Good to a Fault (13 page)

Paul handed her a cup of burnt, caramel-coloured coffee. “He demoralizes me. He’s Candy Vincent’s uncle. She’s been—” He caught himself before mentioning her tale-bearing call to the bishop. “She’s something of a force in the parish.”

“You should have known her when she was Candy Kane, in Grade 8. She was a wild girl in those days, Elton John glasses and platform shoes. I thought she was amazing.”

“But you can’t have known her then?”

“We were in school together. I’m pretty old, you know.”

He blushed. Clary was fascinated to see him redden from the base of his neck upwards, his ears included, while the polite expression on his face never altered.

“I’m forty-one,” he said, meaning that he was old too.

“Forty-three,” she said. “I guess that makes me the boss of you. Sad, really.”

Then he laughed, the red receding. “
It is the blight man was born for
,” he said. “
It is Margaret you mourn for
.”

“I can never remember poems,” she said. “But I like when you quote Rilke in sermons.”

He was grateful for that. What beautiful eyebrows she had.

“Joe Kane used to like to play chess,” she told him. “He played my father in the sunroom at the old City Hospital years ago. See how irascible he’d be if you beat him.”

“Kind of you to suggest I might be able to,” he said. He took the cup she had finished, and she hurried away through the lobby, already gone from him, trying to remember where she had parked this time.

Clary walked in the front door and almost fell over a pile of metal struts. A man she’d never seen before was crouched down gathering the struts together, and he scrambled up to catch her; she caught herself, instead.

“Hello?” she said.

Darwin came running up from the basement. “Hey, Clary! Good!”

He edged past the large man and helped him manoeuvre his load past the woodwork. She could see no place to put her grocery bags that wasn’t covered with hardware.

“Give them to me,” he said. “You’re pretty heavy-laden.”

He side-stepped back through the kitchen doorway. Moreland was sitting at the kitchen table working something out on paper with a ruler and his trusty space pen.

“Moreland!” Clary said, surprised. “Is this your doing? You’ve met Darwin—Lorraine’s brother?”

Moreland hadn’t figured the exact relationship but had gathered something along those lines. He covered the paper with his arm, and then uncovered it, thinking maybe better she didn’t go down to the basement. He didn’t want her to see the big black lines he’d drawn on the wall downstairs, where they could put in a bigger window, if they dug four feet and lined the well…

“Where are the children?” Clary asked, refusing to ask about the rubble.

“That nice Mrs. Zenko of yours came over and said she had ’em,” Moreland said. “Said she was feeding them supper and if we’d like to come along later she’d feed us, too.”

Clary squeezed her eyes shut. She was putting too much strain on Mrs. Zenko, she had to find a better way of doing this. She could not bear to think what all this new chaos was about, the piles of stuff, Moreland roped in somehow here, and all these strange friends of Darwin’s—what disreputable people did he hang around with, normally? Petty criminals, carnies, drug dealers.
But Moreland was here. And if they were making a better place for Darwin to sleep, that would be good.

Darwin said, “Mrs. Zenko is glad to have something worthwhile to do.”

That was true.

“She’s getting all those perogies cleaned out of her freezer,” he said.

“Perogies? That what’s for supper?” Moreland asked.

“According to Trevor,” Darwin said. “Might have been wishful thinking. Whatever she makes is good. Do you care what we do down in the basement?” he asked Clary. “Thought I could pay you back a bit, in kind.”

“I don’t care about anything,” she said. What a pleasure to say that! Moth-eaten mink coats, old lamps, what was down there? An affliction of stuff in mouldy boxes. “It’s all junk I haven’t shovelled out. If you’ll deal with it I’ll be grateful. Oh, Grace wants the jam jars. But I don’t need any of it.”

Moreland gave her a wink. “Good to let go once in a while, eh?”

She laughed, and headed next door, where she could hear the children yodelling in the garden.

