A Good House (32 page)

She stood up from her chair. “I think it’s a simple addiction,” she said, “like any other. And now that I’ve said the word, I would guess you have noticed he’s drinking more than he should.” She leaned down to kiss Bill’s forehead. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the drinking is only a predictable, secondary repercussion.”

The cardinals had returned to the willows, had soared in, the male arriving a few long minutes behind the female, and with their return, with the evidence of their deep red devotion so plain, Margaret was able to understand things differently. She understood that if all of this had happened before Paul’s death, before the ground had shuddered and then gone out from under them, she and Bill might have tried to help Mary change her mind, or counselled her to at least give it some time. They did like her so much and they certainly did not have to be convinced that Patrick was not perfect. If Paul had been still alive, still among them with his laughter and his long legs and his quick movement from a chair to a door, from a truck to a back porch, they might have invited Mary to settle into her lawn chair for the afternoon and
just let it pour out, hoping as mothers and fathers almost always do that the difficulties could be examined, could be broken apart and fixed one by one by one. If everything had been different, without a moment’s hesitation she would have turned traitor to her own past self, would have argued for the rightness of Mary’s cause just as fiercely as she’d fought for the rightness of her own when she herself was a proud, young bit-on-the-side. And she would not have wallowed, as some might, or paused to deplore the slippery nature of her fidelity. She would not have slowed down to acknowledge the fraud.

But neither of them had the strength for it, not that year. Soon after Mary’s kiss, Bill left them to go into the house alone, to go up to bed, and Margaret, hearing Mary’s rage fade from humiliation down to a mute, humbled grief, felt only regret for her own exhaustion. She was ashamed of her exhaustion.

Walking out to Mary’s car she’d thought, It’s true what they say about timing. So much in this life depends on timing. And then, believing that, whatever had transpired in their marriage, which surely was, like any marriage, beyond the comprehension of those outside it, Patrick had a very large responsibility to this woman, and believing too that perhaps this was the one way she could help, she asked Mary a normally never-asked question. “Will you be all right for money?” she asked. “Will you keep your wonderful house?”

But Mary assured her that money would probably be the least of her worries. She said she was going to dust off her M.A., and if it turned out to be as useless as she suspected, she would go back for another, more relevant degree. She said Patrick had agreed to help until she had established herself.

“I think the kids are old enough to live through this,” she said, opening the car door, assuming that Stephen and John and Rebecca would be on Margaret’s mind, would be claiming their proper place there. “You and Bill will still see them,” she said, “as often as always. I promise you that.”

When she turned away to get in behind the wheel, Margaret pulled her around and hugged her tight, aware as she patted the thick Jackie Kennedy hair that she took the embrace not for Mary but for herself, both for the young, loving, deliriously happy adulteress she’d briefly
been and for the lifelong wife she had so unexpectedly, so thoroughly become. When she said goodbye, for the first time in her life she used the word
dear,
thinking, I’m an old woman now and I’ll never be anything else. Except dead.

“I came because I thought you and Bill were entitled to an explanation,” Mary said. She was not even close to tears. “I’ve worked as hard as he’s worked. I have a right to be happier than I am.”

“Yes,” Margaret had said, helping Mary close the door and then standing back from the car. “I agree.”

And so, eight years later, they had in their midst Stephanie, a lovely, grown-up woman who was all you could ask for in a second wife. Neither Bill nor Margaret had ever spoken of Mary’s visit that last afternoon, not to each other or to Patrick or to anyone else, and the soft-spoken girl who had been nothing, who had no name, had disappeared without a trace, had sunk like a stone, had become by now, possibly, some young man’s affectionate, trusting young wife.

Stephanie appeared to be more even-tempered, more relaxed than Mary, but maybe this was because they didn’t know her so well. They would never have the time now to know her so well. She seemed to assume, not quite correctly, that everything that could be done for Bill had been done. Patrick told Margaret that she had watched a favourite aunt go in some similar way.

