Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (29 page)

Even in June, the Lake Ontario water chills.

She dries her feet on the grass, puts her sandals back on, looks around for her bicycle. Gone too? She stands frowning, jingling the car keys in her hand. Where did I park?

In front of the biology building, she leaves the hazard lights flashing, rings the night-bell. There's a long wait, no answering buzz, perhaps he's gone. She pushes a number of buttons at random, with no luck. Here we go round
ah the years, the years,
she thinks, turning on the ignition. But wait, he's there, he's breathless, chasing the car, rapping on her window, yes it's it
is,
it
is.

“God,” he says (in the car, lights off, engine still running), his mouth and tongue on her shoulders her throat, his fingers combing her hair. “I've been waiting all evening, I was …” (Are they laughing or crying?) When breath comes back to them, she turns the ignition off, he says: “My daughter dropped by without warning. I was afraid she'd never leave, I was afraid you'd come and go.” He rubs the back of one hand across his eyes. “I was afraid she'd see you.”

Her smile is sardonic; no, imitation sardonic; for what does she, so recklessly happy, care? “And this would be worse than if your wife…?”

Silly question, she thinks, since it's the last thing, surely, that anyone lets go. A universal need, perhaps: to preserve, to tend and water the illusion that in our children's eyes we are faultless.

“I've only got fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most,” she says. “My son needs the car, he's got a nightshift job for the summer.”

“How was the great man?”

“Poignant. Rummaging through the new physics, like everyone else. You would have liked it, I think. He quoted someone who says that memory's holographic. Distributed, not localised. Nudge a frequency, you get the thing back entire, the whole replay.”

He takes her hand, sucks her fingers one by one, delicately, dropping a line between each knuckle:
“Clocks and carpets and chairs,”
he murmurs.

On
the lawn all day.

And brightest things that are theirs …

Ah, no; the years, the years …

Wondering, delighted, she asks: “How do you know Hardy?”

“Surprise, surprise. Even illiterate scientists read from time to time.”

“Oh!” she says sharply. “Look. There he is.” A frail man, elderly, is wandering beneath the lilacs. “It's him. He must have lost his bearings. They've given him a room in Vic Hall. Shall we go and … ?”

Watching him stumble, sway a little, gaze vaguely about, they cannot bring themselves to … what?
expose
him. They stand in the courtyard, discreetly close, forearms brushing, and wait. Transgressors. Eventually the old man tacks toward them, squinting. “In '32?” he queries, plaintive. “Yes.” He steadies the question, nodding. “I didn't know up from down, just wandering round thinking
Princeton, Princeton
when all of a sudden my god I thought
Einshtein
…”

Reverently – yes, you could call it reverence – they guide him toward Vic Hall. Can you tell me, she thinks of asking the girl at the night desk, the great man, her lover, can you tell me ver iss we are?

The Loss of Faith

His first wife was living in Sydney when she died, and on that very day Adam saw her on the subway in New York. He was just getting off the Broadway Local at Times Square, and trying to find the place where you go down the stairs for the crosstown shuttle to Grand Central, when they collided.

“My God,” he said. “Faith!”

For whole seconds he felt his waking vertigo (Adam's dreams wore bells and motley, they were extravagant, their sense of humour was decidedly off-kilter) and dizziness nipped at his brain like a terrier. He thought he could hear a phone ringing; yes, he definitely heard the descant “pips” that signal a long-distance call in Australia. The conviction that he must have been changing trains at Circular Quay instead of in Manhattan was so intense that he saw the Sydney sky, very blue, and the Harbour Bridge, right there against the subway pillars. There was, in fact, a travel poster (Paul Hogan grinning, the bridge, the opera house,
G'day, mate, come and see us Down Under for the Bicentennial)
; and so later he thought that this was the explanation; until later again when his daughter Robbie (the eldest of his three children, the one who forgave him least) phoned with the news of Faith's death. But for twenty-four hours or so, he thought the travel poster was the explanation.

“Faith,” he murmured, dazed, unable to move, while Paul Hogan smirked in peripheral vision and Times Square seethed above their heads.

Faith looked young and quite lovely – the way she had looked in their halcyon years – but very pale.

“Keep your hands to yourself, mister,” she said in a flat Bronx accent, and someone shoved him aside and next thing he knew he was in the vast rococo barn of Grand Central Terminal with thousands of people milling around and a horrible sensation – a sort of rising fog of queasiness moving on up from his ankles – that he was going to faint. Air, he thought,
air,
trying to grope his way out to Forty-second Street but getting lost in the tunnels and turning into the Oyster Bar instead.

“Table, sir?” A waitress laid her hand lightly on Adam's arm and he nodded. She was blonde and mechanically flirtatious. “Will anyone be joining you, sir? No? This way then.”