When Darwin stepped into the darkened room, Lorraine opened her eyes.

“You’re late,” she said, in a slow voice, stupid with drugs. He looked tired too. “Working too hard?”

“Hardly working,” he said, and sat on the edge of the bed. He held her foot, forming its shape under the sheet. His hand felt safe.

“How’s everything?” She meant at home, the children.

“Mrs. Zenko next door took them over for supper. Mom Pell blew a fuse.”

“Oh, no.”

“She’s settled down now, off sulking somewhere. She’s a crazy woman.”

“What set her off?”

“I got some guys helping me do a few things down in Clary’s basement, fix it up for her a bit. Mom Pell wants a room down there when it’s done, but I told her no.”

Lorraine wanted to think about Mrs. Pell’s everlasting selfishness and about Clary’s house turned upside down in the usual chaos of Darwin’s projects, but she felt herself sliding backwards. A pleasant/unpleasant sensation,
beginning to whirl. Like being drunk, only none of the giddy tickle. It was uncomfortably like dying. She could hear Darwin talking, she could feel his foot, no, his hand, on her foot…There was something…Darwin carried on telling her all about it, about Moreland coming and the little refinements they’d decided on, the new window Moreland was going to bring in the morning, so they’d have to dig the window well deeper; how the kids had comforted Mrs. Zenko when Mom Pell went round the bend.

Lorraine didn’t have to talk. In between sentences he would hum, hum, one of Rose’s tuneless, wordless songs from Avenue H, Rose sitting with them while they drifted off to sleep. Lorraine was unable to be afraid, half-listening. Freed from the long bead-string of things she had to finger over and over: money, the children, Clayton, the cancer, the bad feeling just there on the left side, hum, hum. Can’t even remember the list, she thought.

At five in the morning, staring out the window while she waited for Pearce’s bottle to warm, Clary saw Darwin roaming around in the garden. She went out onto the concrete patio to say hello. Pearce joggled along with her, wakeful but not grumpy this pale blue early morning, watching the sparkle on the grass where light was beginning to glance.

“Hey, Pearcey,” Darwin said, looking back.

He had been staring at the back garage, Clary’s father’s workshop. Wide as a single car garage, but twice as long, opening onto the alley—it had become invisible to Clary, as familiar things do. Overgrown lilac bushes almost hid it from the house. She should trim those back.

“Mom Pell,” Darwin said. “She’s sleeping in a chair out there, an old recliner.”

Clary hoped that the words would translate into English if she waited.

“She’s mad at me,” Darwin told her. Birds were singing their crazy morning alarms. “No need waking her up now. Wait till she comes out on her own, eh?”

“Okay,” Clary said. Thinking, like Fern,
whatever
…

“You keep anything in there?”

“Oh, my father’s old tools, and a table saw. It was his hideout. He was
tidy, there’s not much clutter. There’s a furnace, he worked in there all year round. It’s insulated, too—probably with asbestos.”

Darwin smiled at her. A very personable, loopy smile, she thought. “Be a nice little house.”

Pearce twisted around in her arms to stare at the windows of the shop, shining with reflected early sky. He pointed strongly toward it, meaning
Take me there!
but she said, “No, no, not now, Pearce,” and turned to go into the house instead.

“Whatever,” she said to Darwin. “Whatever you like.”

Darwin just hummed. Clary left him to it. She went back to make Pearce’s bottle, and maybe, with any luck, get a little more sleep.

T
ime to introduce the children to church, Clary thought, with the house a little more orderly and breakfast over by nine. Banging reverberated in the basement, and Dolly and Trevor kept slipping down to check on things and being sent back upstairs with urgent messages like
Tell Clary we need a three-pronged grommet by Thursday, go tell her right now.
Before Clary got the joke, she had started making a list on the fridge.
3-pronged–?
it read.
Electric hat-saw w. grinder
, and
6 gross button-head hybrid bingo-nails(?)
.

