The Love Of A Good Woman

Mrs. Wild was not at home at the time of the fire having gone to Vancouver Island on a boat belonging to James Thompson Gorrie of Union Bay.

The death of Mr. Wild was ruled to be an accident due to misadventure, its cause being a fire of origins unknown.

Close up the book now.

Put it away. Put them all away.

No. No. Not like that. Put them away in order. Year by year. That’s better. Just the way they were.

Is she coming yet? Look out the window.

Good. But she will be coming soon.

There you are, what do you think of that?

I don’t care. I don’t care what you think of it.

Did you ever think that people’s lives could be like that and end up like this? Well, they can.

I did not tell Chess about this, though I usually told him anything I thought would interest or amuse him about my day. He had a way now of dismissing any mention of the Gorries. He had a word for them. It was “grotesque.”

All the dingy-looking little trees in the park came out in bloom. Their flowers were a bright pink, like artificially colored popcorn.

And I began working at a real job.

The Kitsilano Library phoned and asked me to come in for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. I found myself on the other side of the desk, stamping the due date in people’s books. Some of these people were familiar to me, as fellow borrowers. And now I smiled at them, on behalf of the library. I said, “See you in two weeks.”

Some laughed and said, “Oh, a lot sooner,” being addicts like myself.

It turned out that this was a job I could handle. No cash register-when fines were paid you got the change out of a drawer. And I already knew where most of the books were on the shelves. When it came to filing cards, I knew the alphabet.

More hours were offered to me. Soon, a temporary full-time job. One of the steady workers had had a miscarriage. She stayed away for two months and at the end of that time she was pregnant again and her doctor advised her not to come back to work. So I joined the permanent staff and kept this job until I was halfway into my own first pregnancy. I worked with women I had known by sight for a long time. Mavis and Shirley, Mrs. Carlson and Mrs. Yost. They all remembered how I used to come in and mooch around-as they said-for hours in the library. I wished they hadn’t noticed me so much. I wished I hadn’t come in so often.

What a simple pleasure it was, to take up my station, to face people from behind the desk, to be capable and brisk and friendly with those who approached me. To be seen by them as a person who knew the ropes, who had a clear function in the world. To give up my lurking and wandering and dreaming and become the girl in the library.

Of course, I had less time for reading now, and sometimes I would hold a book in my hand for a moment, in my work at the desk-I would hold a book in my hand as an object, not as a vessel I had to drain immediately-and I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.

But this scare would vanish in a minute.

The women I worked with recalled the times they had seen me writing in the library.

I said I had been writing letters. “You write your letters in a scribbler?” “Sure,” I said. “It’s cheaper.”

The last notebook grew cold, hidden in the drawer with my tumbled socks and underwear. It grew cold, the sight of it filled me with misgiving and humiliation. I meant to get rid of it but didn’t.

Mrs. Gorrie had not congratulated me on getting this job.

“You didn’t tell me you were still looking,” she said. I said I’d had my name in at the library for a long time and that I’d told her so.

“That was before you started working for me,” she said. “So what will happen now about Mr. Gorrie?” “I’m sorry,” I said.

“That doesn’t do him much good, does it?”

She raised her pink eyebrows and spoke to me in the high-falutin’ way I had heard her speak on the phone, to the butcher or the grocer who had made a mistake in her order.

“And what am I supposed to do?” she said. “You’ve left me high and dry, haven’t you? I hope you keep your promises to other people a little better than your promises to me.”

This was nonsense, of course. I had not promised her anything about how long I’d stay. Yet I felt a guilty unease, if not guilt itself. I hadn’t promised her anything, but what about the times when I hadn’t answered her knock, when I’d tried to sneak in and out of the house u

“It’s just as well, really,” she said. “I wouldn’t want anybody who wasn’t dependable looking after Mr. Gorrie. I wasn’t entirely pleased with the way you were taking care of him, anyway, I can tell you that.”

Soon she had found another sitter-a little spider woman with black, netted hair. I never heard her speak. But I heard Mrs. Gorrie speaking to her. The door at the top of the stairs was left open so that I should.

“She never even washed his teacup. Half the time she never even made his tea. I don’t know what she was good for. Sit and read the paper.”

When I left the house nowadays the kitchen window was flung up and her voice rang out over my head, though she was ostensibly talking to Mr. Gorrie.

“There she goes. On her way. She won’t even bother to wave at us now. We gave her a job when nobody else would have her, but she won’t bother. Oh, no.”

I didn’t wave. I had to go past the front window where Mr. Gorrie was sitting, but I had an idea that if I waved now, even if I looked at him, he would be humiliated. Or angered. Anything I did might seem like a taunt.

Before I was half a block away I forgot about both of them. The mornings were bright, and I moved with a sense of release and purpose. At such times my immediate past could seem vaguely disgraceful. Hours behind the alcove curtain, hours at the kitchen table filling page after page with failure, hours in an overheated room with an old man. The shaggy rug and plush upholstery, the smell of his clothes and his body and of the dry pasted scrap-books, the acres of newsprint I had to make my way through. The grisly story that he had saved and made me read. (I never understood for a moment that it was in the category of the human tragedies I honored, in books.) Recalling all that was like recalling a period of illness in childhood when I had been willingly trapped in cozy fla

Mrs. Gorrie brought a pillowcase to my door. Showing her teeth in a hopeless, hostile smile, she asked if it might be mine. I said without hesitation that it wasn’t. The two pillowcases that I owned were on the two pillows on our bed.

She said in a martyred tone, “Well, it’s certainly not mine.”

I said, “How can you tell?”

Slowly, poisonously, her smile grew more confident. “It’s not the kind of material I’d ever put on Mr. Gorrie’s bed. Or on mine.” Why not?