A Good House (30 page)

They did return every two or three years to visit and Sarah came immediately for Paul of course. And Margaret still had her open invitation. But she had never gone, never flown out, never flown anywhere in her life. They’d got to Florida all those years ago on their own, driving, and they had taken the car to Expo, too, just the two of them, she and Bill fighting through the Montreal traffic, staying at the private home of an older French couple who had opened very pleasant rooms to paying visitors. Although they had liked what they saw, especially liked trying all the food, some of which they had never even heard of, when they got back home, very tired and disorientated, they decided they weren’t really travellers. The crowds especially had got to Margaret. So those two were the only trips they’d taken, except for a half-dozen times over to Detroit to see a ball game and of course once in a blue moon in to Toronto.

Sarah was disappointed that Margaret wouldn’t get on a plane and fly out to Vancouver but she knew enough to stop coaxing. She said what they didn’t spend on airfare they should spend on pictures and
phone calls, so there were albums filled up and regular Sunday telephone visits. Margaret made notes for herself before the phone calls so she could be sure to give Sarah just the most significant news. Sometimes, if she’d called after eleven when the rates dropped, she would relax maybe a bit too much and talk about people Sarah didn’t remember at all and Sarah would bluff her way through it, saying, Yes, she remembered Norma Fawcett and yes, she remembered the damage from that November storm, and then she’d kick in with her own news and complaints and modest boasting: the extended deck, seven-year-old Natalie honoured at school for her confidence, her brother Jake, so old for nine, playing the guitar, imitating some kind of music from Seattle, the bonehead neighbours with their yappy dog.

Margaret had early on asked Sarah to draw her a floor plan of their never-painted wood house in Vancouver so she would know what she was looking at when she saw the pictures, know where Sarah stood with the phone in her hand. And for Christmas, two years earlier, they’d sent a VCR, which meant that Margaret now had tapes to watch in the afternoons: Sarah’s kitchen with not a thing out of place, not one stray crumb, their living room, all glass and leather and chrome like something in an expensive magazine, Rob cutting the grass, diagonally, making a nice pattern; Sarah on her treadmill, her hair a helped-along blonde, her middle thick like Margaret’s own but her legs still as finely shaped as Betty Grable’s; Natalie lying in a chaise in her bathing suit, reading a paperback book, showing little enthusiasm for the camera; Sarah and Rob dressed up to go out for the evening with the neighbours with the yappy dog; Rob bare-chested in tartan boxers, scraping moss off the deck, getting ready to treat it with something or other.

Watching with her, Bill said, every time, “He won’t win against that moss. Any halfwit could see they have no business living there. It’s not a fit place for housing. It’s always been a forest and that’s what it means to be.”

Sarah could read between the lines as well as anyone and she’d had several long phone calls from Patrick, just so she would know what was happening, he told her when he called. She did understand that her father was going through something extremely difficult but it was
all entirely in the abstract for her because there was nothing she could do except listen to whatever got said and babble on about life as she knew it. Life as she knew it a continent away in a magnificent city tucked between the mountains and the ocean, with friends and neighbours and colleagues more likely to be called Wong than Chambers.

Although Daphne was settled into the McFarlane house, she didn’t come over any more, ever. She was almost worn out, driving back and forth from the hospital in Sarnia, still working shift. She did welcome Margaret into her own kitchen and she did send the girls to visit Bill, Maggie occasionally when she was home from university for the weekend, Jill more often with jars of rhubarb jam or marmalade or loaves of lemon bread.

Daphne had celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday in March and the girls had given her a party. They’d sent invitations far and wide and opened the doors of the McFarlane house to over a hundred people. By all reports it was a blow-out affair. Murray and Kate drove up from Toronto, stopping in London for Patrick and Stephanie and Meg, from the home, and Andy came, and most of the kids. Friends came from Daphne’s old apartment in the city, people who had known the girls when they were small, and from all three of the hospitals where Daphne had worked and from her years in training.

