Luck (18 page)

So different have Nora’s ideas been, casting the contorted Beth into earthly and heavenly representative of mythic sacrifice, compassion, redemption, celebration, grief and suffering, and so hidden has Beth been in Nora’s household, even dodging, mainly successfully, most of the cameras that haunted them briefly, so absent has she been from that past and so present here, that she is now as remote as a fourth cousin from the girl who years ago walked gracefully and sang sweetly and spoke softly on stages and who carried home trophies,
tiaras and sashes and who then, in a radical alteration of heart, poisoned her mother’s most bitter tea.

How far has she come? Not too far, but it’s time to head back. The walk home is more boring than the way out. Once a person’s seen fields and weeds and ditches and trees and the gravelled side of a highway, there’s not much more to it. Nature is pretty enough, and useful, but this distance down the road it’s mainly uncomfortable. Beth’s sandal straps pinch and rub, their soles give hardly any protection. Still, she can go slowly, there’s no need to hurry.

Careful, careful, patience, patience: precipitous action, inattention to
impulse control
, that’s what gets people in trouble. There are no rules against hope, though, there’s nothing to stop her, as she steps homewards, from constructing and decorating her most perfect idea, picturing how she will redeem, at the good and right moment, everything that Philip’s absence, his death, have made so wonderfully and suddenly and clearly redeemable. She can’t wait. She must wait. She can do that.

S
o that’s what happened: a plumply bloated clump of blood decides to go for a middle-of-the-night adventure, setting out with its individual molecules holding as tight to each other as colourfully scarved and snow-suited little school buddies going tobogganing. Once launched from a cautious start, however, this clump, this clot, loses control, gains momentum, helplessly rolling and tumbling faster and faster, barrelling through arteries, still clinging tight together until—
wham!
—an unforgiving collision with the heart of the matter.

The tree at the bottom of the tobogganing hill.

Of course, the form Sophie brings home, a photocopy of one from the hospital, doesn’t exactly put it that way.

Nora and Sophie are at the kitchen table again. Beth appears to be out, which is unusual but not interesting. Nora is going through the paperwork Sophie handed over from the funeral home. Places where she’s supposed to sign, acknowledging receipt, confirming arrangements, are handily marked by Hendrik Anderson with an X. It’s all densely written, a blur of type except for the line on the hospital form: Cause of death.

What a lucky man, Philip Lawrence, leaving aside his relative youthfulness: except possibly for a single breathtaking instant of pain, just whoosh, thump, you’re dead. “It doesn’t sound,” Nora says bleakly, “as if he suffered.”

“Yes, there’s many worse ways to go, that’s for sure.” Sophie doesn’t intend this the way she ordinarily might: that isn’t it just good northern-hemisphere fortune to go out after a full meal, a pleasing evening, indulged and contented and, except for the death part, perfectly safe. She doesn’t mean it that way, but it’s how, from the habit of hearing Sophie on these matters, Nora hears her now and thinks how irritating that even in death no one measures up to Sophie’s standards for suffering.

Surely under any circumstances it’s cruel enough that beneath the cover of skin, any sort of assault may be in the making. A blood clot waits for the right moment to take a fatal spin through the body. A tiny cluster of badly intentioned cells gathers adherents, drawing more and more like-minded ones together until there’s enough to defiantly announce themselves as a big, fat, unbeatable tumour.

Any of that. One knows these things, but not properly.

Look at Nora’s own compact body, which ordinarily she’s rather fond of—the fact is, anything could be going on in there. Things that can’t be seen are suddenly scary. Even Philip would have been frightened if he’d known; but then, he never had to know, did he, except for one brief, shocking, terrible instant?

Why terrible? Possibly it was glorious.

Nora’s mother’s tortured effort was painful and slow, and in that way a relief to everyone, not least herself, when it finished. Uncle Albert’s death, though, his was more like Philip’s, also a bolt from the blue and possibly, now that Nora considers it, his last, best, most spectacular rapture.