Church would get them out of Darwin’s hair for a while. And that overbearing chin-wagging redound woman last week had made her determined to take them. She re-dressed Pearce and collared Dolly and Trevor to put on clean shorts the next time they came up to tell her what Darwin needed. (
A dark balance umbrella
,
if she’s got one.
) She washed all their faces and combed their hair. They made a little crowd in the pale green bathroom, filling the big mirror when she glanced up. She brushed Dolly’s bangs back from her face again and rummaged in the top drawer for a pretty bobby pin, the one with a butterfly on it.

Dolly stared at Trevor’s fine hair flying up off the back of his head from static, at Pearce perched on Clary’s hip. Clary’s smooth head was bent in the
top half of the mirror, checking to see if they looked good enough for church. This was their life now: to be with Clary. Dolly stopped. No thinking about anybody else, white as a sheet on yellow hospital sheets.

In the porch of the church Clary thanked Frank Rich and took a second bulletin for Trevor to share with Dolly, since he could not yet read. But he looked heartbroken, so she gave hers to Dolly and smiled at Trevor.

“What was I thinking?” she said. “You need your own.”

She led them through into the opening arches and pillars, the airy height. They were early, plenty of empty pews. Clary chose one near the front to give the children a better view. She tried balancing the baby-seat on the pew, but it slid off sideways, so she left it on the floor and took Pearce out to stand on her knee. He stared up at the stained glass windows arrowing high above, which Clary had not noticed for years.

Paul walked by in his black cassock, not yet robed for the service, going to check the readings. What a pure face, Clary thought. A medieval knight’s face. He was thinner. In a month he would be reduced to eyes and a nose. Hard to advise the congregation on love and understanding and human relationships, when his own had failed.

Trevor watched Paul striding along up to the front. Wearing a long black dress! Nice buttons, and a long pleat in the back, swish, swish—with each long step the dress swung open and closed, swirling around the bottom like icing, or curtains. Paul went to a carved golden eagle with wings holding a big book. Up on the wall was the cross, bare. A big Jesus was right on it in the Catholic church their mom had cleaned in Espanola. Trevor could not look at him poked up on the cross like that: big nails through his feet, between the narrow bones, and a big drop of purply-red blood. Just plain wood was easier to take.

Dolly found church very irritating. The organ playing too quiet to hear was like something pressing on her. Behind the altar green velvet curtains hid the room of God, the inner secret part, she guessed, where only Paul would be allowed. He came back down the aisle, and Dolly thought he looked happy to see them, like they’d come over to his house by surprise. He leaned over and smiled at Dolly so his face made clean creases and he looked like an older angel. He must like us, Dolly thought.

“Good to see everybody here,” Paul said to Clary.

Pleasure welled up in her at the achievement of getting them all here, all dressed and fed, all in a row.

Behind Clary a woman leaned forward to touch Pearce’s cheek. “You have a lovely baby!” she said.

The music changed, and everyone was standing, so Clary didn’t have time to explain. She helped Trevor and Dolly leaf through their hymn books, and sang softly to help with the tune. Pearce pulled her head down toward his face. He smelled good, he was all right. No more Benadryl. Clary prayed the first successful prayer she’d managed lately:
thank you, thank you that he was not hurt.

Church was like a movie, Trevor thought, but you’re in it. The words mostly washed over him, but when the bald guy from the audience walked up to read, he heard parts of that:
I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks, I bent down to them and fed them.
Like Clary’s cheek. Everything tucking in so nicely there beneath her pointy little chin. When she lifted Pearce to her cheek Trevor always wished it was him. When she bent to kiss him at night, he saw the lines on her face, and breathed in her looping shiny hair and her neck. She smelled like soap. His own mother smelled like apples. He could feel the middle of his body empty, a dark cave running up and down through him, because his mother was sick. He decided he would kill Jesus, and be the new Jesus, and then he could get her better. Who cares that he would be the devil then.

