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Why unexpected? She has known for some time about me and she also knew that George Kirkham might be killed. He was in the air force, after all. (And around her in the Kirkhams’ house this afternoon people are saying-though not to her, his widow, or to his sisters-that he was just the sort you always knew would be killed. They mean because he was good-looking and high-spirited and the pride of his family, the one on whom all the hopes had been pi
She paid some attention to the world-she knew the war was ending. She thought that George might be back soon after I was born. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to go on living in her room then-she’d have to live somewhere with him. And she knew that I’d be there, but she thought of my birth as bringing something to an end rather than starting something. It would bring an end to the kicking in the permanent sore spot on one side of her belly and the ache in her genitals when she stands up and the blood rushes into them (as if she’d had a burning poultice laid there). Her nipples will no longer be large and dark and nubbly, and she won’t have to wind bandages around her legs with their swollen veins before she gets out of bed every morning. She won’t have to urinate every half hour or so, and her feet will shrink back into their ordinary shoes. She thinks that once I’m out I won’t give her so much trouble.
After she knew that George would not be coming back she thought about keeping me for a while in that same room. She got a book about babies. She bought the basic things that I would need. There was an old woman in the building who could look after me while she practiced. She would get a war widow’s pension and in six more months she would graduate from the Conservatory.
Then Ailsa came down on the train and collected her. Ailsa said, “We couldn’t leave you stuck down here all by yourself. Everybody wonders why you didn’t come up when George went overseas. It’s time you came now.”
“My family’s crackers,” George had told Jill. “Iona’s a nervous wreck and Ailsa should have been a sergeant major. And my mother’s senile.”
He also said, “Ailsa got the brains, but she had to quit school and go and work in the Post Office when my dad died. I got the looks and there wasn’t anything left for poor old Iona but the bad skin and the bad nerves.”
Jill met his sisters for the first time when they came to Toronto to see George off. They hadn’t been at the wedding, which had taken place two weeks before. Nobody was there but George and Jill and the minister and the minister’s wife and a neighbor called in to be the second witness. I was there as well, already tucked up inside Jill, but I was not the reason for the wedding and at the time nobody knew of my existence. Afterwards George insisted that he and Jill take some poker-faced wedding pictures of themselves in one of those do-it-yourself picture booths. He was in relentless high spirits. “That’ll fix them,” he said, when he looked at the pictures. Jill wondered if there was anybody special he meant to fix. Ailsa? Or the pretty girls, the cute and perky girls, who had run after him, writing him sentimental letters and knitting him argyle socks? He wore the socks when he could, he pocketed the presents, and he read the letters out in bars for a joke.
Jill had not had any breakfast before the wedding, and in the midst of it she was thinking of pancakes and bacon.
The two sisters were more normal-looking than she had expected. Though it was true about George getting the looks. He had a silky wave to his dark-blond hair and a hard gleeful glint in his eyes and a clean-cut enviable set of features. His only drawback was that he was not very tall. Just tall enough to look Jill in the eye. And to be an air force pilot.
“They don’t want tall guys for pilots,” he said. “I beat them out there. The beanpole bastards. Lots of guys in the movies are short. They stand on boxes for the kissing.”
(At the movies, George could be boisterous. He might hiss the kissing. He didn’t go in for it much in real life either. Let’s get to the action, he said.)
The sisters were short, too. They were named after places in Scotland, where their parents had gone on their honeymoon before the family lost its money. Ailsa was twelve years older than George, and Iona was nine years older. In the crowd at Union Station they looked dumpy and bewildered. Both of them wore new hats and suits, as if they were the ones who had recently been married. And both were upset because Iona had left her good gloves on the train. It was true that Iona had bad skin, though it wasn’t broken out at present and perhaps her acne days were over. It was lumpy with old scars and dingy under the pink powder. Her hair slipped out in droopy tendrils from under her hat and her eyes were teary, either because of Ailsa’s scolding or because her brother was going away to war. Ailsa’s hair was arranged in bunches of tight permanented curls, with her hat riding on top. She had shrewd pale eyes behind sparkle-rimmed glasses, and round pink cheeks, and a dimpled chin. Both she and Iona had tidy figures-high breasts and small waists and flaring hips-but on Iona this figure looked like something she had picked up by mistake and was trying to hide by stooping her shoulders and crossing her arms. Ailsa managed her curves assertively not provocatively, as if she was made of some sturdy ceramic. And both of them had George’s dark-blond coloring, but without his gleam. They didn’t seem to share his sense of humor either.
“Well I’m off,” George said. “I’m off to die a hero on the field at Passchendaele.” And Iona said, “Oh don’t say that. Don’t talk like that.” Ailsa twitched her raspberry mouth.
“I can see the lost-and-found sign from here,” she said. “But I don’t know if that’s just for things you lose in the station or is it for things that they find in the trains? Passchendaele was in the First World War.”
“Was it? You sure? I’m too late?” said George, beating his hand on his chest.
And he was burned up a few months later in a training flight over the Irish Sea.
Ailsa smiles all the time. She says, “Well of course I am proud. I am. But I’m not the only one to lose somebody. He did what he had to do.” Some people find her briskness a bit shocking. But others say, “Poor Ailsa.” All that concentrating on George, and saving to send him to law school, and then he flouted her-he signed up; he went off and got himself killed. He couldn’t wait.
His sisters sacrificed their own schooling. Even getting their teeth straightened-they sacrificed that. Iona did go to nursing school, but as it turned out getting her teeth fixed would have served her better. Now she and Ailsa have ended up with a hero. Everybody grants it-a hero. The younger people present think it’s something to have a hero in the family. They think the importance of this moment will last, that it will stay with Ailsa and Iona forever. “O Valiant Hearts” will soar around them forever. Older people, those who remember the previous war, know that all they’ve ended up with is a name on the cenotaph. Because the widow, the girl feeding her face, will get the pension.