Uncle Albert typically comes to mind in bad times. There are reasons for that, mainly that a profoundly negative influence can be as powerful, and as useful, as any positive one. It is possible to suppose that without Uncle Albert Nora might not have experienced that blessed toppling discovery of what she would do, which began, using crayons and long sheets of paper, with translating stories—Uncle Albert’s grim stories, to be sure—into pictures. Or that without Uncle Albert she might not have learned the keen-edged, stubborn art of resistance. Or the sharp art of the question. Unintended consequences from Uncle Albert’s perspective, of course, but anyone who seeks influence risks being surprised by its results.

Shortly before she came here to live, Sophie underwent a short course of therapy, but all it did, she told Nora and Philip, was make her impatient. She knew the sources of her particular fixation on performing good and preferably arduous acts. What she’d needed, she said, was not a repetitious discourse on history but a way out, some means of modifying history to render it bearable. Nora understood what she meant. She, too, knows sources. Use them, make something of them, don’t get agreeably stuck in them—she and Sophie found hard, common ground there.

Still. If Nora had not found crayons and paints and then threads and materials and miraculous new generations of powerful glues—all that lemonade made courtesy of Uncle Albert’s pinch-lipped bag of lemons—if she had not, there’d have been no Max and Lily to meet, and therefore no gallery to celebrate, and therefore no encounter with Lynn, and therefore no Philip. Temporary influences and relatively minor events turning into something like blood clots gathering steam, or cancer cells increasing in bulk and capacity.

Only better than those things, of course.

When he turned up each summer of Nora’s childhood, she at first mistook Uncle Albert for something like a big, exotically colourful bird flying in overhead and choosing her and her mother, his sister, to alight among briefly: a wonder, a mystery. He called this annual month-long visit a “furlough,” as if he were a soldier on leave from the adamant, single-minded army of God. He settled his oversized rump in the living room as if sisterhood made Nora’s mother his natural host, albeit also an awful doomed sinner.

There was no obvious resemblance between brother and sister, which made him in Nora’s young eyes an even more glamorous guest in their shrunken two-person home. He was also the only man, in Nora’s experience, her mother seemed to know well.

The volume of the house rose markedly with his preacher’s voice, which he didn’t trouble to mute in small spaces. “Take me as I am,” he liked to say, “as you take the Lord.” At some point that began to sound blasphemous: who exactly did he think he was? But not while Nora was very young.

For four Sundays a year, little Nora and Uncle Albert marched off together to his small and peculiar denomination’s small and peculiar services. Much later it dawned on her that her mother allowed her to go with him just because she yearned for a few hours of peace and quiet, and maybe a nap. “I don’t suppose it can do you much harm,” she said dubiously.

The plain, cement-block building where Uncle Albert worshipped (or for those few weeks a year where he was, perhaps, worshipped) looked from the outside as if it might be a garage, or an appliance repair shop. Nora perched still and obedient on a grey metal folding chair near the back. The services involved a great deal of shouting, or at least loud
voices full of strange, vibrating passions. The best part each week was when one of the men told a story, because all the stories were amazing in some way. There was Joseph and his coat of many colours and his mean, envious brothers; Abraham actually agreeing to slaughter his own son; most hugely the apocalypse coming fast, the ultimate war between evil and good. These were awesome and very cruel pictures. Nora could see Joseph’s brothers envying him his bright coat and the love of his father—who would not?—but not the vengeance they chose. She was horrified by Isaac struggling in Abraham’s arms—imagine!—blind with betrayal and shaking with terror as he learned what his father and God had in mind. She conjured armies of stallions and men with flashing swords overhead in a sky dark with rolling clouds, lit by flashes of lightning during what was called, for some reason, “the end game,” which sounded like no game she knew.

Then, when storytelling time was over, she watched as her mysterious uncle, that flamboyant, raving bird of paradise, stepped up to the front. She also watched the congregation, few in number but large in eye-popping fascination. “Brothers and sisters,” cried Uncle Albert, “salvation is our purpose, it is our destiny and our fate whatever the costs to wash souls in the blood of the lamb. However hard it may be, however lacking in familiar comforts or difficult the journey, we must consider the lost souls of savages, consider what we must do to redeem them, consider our duties, consider our heavenly joys!” There was a confusing push-pull to this, involving guilt, sacrifice, future reward, although that only became clearer in retrospect; what Nora knew as a child was that when Uncle Albert was speaking, she sometimes got muddled.