Some of Maggie’s and Jill’s own friends turned up a few days early to help get the house ready and several of Daphne’s oldest friends, from town, from her own time as a girl, the people she had been getting to know again since moving back, helped the girls with the planning and the preparation of the food. The younger women stood around the dining-room table listening as the menu and its attendant complications were discussed, waiting for instruction, and soon, chopping a bag of onions or taking a cloth and a bottle of furniture polish to one more deep, dusty windowsill, they began to imitate these older, relaxed women, their confidence in the face of a big party, their casual talk of recipes for fifty, doubled. In particular, the younger women began to take as their own the much-repeated phrase, “Just leave that to me,” laughing as they said it, assuming they’d screw up and hoping it wouldn’t be noticed.

Halfway through the evening, when the McFarlane house was
pulsing for the first time in fifty years with music and wine and with the raucous noise of conversation, with stories and anecdotes and praise and questions and lies, when the air was filled with the steamy temptation of good food well prepared, chicken pot pie and beans and ribs and curried shrimp and stir-fried vegetables and paella and leek and potato and squash pie, which was the new recipe, because there was always a new recipe waiting to be tried on a crowd, someone lifting freshly laundered sheers to look out a window noticed a March blizzard gaining strength under the streetlights, so many of the guests who had come from out of town stayed for hours after the party was supposed to end, stayed the night, filled the beds and couches and slept on the floors in sleeping bags like middle-aged kids, pulling each other upright in the morning and stretching and complaining about their lower backs as Jill carried a large tray of orange juice through the rooms, loving it.

Margaret and Bill had been invited to the party but Margaret had declined for them, as she was expected to. Instead she sent a wild-rice casserole and a big silver tray of miniature lemon tarts and, at the last minute, two dozen glads from the new flower shop uptown, the card saying what she always said on cards, “With all our love, Your Dad and Margaret.”

When Bill finally got a partial description of the evening out of Maggie and Jill, the gory details, he called them, he said to the girls, “I expect they were all drunk as lords. What else do they know how to do?”

The next night he turned off a debate about a Gay Pride Parade and phoned Daphne to give her hell. “If they were too drunk to get home, why didn’t you send them over here to sleep?” He listened to her scrambling for a response and, fed up, overspoke her. “If you’re fifty-five, you’re old enough to know that not even drunks like sleeping on the floor.”

Maggie and Jill sometimes brought one boyfriend or another to meet Margaret and Bill, young good-looking men who had been well warned on the way over, prepped to listen and nod and lie according to their best judgement, which was, on the whole, surprisingly reliable.

Margaret had sat Daphne down just once to ask her to forgive her father, simply because she knew she was the only one to do it and she would hate herself later if she didn’t make some effort. She did not believe for a minute that Daphne would be able to offer this imagined forgiveness. Like any daughter, Daphne had never seen her father up close and defenceless, not the way a wife does, so she didn’t have that to fall back on. And his words had been obscenely cruel and said in front of the girls, just after Daphne had moved them back to town.

Right out of the blue he’d asked her, “So where’s the father?” As if this information could make any difference now. “In all this time,” he said, “you’ve never shared that with us.”

When Daphne stood to leave he got up from his chair and followed her through the kitchen to the door. “Just took what he wanted,” he said. “And you too stupid and ugly to deny him.”

They had all spent a good part of their lives, Bill as much as the others, more than the others, much more, trying to help Daphne believe that she was not ugly, not “dee-formed,” as she used to like to put it. Her load was plain when she was still a teenager, you didn’t have to be a brain surgeon. Margaret thought now that Daphne was like a small boulder pushed almost to the top of a hill by a dozen willing hands, and then comes a sneaky well-placed kick. Premeditated, guaranteed. The bastard, she thought. And that’s what she’d said to him at the time, playing rough, breaking for once the firm promise she had made to herself. “You bastard. You God damned bastard.” Knowing it would do no good, except that Daphne and the girls would have those words too, as a modest entitlement from her.

She marked his words to Daphne as the first outside attack. Until then no one would have believed what he could say. But Daphne had taken it to heart. She apparently thought it was real.

