Good to a Fault (5 page)

The trunk was packed like a jigsaw puzzle, boxes of every shape. The kitchen box was crammed with pots and an old plastic jug filled with cutlery. Other boxes, shoes and boots were stuck here and there: the whole thing given a hard shake by the accident and the tow. When they’d pulled out the duffle bags, and her mother’s little box, Darlene balanced the kitchen box on them.

“You don’t have to open these,” she said. “You have enough stuff.”

“Of course,” Clara said, unmiffed. She put the Playboy Bunny key back in its envelope.

Darlene stared out the back window even after she could not see the Dart any more. It had not been bad, being in the car, even though Gran complained. Better than some of the places they’d lived—better than Espanola, last winter. She didn’t have to come, anyway, Darlene thought. She could have stayed in Winnipeg, if she hadn’t fought with Mrs. Lyne. Who wouldn’t fight with Mrs. Lyne, though, and who could stand her stinky trailer?

She did not want to think about where her dad might be. Instead, she thought about going to sleep in the back of the Dart while they drove through the darkness, Trevor and her lying on each other’s laps, twisting around to get more comfortable. Her dad whistling for a while in the mornings, or his face pressed against the window pretending to scare them when he came back with doughnuts—but she wasn’t thinking about him. She loved sitting on the floor of the back seat, with the vibrations humming in her bones, and the ticking the motor made when they’d finally stopped late at night, the heavy
feeling of stillness after moving for so long. Like the night in the parking lot, with the big moon, when they all lay out on the hood of the car, staring up at the sky, looking for satellites and shooting stars. Except that was the night that her dad was gone for a long time, and they woke up in the middle of the night when those scary guys rocked the car, looking for him. Her mom locked all the doors and whispered to stay still, not talk, not breathe, until they went away.

That was a long trip, to Saskatoon. They had stopped ten miles outside town so her mom could try to tidy everybody up, and then Pearce spat up on her last clean top, so they went to the Saan store to buy a new top so they could go see Darwin at her mom’s cousin Rose’s house. But Darwin was not at the house any more. The people who lived there now had never heard of her, or Darwin, so they’d lost him. Her mother had cried when they came out of the house, because she missed him. And then was the crash, and now here they were, parked at the hospital again, the parking lot that Darlene was getting to know very, very well. She tried to focus her eyes on Clara but it was too hard. She walked beside her, not even trying any more, carrying her mother’s box and the orange pillow.

Lorraine was asleep. Darlene slid the box into the bedside table cupboard carefully, not making any noise. She put the orange corduroy pillow on the bed beside her mother’s arm and looked at Clara—what should they do?

Clara had managed office staff for twenty years, but she found it strange to be the authority for a child. She tore a page from her notebook. “We’ll write her a note,” she said.

Dear Lorraine,
she wrote.
We’ve left what you asked for in your bedside cupboard, and the nurse will have the key. Please don’t worry about the things in the car, they’ll be keeping the car in the lot for a few months. I’ve asked my parish priest to come by when he’s in for his visits, and he can tell you that I’m a good citizen. I’ve got a couple of weeks off work, anyway, and I promise I’ll look after the children. So you don’t have to worry

What a stupid thing to say. She added,
about them.
Leaving Lorraine free to worry about herself as much as she might like. Clara usually had nice clear handwriting, but for some reason the pen was not co-operating, and the letter looked scrawly and irresponsible.

I’ll be back to see you later,
she put.
Clara Purdy.

When they got home, they found the baby trapped in a cage made of dining room chairs. Trevor was trying to keep Pearce happy by feeding him crusts of bread between the bars. A soap opera blared through the house from where Mrs. Pell snored on the couch in the TV room. The boys had been crying, but they’d worn out their tears. Pearce had smears of gummy bread crusted on his cheeks. Clara caught him up and soothed him, his arm gripping fiercely around her neck in his relief.

She washed everyone’s face, gave Pearce a bottle to calm him down, and made grilled cheese sandwiches. Mrs. Pell managed to stay sleeping even when Clara snapped off the television, and didn’t wake, or allow herself to be seen to be awake, till Clara brought her a sandwich and a cup of coffee. She took them with an ill grace and shut her door tight.

