The Love Of A Good Woman

A curly-headed beanpole was what he called you. Coming from him that was almost complimentary.

When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said, “Oh-oh. Do you think you’ll ever manage to get another one?” If I’d objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.

Mrs. Barrie is back. She’s back in less than three weeks though it was supposed to be a month. But she has to work shorter days than she did before. It takes her so long to get dressed and to do her own housework that she seldom gets here (delivered by her nephew or her nephew’s wife) until around ten o’clock in the morning.

“Your father looks poorly” was the first thing she said to me. I think she’s right.

“Maybe he should take a rest,” I said.

“Too many people bothering him,” she said.

The Mini is out of the garage and the money is in my bank account. What I should do is take off. But I think stupid things. I think, What if we get another special? How can Mrs. B. help him? She can’t use her left hand yet to hold any weight, and she could never hold on to the basin with just her right hand.

R. This day. This day was after the first big snowfall. It all happened overnight and in the morning the sky was clear, blue; there was no wind and the brightness was preposterous. I went for an early walk, under the pine trees. Snow was sifting through them, straight down, bright as the stuff on Christmas trees, or diamonds. The highway had already been plowed and so had our lane, so that my father could drive out to the hospital. Or I could drive out whenever I wanted to.

Some cars went by, in and out of town, as on any other morning.

Before I went back into the house I just wanted to see if the Mini would start, and it did. On the passenger seat I saw a package. It was a two-pound box of chocolates, the kind you buy at the drugstore. I couldn’t think how it had got there-I wondered if it could possibly be a present from the young man at the Historical Society. That was a stupid thought. But who else?

I stomped my boots free of snow outside the back door and reminded myself that I must put a broom out. The kitchen had filled up with the day’s blast of light.

I thought I knew what my father would say.

“Out contemplating nature?”

He was sitting at the table with his hat and coat on. Usually by this time he had left to see his patients in the hospital.

He said, “Have they got the road plowed yet? What about the lane?”

I said that both were plowed and clear. He could have seen that the lane was plowed by looking out the window. I put the kettle on and asked if he would like another cup of coffee before he went out.

“All right,” he said. “Just so long as it’s plowed so I can get out.”

“What a day,” I said.

“All right if you don’t have to shovel yourself out of it.”

I made the two cups of instant coffee and set them on the table. I sat down, facing the window and the incoming light. He sat at the end of the table, and had shifted his chair so that the light was at his back. I couldn’t see what the expression on his face was, but his breathing kept me company as usual.

I started to tell my father about myself. I hadn’t intended to do this at all. I had meant to say something about my going away. I opened my mouth and things began to come out of it that I heard with equal amounts of dismay and satisfaction, the way you hear the things you say when you are drunk.

“You never knew I had a baby,” I said. “I had it on the seventeenth of July. In Ottawa. I’ve been thinking how ironic that was.”

I told him that the baby had been adopted right away and that I didn’t know whether it had been a boy or a girl. That I had asked not to be told. And I had asked not to have to see it.

“I stayed with Josie,” I said. “You remember me speaking about my friend Josie. She’s in England now but she was all alone then in her parents’ house. Her parents had been posted to South Africa. That was a godsend.”

I told him who the father of the baby was. I said it was you, in case he wondered. And that since you and I were already engaged, even officially engaged, I had thought that all we had to do was get married.

But you thought differently. You said that we had to find a doctor. A doctor who would give me an abortion.

He did not remind me that I was never supposed to speak that word in his house.

I told him that you said we could not just go ahead and get married, because anybody who could count would know that I had been pregnant before the wedding. We could not get married until I was definitely not pregnant anymore.

Otherwise you might lose your job at the Theological College.

They could bring you up before a committee that might judge you were morally unfit. Morally unfit for the job of teaching young ministers. You could be judged to have a bad character. And even supposing this did not happen, that you did not lose your job but were only reprimanded, or were not even reprimanded, you would never be promoted; there would be a stain on your record. Even if nobody said anything to you, they would have something on you, and you could not stand that. The new students coming in would hear about you from the older ones; there’d be jokes passed on, about you. Your colleagues would have a chance to look down on you. Or be understanding, which was just as bad. You would be a man quietly or not so quietly despised, and a failure.

Surely not, I said.

Oh yes. Never underestimate the mea

But we could just pick up and go somewhere else, I said. Somewhere where nobody would know.

They’d know. There’s always somebody who makes sure that people know.

Besides, that would mean you’d have to start at the bottom again. You’d have to start at a lower salary, a pitiful salary, and how could we manage with a baby, in that case?

I was astonished at these arguments which did not seem to be consistent with the ideas of the person I had loved. The books we had read, the movies we had seen, the things we had talked about-I asked if that meant nothing to you. You said yes, but this was life. I asked if you were somebody who could not stand the thought of someone laughing at him, who would cave in before a bunch of professors’ wives.

You said, That’s not it, that’s not it at all.

I threw my diamond ring away and it rolled under a parked car. As we argued we were walking along a street near my rooming house. It was winter, like now. January or February. But the battle dragged on after that. I was supposed to find out about an abortion from a friend who had a friend who was rumored to have had one. I gave in; I said I’d do it. You couldn’t even risk making inquiries. But then I lied, 1 said the doctor had moved away. Then I admitted lying. I can’t do it, I said.

But was that because of the baby? Never. It was because I believed I was right, in the argument.

I had contempt. I had contempt when I saw you scrambling to get under the parked car, and the tails of your overcoat were flapping around your buttocks. You were clawing in the snow to find the ring and you were so relieved when you found it. You were ready to hug me and laugh at me, thinking I’d be relieved too and we’d make up on the spot. I told you you would never do anything admirable in your whole life.

Hypocrite, I said. Sniveller. Philosophy teacher.

Not that that was the end. For we did make up. But we didn’t forgive each other. And we didn’t take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief. Yes, at that time I’m sure it was a relief for us both and a kind of victory.