Andy came over regularly, as she always had. Once in a while she would have Neil or Carol in tow, or their kids, or Krissy, who was married now and the mother of three boys, the little hellers, Bill called them, taking them back to explore the creek, his control of their loud, confusing play firm but not unkind. He didn’t scare
them. For nearly a year, Carol and Krissy had been sharing a dark green Jag XJS. They’d bought a Dream of a Lifetime ticket together, partly because Carol’s mother had won a thousand dollars in the previous draw but mostly to support the hospital, and then they’d won the car. Everyone expected them to sell it and split the money but they didn’t. They’d taken the train into Toronto to pick it up and they traded it off month by month, loading their kids into the back seat, which was not intended for kids, and taking Bill for a short spin around town whenever he asked, which was often.

When Meg was brought home from London for a visit, she and Andy would come in and stay for part of the afternoon. Meg had needed a hysterectomy soon after Paul was killed and the surgery had frightened her, subdued her more than any of her drugs. She hadn’t been herself since.

Bill still tried to make a big fuss over Meg, although one afternoon when they were at the kitchen table playing their version of crib, he laid down his hand and backed away from her and scowled and barked at some little thing she’d said. Not understanding at all what she had done wrong, Meg stood up and started to bawl, loudly, and then she banged the table with her fists, which made the cards and their glasses of Coke jump.

“Just like old times,” Andy said, coming in fast from the living room.

Margaret steered Bill out of the kitchen quickly so Andy could tell Meg that her grandfather must be very tired, that sometimes old people just got very tired, and then it was over, forgotten. In ten minutes the two of them were sitting on the couch together, one on each side of Andy, looking at the pictures from Florida.

Andy didn’t farm any more, she leased to a neighbour, putting most of that money aside, but she was still managing the mill, wisely, still getting her living from it. Neil, who was thirty-four now and, like his father, tall and fast and sometimes funny, worked for her, and between the two of them they knew almost everyone around, who could be trusted, who shouldn’t be. Over the past five or six years she had been going to Europe for a few weeks every spring. The first time, she took Krissy and Carol to England,
another year Daphne and Maggie and Jill flew over to join her for a week in Italy and then a few days in Spain. And one year Mary went with her, although this was long after Mary had divorced Patrick, so it went without saying that the pictures of the two of them, standing on the Pont Neuf looking down at the Seine or sitting at a sidewalk café having breakfast or drinking wine, would not be shoved under anyone’s nose. The last time she was over, so much more confident than she’d been when she started, she had gone to Italy again, with Meg, just for a week. After Meg recovered from her jet lag, which had made her cry with confused exhaustion, they’d got along fine. Meg had liked Rome best, the hot slices of pizza bought right on the sidewalk from dark men who flirted with her, the narrow winding streets she walked holding her mother’s hand, the women who could run across these streets on very high heels. She had liked the churches especially, their thick stone walls, the high, dark emptiness inside, the echo if you shouted.

Andy didn’t seem to be bothered by anything Bill said or did. Nothing fazed her, not even Bill’s insinuations that she and Neil were spending far too much money, that they were running Paul’s mill into the ground. One morning, after a visit when Bill had been tired and thoughtful, when he had talked for a long hour, for which she was thankful, about Paul, jumping around in time but still so obviously and painfully filled with love for his dead son, she went to Daphne under the full steam of nervy anger to tell her that she thought anything was better than having your father die so young your kids had no actual memory of him. “Do you even remember my father?” she asked. “Does anyone?”

Daphne told Andy yes, she did remember her father. She remembered dancing with him at the wedding and out at the Casino in the summers, many times. She said he was the one who first took her out onto the floor to teach her to dance. This wasn’t true, he had been only one of the first, but Daphne thought, It’s true enough.

Murray came. He had always come up to visit a few times a year. During Charlotte’s reign he came alone, the reasons for her absence usually having a nice ring of truth to them, but Charlotte was almost forgotten now. For the last twelve years he had been bringing Kate.