Not the grown-ups, however. Coins clattered onto collection trays. Congregants rose to their feet and stood swaying to
the rhythms of Uncle Albert’s words. Some people fell, mys-tifyingly, to the floor. Women, mainly. One moment they were modestly dressed, quiet-spoken, their fervent hands gripping the shoulders of their small wide-eyed children; next moment they were rolling about howling, modest dresses flown upwards, their small upright children very wide-eyed indeed.

“How was church?” asked Nora’s mother.

“Okay.” Weird and interesting was what it was, but Nora didn’t want her mother asking more questions and getting nervous and deciding not to let her go any more.

When Uncle Albert gave her crayons and big sheets of rough paper and told her, “Draw what you heard this morning,” he intended instruction, of course, not pleasure, much less ambition, purpose and desire.

Many-coloured coats were easy. Horses were really hard, although setting them to rearing up on dark clouds, with lightning flashing and men falling around them, was fun, challenging, and consumed lots of colours and paper. What sort of knife would Abraham carry? Something very sharp, very silver.

This knife could be improved with a careful glueing of tinfoil rather than plain silver crayon; and so it began, and so it grew, from crayons to coloured pencils and paints, from scary old testament tales to any stories and people at all, and from tinfoil to beads and bits of glass and tag ends of rags—all this took on its own life well beyond Uncle Albert. Nora’s mother learned to say, “No drawing,” which she also called
fiddling
, “till you finish your homework.” A teacher said, “You might want to consider a career that uses this talent you have”—a new notion. Still, there Uncle Albert persistently was: “In the beginning,” as he himself might have thundered.

Where was his own beginning? By the time Nora was twelve or thirteen, she was asking questions about him that her mother, it seemed, couldn’t answer. “All I know is that he got involved with those people when he was in his early twenties and next thing we knew he was a preacher. We didn’t come from that sort of home, and I don’t know how he hooked up with them. Or why. And then he went off overseas, and that was that.” Wasn’t it odd that a sister didn’t ask, and a brother didn’t say? Perhaps he thought his brand of salvation too basic and obvious to need explanation. Perhaps her mother thought he’d be offended if she asked. Perhaps she was right. He was definitely a man who favoured answers, not questions.

Nora didn’t go to hear him preach any more. He said the same things over and over, in the same roaring tones. He was irritating and boring at home, too. He didn’t leave room for anyone else. He spoke of being called to leave behind his family and all other “worldly affections” in order to follow his “sacred course” which meant he’d missed the illnesses and deaths and funerals of both his parents, and the wedding and subsequent abandonment and divorce of his little sister. Nora noted that leaving his family behind did not apply to turning up on their doorstep each summer.” I’m sure that’s a good point, dear,” said her mother, “but try to be kind. He’s still my big brother. He used to make sure nobody picked on me at school and I remember him reading to me and teaching me card games and how to ride a bike. Things like that you don’t forget.”

“He’s
supposed to forget, isn’t he?” Nora no longer imagined him as a beautiful bird; she thought she must have been far too easily dazzled. Now he didn’t like to see her drawing or painting, spoke, naturally loudly, of “false gods” and “sinful images.” When she was fourteen, fifteen, she used his annual
visit to try sketching the man himself, without him noticing. His broad nose wasn’t hard, his hairline was straightforward, but his eyes were a trick. She worked and worked at getting the right, fierce light in them. Lines were one thing, lines were easy. Emotions were hard.

Even Nora’s mother sighed sometimes. He wanted oatmeal at his place at the table at seven each morning. He pointed out that Nora’s mother’s troubles must be the consequence of disobedience; hers, not her husband’s. “The woman is servant of man, as man is servant of God,” he liked to say.

“That’s ridiculous,” Nora hissed to her mother. “What century is he living in?”

“Just two more weeks, dear. Be patient.”

If he was a man out of time in their lives, how much more dangerously out of step was he the other forty-eight weeks of the year? But perhaps, unlike Nora, those lucky far-away people had jungles or deserts they could sneak off to, dense trees and wide rivers or a huge sky to absorb his hectoring voice. Perhaps they had their own lives to save and their own liberations to see to. Maybe they regarded him, if they regarded him at all, as just another pesky but irrelevant fly.