It was murky as sin in the Oyster Bar, and he tripped over several pairs of feet. On his table a feeble glow of candle was drowning itself, swamped in paraffin. He gulped down two beers (Foster's, thanks to the ubiquitous Mr Hogan) and told himself:
It doesn't mean anything, seeing Faith's double. It doesn't mean anything at all.
But the trouble with a Marist Brothers education – Sydney, circa late '40s, early '50s – was that the world was always thick with symbol. You could never escape it.

“It means something,” he told the blonde waitress lugubriously.

“It's just the wax,” she said. “See, if you tip it, you can free the wick again.”

“What?”

“See? I've relit your candle.”

Fat chance, Adam thought. “My first two wives,” he said solemnly, “were Australian.” He studied the palms of his hands, seeking clues to a mystery. He raised his head and listened to something far away. “Is that a telephone ringing?”

She smiled. “Would you care to order now?”

“And so am I,” he said. “Australian. Still.” He frowned and added: “I think.”

“I recommend the Oysters Florentine.”

“If I'm anything,” he amended, taking hold of her wrist and mournfully running an index finger up and down the soft inner skin of her forearm. “I'm not from New York.”

“Who is?”

“I get down from Northampton – Northampton, Mass – once or twice a –”

“Don't tell me.” The waitress rolled up her eyes in mock despair. “You teach at Smith.”

“Well yes, as a matter of … How'd you – ?”

“I'm a Smithie. Class of '84. But you weren't …”

“No. I went there in '85. What's a nice Smith girl doing –”

“Working her way through grad school. Columbia.”

“Columbia.” He sighed heavily and rested his hands, palms up, on the table. “I was at Columbia when …” He pondered the zigzag of his marriage line, hanging onto the tail of a thought. “I'll tell you something weird: I only get down to the Big Apple once or twice a year, but something bloody strange happens every time. I think it's because –”

“Listen,” she said awkwardly. “I'll come back in –”

“– I associate New York with guilt. That's why it happens.”

“– back in ten minutes, okay? When you're ready to order.”

“What's your name?” he asked, pulling the inside of her wrist to his lips.

“Sandra,” she said. Oh damn, she thought. She was an absolute sucker for a man with tears in his eyes. This was on account, so sundry therapists assured, of her feckless father who'd moved on and moved on, as one day Sandra herself might be able to do. But for now she was stuck (though improving). For now, she would go as far as drinks and sex (providing he was willing to play safe) but not in her apartment, and not more than once, because she knew him already. He'd had a sad life, he favoured clingy and insecure women, she was not – she refused to be – his type.

“I've had a sad life,” Adam sighed.

I am not I am not thank god his type, Sandra told herself, running through her therapist's catechism. I will not be a breast for one more child-man to suck, I am cured of congenital soft heartedness, I am definitely learning not to … “I get off in two hours,” she said. “If you want to talk.”

“My third wife,” Adam told her as they lay side by side in his hotel bed, “well not wife, strictly speaking, we never married … but she was American, a therapist.”

A therapist, Sandra thought. It figures.

“We met on my sabbatical here in New York.”

“At Columbia,” she said.

“Right. Columbia.” Nineteen seventy-six, that year of flags and tall ships, of academic excitement, marital chaos, erotic trysts, the smell of hotel sheets – it came back to him with the faint sweetness of perfume left on a sweater. “My second wife was dreadfully unhappy,” he sighed. “In New York, I mean. It's very difficult to live with someone as unhappy as that, someone who is so
desperately …
who is I suppose you would have to say incurably … And then Robin, my daughter back in Australia, my daughter from my first marriage, Robbie got into trouble in school, well she got herself expelled to tell you the truth, and Faith, my first wife, the one I saw … the one I thought I saw today … Faith called.”

And Carolyn, his second wife, had thrown a tantrum. “Faith just never gives up, does she?” she'd stormed.

“But it's Robbie,” he'd said, bewildered, preoccupied with his daughter, furious with her, sick with anxiety.

“Hah!” Carolyn had shouted.
“Hah!”

“What do you mean,
hah?”

“Hah!” Carolyn screamed. Then she burst into tears. “Can't you
see,”
she demanded, “why she puts Robin up to those things? Can't you
see?”

He could see that Carolyn's knuckles were white with strain. Sometimes it seemed to him that her body was covered with small sharp spikes.

“It's so obvious.” Carolyn's voice was climbing higher, higher. “First the broken ribs, then the stealing, and now this … this
perversion.
She only puts Robin up to it to get your attention.”

He was frightened for Carolyn sometimes, though Carolyn seemed to glide protected on the slipstream of her own incommensurate furies. She scooped up the twins and swept out of the apartment and slammed the door with such force that his University of Sydney beer mug fell off his desk – a theatrical statement that was rather spoiled for Carolyn by her having to return for the children's snowsuits.

“I could never make head or tail of it,” Adam sighed. “She just packed up and went home to her mother in Perth. Took the children with her.”

“What did you do?”

“Me? Well, nothing.” He had been so
relieved.
“Of course it was distressing but what could I possibly … ? I had to finish my year, I was on a Fulbright. And Rhoda was very helpful –”

“The therapist.”

