The Love Of A Good Woman

Sonje who has said, during another alarming conversation, “My happiness depends on Cottar.”

My happiness depends on Cottar.

That statement shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn’t want it to be true of herself.

But she didn’t want Sonje to think that she was a woman who had missed out on love. Who had not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.

II.

Kent remembered the name of the town in Oregon to which Cottar and Sonje had moved. Or to which Sonje had moved, at the end of the summer. She had gone there to look after Cottar’s mother while Cottar took off on another journalistic junket to the Far East. There was some problem real or imagined about Cottar’s getting back into the United States after his trip to China. When he came back the next time he and Sonje pla

There wasn’t much chance that Sonje would be living in the town now. There was just a slight chance that the mother might be. Kent said that it wasn’t worth stopping for, but Deborah said, Why not, wouldn’t it be interesting to find out? And an inquiry at the Post Office brought directions.

Kent and Deborah drove out of town through the sand dunes-Deborah doing the driving as she had done for most of this long leisurely trip. They had visited Kent’s daughter Noelle, who was living in Toronto, and his two sons by his second wife, Pat-one of them in Montreal and the other in Maryland. They had stayed with some old friends of Kent’s and Pat’s who now lived in a gated community in Arizona, and with Deborah’s parents-who were around Kent’s age-in Santa Barbara. Now they were headed up the West Coast, home to Vancouver, but taking it easy every day, so as not to tire Kent out.

The dunes were covered with grass. They looked like ordinary hills, except where a naked sandy shoulder was revealed, to make the landscape look playful. A child’s construction, swollen out of scale.

The road ended at the house they’d been told to look for. It couldn’t be mistaken. There was the sign-pacific school of dance. And Sonje’s name, and a for sale sign underneath. There was an old woman using shears on one of the bushes in the garden.

So Cottar’s mother was still alive. But Kent remembered now that Cottar’s mother was blind. That was why somebody had to go and live with her, after Cottar’s father died.

What was she doing hacking away with those shears if she was blind?

He had made the usual mistake, of not realizing how many years-decades-had gone by. And how truly ancient the mother would have to be by now. How old Sonje would be, how old he was himself. For it was Sonje, and at first she did not know him either. She bent over to stick the shears into the ground, she wiped her hands on her jeans. He felt the stiffness of her movements in his own joints. Her hair was white and skimpy, blowing in the light ocean breeze that had found its way in here among the dunes. Some firm covering of flesh had gone from her bones. She had always been rather flat chested but not so thin in the waist. A broad-backed, broad-faced, Nordic sort of girl. Though her name didn’t come from that ancestry-he remembered a story of her being named Sonje because her mother loved Sonja Henie’s movies. She changed the spelling herself and scorned her mother’s frivolity. They all scorned their parents then, for something.

He couldn’t see her face very well in the bright sun. But he saw a couple of shining silver-white spots where skin cancers, probably, had been cut away.

“Well Kent,” she said. “How ridiculous. I thought you were somebody come to buy my house. And is this Noelle?”

So she had made her mistake too.

Deborah was in fact a year younger than Noelle. But there was nothing of the toy wife about her. Kent had met her after his first operation. She was a physiotherapist, never married, and he a widower. A serene, steady woman who distrusted fashion and irony-she wore her hair in a braid down her back. She had introduced him to yoga, as well as the prescribed exercises, and now she had him taking vitamins and ginseng as well. She was tactful and incurious almost to the point of indifference. Perhaps a woman of her generation took it for granted that everybody had a well-peopled and untranslatable past.

Sonje invited them into the house. Deborah said that she would leave them to have their visit-she wanted to find a health-food store (Sonje told her where one was) and to take a walk on the beach.

The first thing Kent noticed about the house was that it was chilly. On a bright summer day. But houses in the Pacific Northwest are seldom as warm as they look-move out of the sun and you feel at once a clammy breath. Fogs and rainy winter cold must have entered this house for a long time almost without opposition. It was a large wooden bungalow, ramshackle though not austere, with its veranda and dormers. There used to be a lot of houses like this in West Vancouver, where Kent still lived. But most of them had been sold as teardowns.

The two large co

“Somebody could still make an okay thing out of it,” she said. She said that they had started the school around 1960, soon after they heard that Cottar was dead. Cottar’s mother-Delia- played the piano. She played it until she was nearly ninety years old and lost her marbles. (“Excuse me,” said Sonje, “but you do get rather nonchalant about things.”) Sonje had to put her in a nursing home where she went every day to feed her, though Delia didn’t know her anymore. And she hired new people to play the piano, but things didn’t work out. Also she was getting so that she couldn’t show the pupils anything, just tell them. So she saw that it was time to give up.

She used to be such a stately girl, not very forthcoming. In fact not very friendly, or so he had thought. And now she was scurrying and chattering in the way of people who were too much alone.

“It did well when we started, little girls were all excited then about ballet, and then all that sort of thing went out, you know, it was too formal. But never completely, and then in the eighties people came moving in here with young families and it seemed they had lots of money, how did they get so much money? And it could have been successful again but I couldn’t quite manage it.”

She said that perhaps the spirit went out of it or the need went out of it when her mother-in-law died.

“We were the best of friends,” she said. “Always.”

The kitchen was another big room, which the cupboards and appliances didn’t properly fill. The floor was gray and black tiles-or perhaps black and white tiles, the white made gray by dirty scrub water. They passed along a hallway lined with shelves, shelves right up to the ceiling crammed with books and tattered magazines, possibly even newspapers. A smell of the brittle old paper. Here the floor had a covering of sisal matting, and that continued into a side porch, where at last he had a chance to sit down. Rattan chairs and settee, the genuine article, that might be worth some money if they hadn’t been falling apart. Bamboo blinds also not in the best condition, rolled up or half lowered, and outside some overgrown bushes pressing against the windows. Kent didn’t know many names of plants, but he recognized these bushes as the sort that grow where the soil is sandy. Their leaves were tough and shiny-the greens looking as if dipped in oil.