Clara took the children out to the back garden in the bright summer evening, asked Mrs. Zenko next door to watch them for half an hour, and raced over to the mall. She bought new shorts and running shoes for Trevor and Darlene, in a frenzy of efficiency, and a folding playpen for Pearce. The diapers would last a few more days. The groceries would hold till tomorrow. She found a case of formula on the way to the checkout, and was back within forty minutes. Mrs. Zenko and Trevor were watering the flowerbeds while Darlene lay on the grass with Pearce, tickling his knees with a long thread of grass. He was kicking, exercising, not laughing but calmly pleased to be fussed over. He reached his arms out for Clara, his huge face smiling, glowing in the lowering light. What a beauty he was.

Mrs. Zenko had brought over a large plastic container of the plain cookies she called angel cookies and a pretty wooden high chair, in perfect condition. “None of my children want this old thing,” she said, as if she was embarrassed to offer something so slight.

Clara thanked her gratefully.

“Not the easiest thing to do,” Mrs. Zenko said. “Taking on a family like this. I heard them yesterday, and this afternoon—I nearly came over to help, but I thought she wouldn’t take it too kindly, so I just listened.”

The noise must have been very bad, Clara thought. She and Mrs. Zenko knew each other well enough. “I’m not going to be able to leave the children with her,” she said quietly. “Not for any length of time.”

“No.”

“I like their mother, Lorraine,” Clara said. “He’s deserted her.” She leaned her cheek against the bird-feeder pipe her father had put up. It needed seed. Tomorrow she’d let Trevor climb the stepladder and fill it. “I’m going to need a book on looking after babies.”

“You can read up, but most of it’s just good sense. It’s only ordinary to be with babies, after all. I’ve got a jar of chicken soup for you to take her tomorrow,” Mrs. Zenko said. She coiled the hose neatly and went back to her own garden.

P
aul Tippett hated hospital visiting. Clara Purdy, talking quickly to persuade him because she saw that it was against his will, had seen that—he must hide his will better. The corridors had been quiet around them in the relief of the evening. The blanket of the dark, or at least the dimmed fluorescent lights.

He pulled a notepad from the paper towers on his desk. Lorraine Gage. Well. Three children, according to Clara. Nothing he’d said had spurred her to the generous action she had taken. Except by opposite action, an effect he believed he often had on people. Not a flattering thought, but worth examining, while not examining Lorraine Gage. If he had said to Clara, “Open your house to these people, you must take Christian action in the world!”—what would she have done? Found a hundred reasons not to. But he had tried to comfort her, to say she was already doing enough…It was not enough. As a running continuo underneath conversation, louder when he was alone, Paul heard his wife’s voice saying things to him, short sentences which were hard to bear.
Not enough. Not good enough. Hopeless.

He was having a bad few days, that was all. Poetry could sometimes keep it at bay.

Foolish and ineffectual. Hypocrite
.
Priest.
An example of similar action, he thought. Lisanne told him he was foolish, and he told himself the same. He was, after all, professionally opposed to opposition. He moved the papers cluttering his desk to one side. It was simpler than that, of course. Not opposite, or similar—it was the truth. Clara was right: visiting the hospital sympathetically was not enough. Lisanne was right: he was a fool.
Divine Spinoza, forgive me, I have become a fool…
Divine Lisanne, forgive me.

He had a sudden flashing memory of their third anniversary party: his sister Binnie, twelve years old, with tears in her eyes, listening as Lisanne mocked him for some failure. “He’s not
stupid,
you know,” Binnie had called, too loud, from her chair far down the table. Daring to enter the lists for him.

The children, that’s where he’d come un-railed. He made a note at the top of the yellow pad.
Three children.
The proximity of death makes us remember our own insignificance, that no one will remember us, that we are animate atoms, at most; our lives don’t matter. But the children do. If there are any children. A chicken: an egg’s way of making more eggs.

He was tired, and confused. A woman lives, and then she no longer lives. Easy enough. The part before “and then” is the difficulty, those long days and nights where people stagger in twilight, dying at different lengths, hard or easy. It would not be easy in this case, as he understood from Clara and from his own knowledge. Dear Binnie. If only it was diabetes, or lupus, or something else.
She lost the fight. Cancer not being a gentle decline, but a ravaging, an invasion.
Phrases from the homily he had given at Binnie’s funeral, because his mother had asked him to, and it was his profession. He did not want to do another funeral homily as long as he lived, and he wanted none at his own funeral. No tea, no baked meats, either. Let them find their own supper, all people who on earth do eat.