P
ATRICK
had been the force behind the garden, which they’d just put in that spring. Years before, when all but one of the big hickories had come down, soon after Sylvia’s death, a garden plot had been marked off and worked and Margaret had laid out her rows of potatoes and corn and broccoli and tomatoes and lettuce and cukes. Then everyone but Sarah was gone and the three of them simply didn’t need all that food. And it was hard work, Margaret told Bill she found it lonely work. Over time, because no shape will hold forever, because lawn grass like any grass will want to spread, the hard garden rectangle had been reduced to a barren, rounded pond of earth. No one had put any effort into taking it back, it had never been rolled and properly reseeded, although Bill did go at the weeds once or twice a summer with 2-4-D.

And Margaret had found a use for the old plot. Soon after the town council had invoked the new bylaw against any kind of private burning, tired of raking the leaves all the way down to the burn patch at the creek, she had begun to gather them onto the plot and put her match to them there, usually taking the trouble to sink a few chestnuts, listening like a kid for the hot pops in the smouldering piles. And almost every fall a small pack of neighbourhood kids who had smelled the smoke in the air would arrive with their rakes to help her, to watch her break the law, and when it was finished she would hand out quarters or, more recently, loonies, from her apron pocket.

It was her habit too in very late winter to watch from the kitchen window for the pond of brown earth that always appeared a week or so before the sun took the snow from the grass, and a little later, in the true spring, she watched as the plot became a mucky, muddy mess, a good measure of the rain they’d had, and, more enjoyably, a soft brown platter that drew the birds to worms.

Patrick had arrived on a May Friday afternoon with a second hand wagon hitched to his newest Lincoln. In the wagon he had a Rototiller and a wheelbarrow, two bags of sheep manure and three of peat, and a bunch of long-handled garden tools, which were not made of ordinary steel but some kind of hard green plastic.

Margaret and Bill went out to the gravel driveway to meet him, and when he began to explain that they had discussed this the last time he was up, putting in a good garden, sharing both the work and the results, Bill insisted that he had no memory of any talk about a garden. “You talked maybe,” he said.

Unloading the tools while Patrick and Margaret set up a make-do ramp to get the Rototiller off, holding up the business ends of the shovel and the hoe and the fork for inspection, he proclaimed them too damn weird for words.

“No rust,” Patrick said.

When he asked just how much was all this going to cost him, Patrick told him, “Zilch, Dad. Father’s Day.”

Patrick was fifty-eight. His very short hair had lost all traces of colour, it was no longer mottled but pure steely grey, and the creases
on his face, deep rays of them back from his eyes and two sturdy grooves from his nose down to his jaw, were set, he could no longer erase them with a change of expression. He claimed he had earned the lines. “Those lines and a few hundred thousand more than you’re worth,” Bill was fond of telling him.

This was one of Bill’s steadiest rages, the amount of money Patrick made. “I cannot comprehend,” he announced one Sunday, “where all this money is coming from.” When Patrick talked about proportions, the high price of housing and cars and insurance and education and hospitals, Bill said the real problem was that people were being educated beyond their intelligence. “Can you tell me who’s going to do the shit work?” he asked. “Can you tell me who’s going to be satisfied living on the wrong side of the tracks?” When Patrick ignored him, left the living room for the kitchen, Bill raised his voice and made sure it carried. “If there ever is another war,” he called out, “no one will be willing to go. No one will be able to go, everyone’s so blessed soft. Then we’ll see where all this improvement got us.” He loaded everything he had on the word
improvement.

Patrick had held on to a squash player’s fitness, which Bill said was a city fitness that fooled no one. He liked to remind Patrick, as he sometimes reminded other men, that his hands hadn’t been dirty in thirty years.

After the unloading and a short visit in the kitchen and a beer for Patrick, Bill sat on the garden bench with his arms folded while Margaret walked the plot with Patrick to find and collect any bits of refuse. Margaret told Patrick if he came across a rare coin, it was his to keep but she’d take any diamond rings. The first thing she found was an ash-smeared length of tartan ribbon similar to the ones mothers used to tie into the hair of their pretty little girls. “I didn’t chuck this out here,” she said, suspecting the birds. Within a few minutes she had picked up several bits of tangled wire, a half-buried pop can, and three good-sized spikes, old and crusted with rust, that must have been left behind when the fence had come down, soon after the war. Margaret knew that Bill and Sylvia had bought the house in part because of the picket fence, she had seen pictures of
the kids climbing it, but when Bill got home from overseas he’d declared it rotten and pulled it down.

