pretty interesting. In fact it was excruciating. But I can’t describe it. That is the weird part. I can remember it but not describe it.”
Because of those events in the hospital, he said, he was rather short of memories. Short of details. He liked to have Lorna tell him hers.
She told him about her life before she married Brendan. About the two houses exactly alike, standing side by side in the town where she grew up. In front of them was a deep ditch called Dye Creek because it used to run water colored by the dye from the knitting factory. Behind them was a wild meadow where girls were not supposed to go. One house was where she lived with her father-in the other lived her grandmother and her Aunt Beatrice and her cousin Polly.
Polly had no father. That was what they said and what Lorna had once truly believed. Polly had no father, in the way that a Manx cat had no tail.
In the grandmother’s front room was a map of the Holy Land, worked in many shades of wool, showing Biblical locations. It was left in her will to the United Church Sunday School. Aunt Beatrice had had no social life involving a man, since the time of her blotted-out disgrace, and she was so finicky, so desperate about the conduct of life that it really was easy to think of Polly’s conception as immaculate. The only thing that Lorna had ever learned from Aunt Beatrice was that you must always press a seam from the side, not wide open, so that the mark of the iron would not show, and that no sheer blouse should be worn without its slip to hide your brassiere straps.
“Oh, yes. Yes,” said Lionel. He stretched out his legs as if appreciation had reached his very toes. “Now Polly. Out of this benighted household, what is Polly like?”
Polly was fine, Lorna said. Full of energy and sociability, kind-hearted, confident.
“Oh,” said Lionel. “Tell me again about the kitchen.”
“Which kitchen?”
“The one without the canary.”
“Ours.” She described how she rubbed the kitchen range with waxed bread-wrappers to make it shine, the blackened shelves behind it that held the frying pans, the sink and the small mirror above it, with the triangular piece of glass gone from one corner, and the little tin trough beneath it-made by her father-in which there was always a comb, an old cup-handle, a tiny pot of dry rouge that must have once been her mother’s.
She told him her only memory of her mother. She was downtown, with her mother, on a winter day. There was snow between the sidewalk and the street. She had just learned how to tell time, and she looked up at the Post Office clock and saw that the moment had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to every day on the radio. She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening. It was more than concern she felt, it was horror, to think of the way things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance.
And even in that memory, her mother was only a hip and a shoulder, in a heavy coat.
Lionel said that he could hardly get more of a sense of his father than that, though his father was still alive. A swish of a surplice? Lionel and his mother used to make bets on how long his father could go without speaking to them. He had asked his mother once what made his father so mad, and she had answered that she really didn’t know.