He did not want to come to this poor woman carrying the baggage of death.
We are not worthy to come to this Thy table, but Thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.
When Binnie shifted, uneasy beneath the sheet, he had seen her naked to the waist, had been unable not to see her. Pearly skin. Not disturbing, it was only death. (“There is no God, no God,” she raged.) Turn it aside.
Hopeless.
(And in her next breath, “Jesus, Mary, Joseph.”)

He would have to telephone Clara and find out what she knew, at least. Not to put it off any longer, Paul pulled the phone from under a stack of bulletins and found Clara’s number on the parish sheet pinned to the wall. Patchett, Prentice, Purdy.

He dialed and waited, unable to keep himself from hoping that she was not in.

“Hello?” It was a child.

“May I please speak to your—” He paused, at a loss.

“Gran?” A helpful guess from the high voice.

“No, no, I’m sorry. I’d like to speak to Clara Purdy, please.”

“Clary!” The phone clattered down. He could hear the boy bellowing off into the distance. “Clary! There’s a phone for you!”

A moment passed, and Paul heard footsteps towards the phone.

“Hello?”

“This is Paul Tippett. About the woman you asked me to visit?”

“Of course, Paul.” She was distracted, having left Pearce standing in the newly assembled playpen. Paul was silent so long that she wondered if she’d said the wrong thing, if with his over-sensitivity he’d heard her impatience.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was organizing what passes for my thoughts.” He meant her to laugh, so she obliged. “I thought I should get some information from you before I go up to the hospital. The chaplain is away, and I won’t have the usual form. But I thought I should have the children’s names. And any details of her ordinary life would help. Could her mother—?”

“Mrs. Pell is not—” Oh, too much to explain. “She’s not communicative,” Clara said.

“No, I understand, certainly.”

Did he? Clara was tired of talking. She wanted to lie down. She should never have taken this on, it was ridiculous. She had to find some way to get out of it. But that would mean finding Clayton, and that would probably mean charging him with car theft, and then he’d be in jail and the children would have nowhere to go. She was stuck. The clock clicked over to 5:00, bedtime was hours away.

“Will you be in your office for a little while?”

“I’ll be here,” he agreed. No urgency toward his home that she could hear. But maybe that was just professional patience.

Clara found Darlene washing her face in the bathroom, which she seemed to be doing too often. Perhaps it was a phobia, or some kind of obsessive-compulsive—Clara knew nothing. She must read up. In the mirror Darlene’s narrow face looked like a flower, emerging from the green towel, one of the Flower Fairies from childhood books. She must be too old for those.

“Come into my—your bedroom for a moment,” Clara said. But Trevor was lying on the bed on his stomach, colouring with washable markers. How washable were they, exactly?

Darlene led Clara instead to Clayton’s room, where Mrs. Pell glowered in the recliner, watching a soap opera with the earphones plugged in. They sat on the sofa, Darlene taking charge and patting for Clara to sit beside her.

“The priest needs to know a few things about your mother,” Clara said. “So he can talk to her in the hospital. Anything you can think of, really.”

“Okay,” Darlene said.

She seemed older this afternoon than this morning. Clara’s hand went out to smooth back her hair, but she stopped herself, and waited.

“She’s a good skater. She used to clean houses for people when we lived in Trimalo, when my dad was in the mine. It was, like, her own business.”

“That’s hard work,” Clara said.

“She used to take me and Trevor with her when we were babies, she’d take the playpen and sit us in there while she worked. And she would give us a glass of juice from their fridges.”

Clara remembered her own mother taking her along on a visit. She remembered sitting on polished wood in some strange English house, playing with broken toys. A tall girl taking a bite out of an orange, right through the bitter skin—the spray of orange oil misting up as her teeth bit down, and the bright smell breaking into the air. Ages ago.

“What does your mother like, that would make her feel happier?”

“She likes to draw. When we’re driving along she draws pictures of us, or of things we see. She draws us a story.”

“Do you have any of her drawings? Maybe in the things from the car?”

“I don’t have anything that’s hers.” Darlene began to cry, as easily as she might have laughed in another situation. Tears spouted from her eyes and ran down her face, and instead of wiping them she let them fall.

“I know,” Clara said, terribly sorry for her, not knowing what to say or
do. “But you have Trevor, and Pearce, and your granny, and…” She could hardly say Clayton. And she could not bring herself to say that Lorraine would be home soon, or be better soon.