Dolly prayed at first—since she had to be there—a short ferocious prayer that was no question but an order:
Get her well.
Her forehead pressing on the pew, staring into her clenched fists. When she stopped, exhausted, she watched Pearce’s foot dangling beside her. His foot trembled like a bird’s as he reached up to touch Clary, to be sure he was still being held. Poor Pearcey, Dolly thought, and tears began the long ride up into her eye. Then she remembered how
boring
stupid church was, and tears receded, and she yelled at God again in her head.

Clary was pleased by how peaceful the children were. This meditative time was good for them. Unfortunately the lesson was that difficult letter of St. Paul,
put to death fornication
. But maybe they had drifted off to whatever thoughts children drift to. Watching Pearce’s intelligent gaze she wondered what he was thinking, with his white-paper mind; what images were being
painted on his brain. What indelible photographs were printed on Trevor’s and Dolly’s, already.

“
You must change your life,
” Paul said, and it was obviously the opening of the sermon, so she’d missed the Gospel. “Rilke says that—and I know I’ve quoted Rilke before,”—he glanced at Clary—“In the poem called
The Archaic Torso of Apollo…
St. Paul says it too, in the letter to the Colossians. He promises change in the new life in Christ, in which all are equal.

“Don’t get distracted by the list, the fornicating and the unclean desires and so on. Go straight to the core: when we have clothed ourselves with the new self, there will no longer be any distinctions: Christ is all and in all.” Paul stopped and shuffled his index cards, which he never referred to but seemed to use as a prop against nervousness. “It’s a tempting list—to be on the lookout for nasty stuff, in ourselves and in other people, that dingy side of life. But the injunction continues: we must get rid of
all
the dross. Anger, wrath and malice, slander and abusive language—Of course I include myself in this. We must struggle against the temptation to malice, even when it’s clothed in a self-righteous vestment of indignation against someone else’s perceived sin.”

His own indignant energy made his face look burnished. He needs to let himself be angry, Clary thought. Candy Vincent sat in the choir, her permanent can-do smile in place.

“One of the failings St. Paul warns against comes up again in today’s Gospel—greed. Jesus warns us against a specific kind of greed in Luke 12: greed for the future. The rich man has had a miraculous harvest, too big for his barns. Instead of allowing the extra to flow into the hands of the poor he says to himself, ‘I’ll tear down these petty little barns and build big barns so I can keep all this for my Self, and eat and drink and be merry for a long time.’ I’m paraphrasing, of course.” Paul had an unassuming smile, acknowledging his own inadequacy but relying on your great mercy and kindness. “The rich man glorying in his harvest and thinking ahead to the party is going to die. He forgot that.”

He looked down to Dolly and Clary, with one arm around Trevor and Pearce in her lap.

“We forget. It’s hard to live with the constant understanding of death in the forefront of our minds. Scholars of old kept a skull on their writing desks
to help. The reminder of imminent death,
memento mori,
is one of the greatest spurs we have to right action.

“When I was a boy my mother fell gravely ill. I knew she was going to die, and that I would be left an orphan with my younger sister to look after. My mother knew it too, and our conversations during those months of her illness have been of use to me all my life. She was given radiation treatment and had a radical mastectomy—they were very radical in those days—and in fact she did not die. But the strength my sister and I received from her in those hard days stayed with us even when we returned to ordinary life and were able to go back to taking her for granted, which I still do, to this day, unless she phones to scold me for it…”

He allowed the congregation to laugh, to release some tension. He could not tell how Clary’s children were taking this. They didn’t seem to be listening, but of course appearances meant nothing, with children. With anyone.

“And there are other deaths. As you all must know by now, my wife Lisanne and I have separated.”

He stopped, he remembered to breathe.

“A little death, the death of a marriage, is another one of those hard times when life becomes clearer. We thought we had stored up for the future, but we’ve had an early frost…”

His mouth turning down as if he disliked his own phrase, he shifted his cards again.