“Yes. And then my book came out, and Cal State offered me a visiting appointment, and then San Diego, and then Smith. I never got around to going back.”

Sandra lay watching the ceiling. She composed a letter to her old roommate:
Oh these predictable Smith professors. It's talk, not sex, that turns them on.
Her roommate was backpacking up the Himalayas in quest of Tantric eroticism and other highs of a spiritual nature.
The love life of male intellectuals,
Sandra telegraphed to her,
continues to be a quest for the perfect listener. There are times when I believe myself doomed to the role of intelligent voluptuous ear. But then, in these days of wine and AIDS, who am I to complain?

“And Rhoda-the-therapist?” she prompted, to set Adam's quest back in motion.

“Well actually, that didn't last very long,” he said – for Rhoda, who was and always would be in aggressive good health, world without end, amen, Rhoda believed they should all be
friends,
he and she and Faith and Carolyn and all the children and God knew who else. She tried to get him, for example, to telephone his wives on their birthdays. Of course he would not. If you reopen Pandora's box, you deserve what you get. “So she wrote letters,” he groaned, “to Faith and Carolyn. She actually wrote letters to them.” Of course, neither Faith nor Carolyn ever replied.

“Rhoda's so American. She never understood about Australian women.” Nor about Australian men. For Rhoda still sent him care packages and birthday wines and invitations to dinner parties that she and her new husband were hosting. She never gave him a moment to mourn for her, the way he did for his first two wives.

For sorrow, that sweet poetic enduring emotion, Rhoda had not the slightest knack.

He frowned, and stared at the night table beside the bed. “I keep thinking I hear a phone ringing,” he said. “I keep thinking I hear the long-distance pips.”

In Sydney, Robin pictures Northampton, Massachusetts, and the small postcard-pretty faculty house with sash windows that stick. She pictures the ill-fitting storm frames that let in the draught. She and Natalie visited last year, a mistake. She pictures the phone in the empty living room. She pictures the hundred-year-old windows rattling softly as the phone rings and rings and rings.

“Ten,” Robin counts. “Eleven. Twelve rings. The bastard. Always unreachable when needed, how does he do it?”

“Why don't you hang up?” Natalie asks. “What's the point of letting it go on ringing?”

“Cheap satisfaction.” Robin smiles. “Thirteen. Fourteen. I like to think of it jarring his house, and it's free.” She looks out the window, past several tacky high rises, toward the strip of Cronulla beach. Some things replay themselves, though she lives resolutely in the present. Still, from the look of her shirred bathing suit, yes she must be nine or ten years old. Eighteen years ago if you keep that kind of score.

“It's still yesterday there, right?” Natalie says. “It's still yesterday afternoon. He's probably at his office.”

Robin cradles the receiver against her neck and hoists herself onto the windowsill. It's hot outside, a steamy January day. “Snowing where you are?” she asks the house in Northampton. She can see unemployed Sydney teenagers cruising the beachfront in battered cars, looking for a safe spot to dope up. She can see mothers assembling clusters of children with buckets and spades, rubber floats, towels tied around their necks like Superman capes. She sees her mother a little apart from the other mums, never quite one of the group. Her father is still inside the rented holiday flat, possibly reading a book, possibly following the footie. (“Aussie Rules is football for intellectuals,” he says.) He is cavalier about when he joins them on the beach. Sometimes when she is just getting ready for bed he insists that they all go for a moonlight romp in the waves. Sometimes at low tide he announces “Footie time!” and practises his drop kicks on the hard wet sand and makes Robin chase the football and bring it back.

Today he is staying inside the flat.

Robin and her mother spread their towels on the sand, and Faith rubs suntan oil on the child's shoulders and back. They spread white zinc ointment on each other's noses, and make white clown lips, and wrinkle up their faces and laugh, though it seems to Robin that there is always something small and sad, like a ship's bell in fog, deep down in the well of her mother's laughter. Robin looks down the golden slope toward the ocean and jiggles from one foot to the other with impatience; her mother is kneeling, the tube of zinc ointment in her hands, facing back toward the houses.

A change happens. First it touches Faith's hands which tremble for an instant and then turn softer and gentler on Robin's skin. Robin watches the change move across her mother the way a wave moves up the sand. It spreads a
shining.
And the child laughs with sheer happiness because a weight has been taken off her chest. “Oh Mummy!” she says, locking her arms around Faith's neck, happy, happy.

The mother strokes the child's hair and nuzzles the crook of her neck and looks at the houses. The child turns. Her father is crossing the road, waving, jogging toward them. Against her cheek the child feels the breath of her mother, how it has turned fast and sweet. It reminds the child of something, it smells like … like … ? like grass after mowing; like the moment when her father puts the mower in the shed and flops down in the shade and reaches up to take the beer from her mother's hand. Her father, zigzagging between traffic, waves and calls out. He flashes his white teeth at them.