Darlene nodded. No Kleenex nearby—Clara wiped the tears away with her bare fingers.

Mrs. Pell looked up and saw Darlene crying, and made as if to take out her earphones. But the program changed, the ad she liked came on. That cat. She pushed the clicker at it for more volume…more.

Unlike the other mountains around him, Paul’s reluctance toward the hospital seemed possible to conquer. He left the church, grimly glad to have somewhere to go other than home. There was a parking spot by the entrance generous enough for his old Pontiac. It was a sign, he told himself. He shook reluctance off as he got out of the car, literally shaking his shoulders in his concentration. He had to watch that. Lisanne was good for him, she caught him when the tip of his tongue was sticking out, or as he was about to walk into a parking meter, or when his physical actions betrayed his internal struggles. He was lucky to have an objective eye to catch his idiosyncrasies before he made a complete fool of himself.

He could hear the doggish submission in his thoughts, so he shook that off, too. He decided to go without Lisanne today, just for a holiday. The elevator came smartly to his touch, and soared up without stopping. God, he thought. Or bounden duty.

In the afternoon room the woman in the bed looked far away, like a boat drifted off its moorings.

“You’re the priest,” she said. “I thought only Catholics had priests.”

“In the Anglican tradition we are called priests too—we don’t depart as far from the Roman Catholics as some other denominations, although we do not require clergy to be celibate, and there are doctrinal…”
Quiet.
He needed a quick answer for that question, one that would serve over and over, but he never could think of one.

“Are you a Catholic?” he asked.

“Not me,” she said. “I’m nothing.”

She had a sharpness behind her staring eyes. An ironic understanding of her position, he thought.

“
Are you—Nobody—too?
”

“That’s in a poem.” Her pointed teeth slid over her bottom lip as her mouth dragged into something approaching a smile.

“Good ear. I’m sorry. I have a bad habit,” he said, bobbing his head like a turtle—he could feel himself doing it. He stopped, and rubbed his ear. “Verse. Too good a memory of that one kind. Not good enough of every other kind.”

“It’s the frog one. We had it in school.”

“Right, the admiring bog.” He advanced into the room. “I’m Paul Tippett, Mrs. Gage,” he said.

“Lorraine,” she said.

He sat in the blue chair at her bedside. “Clara Purdy wanted me to reassure you that your children will be safe with her.”

“And will they be?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”

They sat in silence for a minute.

Lorraine said, “Not that I have any choice, anyway.”

He did not think she was self-pitying. That was one of the consolations of hospital visits, the good behaviour of the sick.
Weak,
to need consoling. It’s proximity, proxy death that appalls. His sister’s face came into his mind so vividly that tears sprang up to the gate of his eyes. Two years after her death, now, he was able to hold them back.

“I don’t know her well,” Paul said, taking himself back to duty. “She is shy, I think. But I know her reputation in the community, and her family is respected.”

“She’s kind of frozen up,” Lorraine said, nodding. “It’s a big deal, her taking them, though. I’d be hooped without her.”

“Well, people seem to like her very much. She’s younger than the way she lives, ‘one foot in her mother’s grave,’ as my warden says. She’s kind, she has energy and intelligence.”

Lorraine lay still.

“Maybe you’ll help her,” Paul said, and felt Lorraine’s withdrawal from the conversation. To suggest her cancer had a mawkish, mysterious-purposes side to it—yammering fool.
Priest
: the most contemptuous thing his wife could say.

He was silent.

From side to side on the bed, Lorraine turned her head. Looking past the walls to find some answer. Like her head was all she could move.

“May I pray with you?” he asked.

Her eyes fixed on him, her head stalled towards him. “No.”

He waited.

“Yes,” she said. “Pray for my kids.”

He crossed himself. “Father, I commend your daughter Lorraine and her children to your care. Be with her. Give her courage and stamina and have her children in mind always, as she does. Keep them safe and well in the house of your servant Clara Purdy.”

Lorraine was unable to recognize this dream her life had become. She thought, if I am God’s daughter, are my kids God’s grandchildren? She could not stop thinking those words, stupid as they were.

“We ask it in Jesus’s name,” Paul said. “Amen.”

Lorraine’s breath was coming higher in her chest, right under her collarbone, and her whole body felt flooded with heat. Racing, desperate blood, or fury, or some effect of the drugs: she couldn’t tell.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll go to sleep, now.” Lying.

Paul touched her arm before he left. His hand was warm as toast.