“God directs us to be joyful and free, unhindered by anxiety, and not to hang on to the stuff of this world, material goods or relationships, as our salvation. They cannot be. He tells us to have the courage to be open to one another, by compassionate understanding and by abiding, kind attention to our neighbours. To see God in those around us. If we are lucky, we see the God Hosea reminds us of, in those who
lift infants to their cheeks, bend down to them and feed them.
”

That time Paul looked directly at the children, and at Clary, and smiled at them all.

She bent quickly to rearrange the car seat, unable to bear his approval. She’d been the catalyst for this disaster, let’s not forget, she thought. The least she could do was try to keep them safe for a while, before…She prayed one word,
Lorraine
.

Then the congregation were rising for the hymn, and automatically she rose too.

Dolly and Trevor stuck close to Clary at coffee hour. Weaving through the heedless crowd of congregation to the coffee table, Clary carried a glum consciousness that, like her own goodness, church was a fraud and a sham, and she should not be there herself, let alone dragging children along with her. But Paul was not a sham, and he seemed to be pretty stalwart in faith.

Trevor tugged her arm, wanting to get closer to the cake: the August birthday cake, made by April Anthony, who remembered the birthdays of the parish. She had listed the August people in icing down one side, and Trevor badly wanted a piece with writing.

“Two pieces, please,” Clary told Mrs. Anthony. Did she make birthday cakes because she was named after a month, Clary wondered, or had she even noticed that? Was April’s birthday in April? Clary’s mother would have known. Mrs. Anthony handed her two pieces of cake, one with plain icing, and one with names.

Trevor snaked his hand up and grabbed the name piece, so rudely that Clary stared at him in surprise. He crammed part of the cake into his mouth and ducked down, disappearing under the table.

“Trevor!” Clary said, remembering that last table he went under. “Dolly, take this—” She bent and reached blindly under the table for his skinny arm, and pulled him out. “Trevor, it’s okay, you’re allowed to have cake. There’s lots.” She was speaking almost in a whisper, her face close to his. “Do you have to pee?”

Trevor shook his head. Then he nodded.

“Okay, come on, I’ll show you where the bathrooms are.”

Dolly had vanished in the crowd, but Pearce, thank God, was still slumped sleeping in the car seat, safe enough among the church women. Clary took Trevor to the washroom.

Dolly was looking for the way into that secret room back there, behind the green velvet curtains. Everybody had left the church part, it was all hushed. She climbed the chancel steps on quiet feet and dodged around the altar to where Paul had stood. It was weird back there. She stroked the green velvet drape along the wall, searching for a break where you could go through.
Nothing. Impatient, she reached over to the far edge and scooped the velvet up sideways.

Nothing! Just the wall. Well. That was a lesson all by itself.

“Dolly?” It was Paul. Her stomach swooped—what if she was trespassing?

“Hey, sweetheart,” he called. “Your—Clary is looking for you. She’s got Trevor and Pearce and they’re ready to go home. Are you finding your way around up there?”

If the room behind wasn’t even there, how holy was it anyway? Dolly skipped down the stairs and ran down the aisle, past Paul waiting at the back door. There might be seconds of cake.

Paul stood outside the church hall after they’d gone. The light blinding through the branches, a fluting bird’s cascading whistle. A lost meadowlark, singing in the noonday sun, to the silent city around them. It wasn’t so far for him to have flown from the river fields on a Sunday.
Quam deus in mundi delectus est
—God so delighted in the world…Paul lifted his face to feel the sun and thanked God, thanked God, as he did almost all the time. When he wasn’t carping, carping for whatever ills he felt afflicted by at the moment. When light glanced around him and the bird poured light in his ears and the dust rose off the asphalt from the recently departed cars of his parishioners, he was convinced that he lived on God, that the earth itself was God itself, as self and selfless as—