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That was why she had thrown a box of chocolates in his face. And then stamped on them, so they couldn’t be picked up and enjoyed, if he should be so nonchalant and greedy as to try.
But this time she was calm as an iceberg.
What she said was, “Well, you’ll have to go and marry her, won’t you just?”
He said he wasn’t all that sure it was his.
And she said, “But you’re not sure it isn’t.”
He said that it could all be fixed up if he agreed to pay for the support. He said he was pretty sure that was all that she was after.
“But it’s not all I’m after,” Selina said. Then she said that what she was after was for him to do what was right.
And she won. In a very short time he and the woman from the dry-goods store were married. And not so long after that, my grandmother-Selina-was also married, to my grandfather. She chose the same time as I had done-dead of winter-for her wedding.
Leo’s baby-if it was his, and it probably was-was born in late spring and by the time it was delivered it was dead. Its mother did not last more than an hour longer.
Soon a letter came, addressed to Charlie. But it wasn’t for her at all. Inside was another letter, that she was to take to Selina.
Selina read it and laughed. “Tell him I’m as big as a barn,” she said. Though she was hardly showing at all, and that was the first Charlie knew that she was pregnant.
“And tell him the last thing I need is any more fool letters from anybody like him.”
The baby that she was carrying then was my father, born ten months after the wedding with considerable difficulty for the mother. He was the only child that she and my grandfather would ever have. I asked Aunt Charlie why. Was there some injury to my grandmother, or some inherent problem that made childbirth too risky? Obviously it wasn’t that she had difficulty conceiving, I said, since my father must have been started a month after the wedding.
A silence, and then Aunt Charlie said, “I wouldn’t know about that.” She did not whisper but spoke in a normally raised, and slightly distant, slightly wounded or reproachful voice.
Why this withdrawal? What had wounded her? I think it was my clinical question, my use of a word like conceiving. It might be 1951 and I was soon to be married, and she had just been telling me a story about passion and unlucky conception. But still it would not do, it did not do, for a young woman-for any woman-to speak so coolly, knowledgeably, shamelessly, about those things. Conceiving, indeed.
There might have been another reason for Aunt Charlie’s response, which I did not think of at the time. Aunt Charlie and Uncle Cyril had never had children. As far as I know there was never even a pregnancy. So I could have stumbled into sensitive territory.
It looked for a moment as if Aunt Charlie was not going to go on with her story. She seemed to have decided that I was not deserving of it. But after a moment she could not help herself.
Leo took off, then, he went places. He worked with a lumbering crew in Northern Ontario. He went with a harvesters’ excursion and became a hired man out west. When he came back, years later, he had a wife with him and somewhere he had learned house carpentry and roofing, so he did that. The wife was a nice person, she had been a schoolteacher. Somewhere along the line she had a baby, but it died, like the other. She and Leo lived in town, and did not go to a local church – she belonged to some freak religion of the sort they had out west. So nobody got to know her very well. Nobody even knew that she had leukemia until shortly before she died of it. It was the first case of leukemia that people had heard of in this part of the country.
Leo stayed on, he got work. He began to visit more with his relatives. He got a car, and would drive out to see them. The word got around that he was pla
But before this he showed up at my grandmother’s house one weekday afternoon. It was the time of year-after frost but before heavy snow-when my grandfather and my father, who was through with school by that time, were hauling firewood from the bush. They must have seen the car but they went on with what they were doing. My grandfather didn’t come up to the house to greet his cousin.
And anyway, Leo and my grandmother didn’t stay in the house, which they could have had all to themselves. My grand mother saw fit to put on her coat and they went out to the car. And did not stay sitting there either, but drove down the lane and then along the road to the highway, where they turned around and drove back. They did this several times, in full view of anybody who looked out the windows of any farm house along the road. And by this time everybody along the road knew Leo’s car.
During this drive Leo asked my grandmother to come away with him. He told her that he was still a free agent, not yet committed to the widow. And presumably he mentioned that he was still in love. With her. My grandmother. Selina.
My grandmother reminded him that she herself was not free, whatever he might be, and so the state of her feelings did not come into it.
“And the sharper she spoke,” said Aunt Charlie, with one or two choppy little nods of her head, “why, the sharper she spoke to him, the more her heart cracked open. Surely it did.”
Leo drove her home. He married the widow. The one I had been told to call Aunt Mabel.
“If Selina knew I told you anything about this, my name would be mud,” said Aunt Charlie.
I had three marriages to study, fairly close-up, in this early part of my life. My parents’ marriage-I suppose you might say that it was the most close-up, but in a way it was the most mysterious and remote, because of my childish difficulty in thinking of my parents as having any co
When my mother became sick-permanently sick, not just troubled with odd symptoms-the balance was altered. This happened when I was around twelve or thirteen years old. From then on she was weighing the family down on one side, and we-my father and brother and sister and I-were holding it up to a kind of normality on the other. So my father seemed to belong with us more than he did with her. She was three years older than he was, anyway-being born in the nineteenth century while he was born in the twentieth, and as her long siege progressed she began to seem more like his mother than his wife, and for us more like an elderly relative in our charge, than a mother.
I did know that her being older was one of the things that my grandmother had thought unsuitable about my mother from the start. Other things emerged soon enough-the fact that my mother learned to drive the car, that her style of dress verged on the original, that she joined the secular Women’s Institute rather than the United Church Missionary Society, worst of all that she began to go about the countryside selling fur scarves and capes made from foxes my father raised, and was branching off into the antique business when her health began to go awry. And unfair as it might be to think so-and she herself knowing that it was unfair-my grandmother still could not help seeing this illness that went undiagnosed for so long, and was rare at my mother’s age, as being somehow another show of willfulness, another grab at attention.