Patrick had found only stones, and when he said he guessed they were finished, Bill got up from the bench to walk every inch himself, to double-check them. On his second pass he found an open diaper pin with a faded pink head. As he dropped the pin into Margaret’s hand, she told him it must have been extremely hard to spot.

“I’m going to put in corn and asparagus,” he said. “Nothing else.”

When Margaret insisted that she would like a few potatoes and some broccoli, he grabbed the strange bright green hoe and cut a line through the earth, marking a section off. “That’s yours,” he said.

Patrick had found some ancient stakes in the shed and after he got the four corners established, he slit the bags of manure and peat and emptied them across the dirt with the new shovel. When he had it all spread he fired up the Rototiller. He slowly covered the ground once and then again, as if he’d read about this somewhere, at a right angle. Margaret brought him lemonade, his mother’s recipe, made from a boiled concentrate and loaded with ice. She stood beside him while he drank it and said very loudly above the noise of the Rototiller, didn’t the soil look rich and cared for?

Bill had decided to open the croquet set he’d bought at Canadian Tire for the great-grandkids. He pushed the loops into the ground at long intervals stretching down to the creek and then he got out a mallet and a few balls, dropping the balls randomly at his feet. When Patrick finally turned off the Rototiller, the absence of the sound of its whiny engine filled the yard with a slightly unnerving silence that was broken only by Bill’s determined knocking of croquet balls toward the creek.

Watching his father swing the mallet, too hard, Patrick called out, “Are you winning, Dad?” Bill ignored him and Margaret shook her head, firmly. No jokes today. Then she helped Patrick load the Rototiller onto the wagon, and after they got it on and tied down, she led him over to the barbecue. The barbecue had been an anniversary present, from everyone, and it had not had a good cleaning since the ribbon had come off five years earlier. “I want you to show me how to thoroughly clean this thing,” she
said, lifting the rain cover. “I’m not that anxious to get blown to smithereens. So what exactly do I disconnect?”

Patrick opened the lid. The barbecue hadn’t been used much so it wasn’t really that bad for char or grease but they watched together as several dozen earwigs paused on the grill and then quickly scrambled away from the daylight. Margaret leaned closer, counting as fast as she could. “Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.” And then she said, “Maybe I’ll get you to show me how to clean it another time.” As she bent down she recited the instructions. “Turn on the gas. Open the burner valve. Push the starter button.” Watching until she was sure of the flames, she closed the lid.

With the earwigs cooked, the three of them went inside for a supper of Margaret’s recipes: whipped potatoes and jellied vegetable salad and baked beans and, Patrick’s favourite, the thing he claimed to like better than anything, breaded pork tenderloin. After supper Margaret took care of the dishes while the men changed the filter on the furnace and then they all sat down to watch “Jeopardy” together, Patrick and Margaret leaning back comfortably into their corners of the sofa and competing without shame, calling out the questions to the answers with either dead, but often conflicting, certainty or with wild, educated guesses.

“Oh, you two are smart,” Bill said. “You don’t need to convince me.”

Halfway through the program he stood up and headed through the kitchen in a huff, calling back through the bang of the screen door that if they couldn’t rouse themselves to get at the planting, he could do it himself. He said if they’d decided that this was his part of the work, that was fine, but he was going to get at it now while there was still some daylight left.

Patrick went out after him to tell him they had no seed, they were going to buy seed tomorrow. Hearing this bit of reality, Bill stopped at the garden bench and sat down hard. “There are days when I believe my brain is haywire,” he said. Then he dismissed Patrick with a sharp head-jerk toward the house, so Patrick left him there. He stayed until dusk, until Margaret took him his sweater. And then he got up and followed her in and climbed the stairs to bed without a word.