Luck (2 page)

H
ow disappointingly undramatic the actual facts of Philip Lawrence’s last wakeful hours are. There was no great abandon. No one was naked or even especially active. The four of them gathered around the Philip-built coffee table in the living room, where they played two peaceable games of Scrabble. Nora and Sophie shared a bottle of wine, Beth had one of her teas, Philip a couple of after-dinner bottles of beer. Philip won one game, Sophie the other, and Nora rang up third place both times. As usual Beth had the lowest scores—she doesn’t seem to know many words—but she never appears to mind losing, at Scrabble anyway. Then Nora and Philip went off to bed, an early night in advance of today’s busy schedule. “Wake me up in good time,” Philip said. Sadly unimpressive last words.

“I will. Goodnight.” Those, too. Nora likes to sleep on her side. She turned away while he adjusted his pillow, making himself comfortable to sleep, as he generally did, on his back. Presumably Sophie and Beth headed off shortly, one this way, one that, to their own rooms, and the house fell silent, until Nora woke up and leaped up and screamed.

How untitillating. Nevertheless, “I’m scared,” says Beth.

But Beth too often trades on delicacy, which over time and in close quarters creates a hardening of response. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, why?” Sophie snaps, and the hostility diverts them slightly from bewilderment, from loss, from the fact of Philip being gone, not out to clear his head or his temper with a brisk march down the road, not off fishing by the riverbank for a few hours, not out for a drink “away from all you
women,”
as he put it on days he was refusing to recognize the sum of his blessings, but—gone.

How can this be?

“Well, because, all that,” Beth says, waving a languid arm. “Everybody out there. Everything.”

“Don’t be sillier than you have to be, Beth. This is no time to be stupid.”

Beth has a point, though. If lurid tales amuse one faction of the local populace, there’s also that opposing, dangerous, lightning-strike extremity to take into account.

Is it fair to cast those villagers, as these days Nora does, as drooling, gap-toothed, hunched, lopsided, moronic? As in
Frankenstein
(the movie, that is, the zesty, wild-haired original), with destruction on their lips, bloodlust in their hearts, torches and pitchforks in their upraised hands?

No. And yes.

This is not Frankenstein country. Nor for that matter is it an inbred backwoods, although no doubt it contains its representative share of sins of that sort. This is not even a village, but an unamazing town of merchants, retired farmers and shopkeepers, young families. It even has a few minor industries. Its public institutions include an elementary and a high school, a hospital and a very old, stone, public library. Besides stone, the town’s primary building materials are brick and
wood, here and there covered by more efficient and recent aluminum or vinyl siding. There are lawns and gardens and trees, and for the most part streets go directly from one edge of town to another. It is a simple matter to keep going on one of those roads all the way to the very large city a couple of hundred kilometres away for a night or a weekend, a trip to the theatre, the museum, a decent hotel. Some people do this often. Nora and Philip were planning to go there this very day.

Nor is the house itself foreboding. It’s on more of a knoll than an actual hill, for one thing, and not in the isolated country but only on the outskirts of town. It has no turrets or dungeons or even secret panels to secret rooms. True, it is large, and more than a century old, and set apart from its nearest neighbours by hedges and fences and a gate and a small acreage of lawn gone more to seed and weed than when Nora and Philip moved in; but nothing about its sprawled brick two-storeyness, its gingerbreaded front porch, its farmhouse-style rectangular windows, its small cement iron-railed back stoop, and far across the backyard its unattractively utilitarian, steel-clad workshop-that-once-was-a-small-barn, suggests evil afoot.

And evil is not afoot, never has been. Ask Sophie, for one, what evil looks like, and her answer will have nothing to do with this house or even this town.

I’m scared?
Beth doesn’t get out enough. Or at all, really. Nora either. Only Sophie and Philip have stayed in close touch with the town, Sophie because she is paid to deal with the outside world, Philip because, maddeningly, he insisted on actually liking the place.

At least it’s diverting of Sophie and Beth to have squared off in a small quarrel. It’s also irritating. Their voices grate on
exposed, wired nerves. “Please, both of you,” Nora snaps. “Have some respect,” although respect is not quite what is required. And, “This doesn’t help,” although she understands that it does. And, “We have to calm down, there are things to be done,” although there aren’t, really. Not right away. Basically Philip, and problems and tasks associated with Philip, are in others’ competent, professional hands. What is left for Nora, Beth and Sophie to do right this second? Wail, mourn, grieve, rend their garments and howl?

They are not, any of them, wailing, rending, howling sorts of women. “Okay,” Sophie says, turning from Beth, annoyance suddenly vanished—such an actor she is, maybe a hoaxter. “Maybe we ought to get dressed.”

But if Beth removes her light cotton nightie, with what does she suitably replace it today? Sophie’s garish robe is clearly inappropriate, but then what? Nora’s white panties have only been worn overnight, but Philip’s pale blue pyjama top—she is going about barely covered by something that belongs to a dead man! An amazing, stupendous, unbelievable notion: Philip is dead! Not possible.

At least get his pyjama top off.

Upstairs there are smudges on the hardwood floor of Philip and Nora’s bedroom, and the sheets are tossed about. It is suddenly an unbearable room. Nora focuses on the closet, the drawers, finding something to put on, flinging her nightclothes aside. When she and Sophie and Beth arrive back in the kitchen, they find they have each, without consulting, gone traditional: all three in black blouses, black pants, a trio of crows. They will roast outdoors on this hot August day, though indoors they’re fine. The air conditioning hums as if nothing has happened, immune as all machinery to human event, and a very good thing that is, since otherwise
how could they brew up more coffee, how could Beth, who shuns coffee as poisonous in the long haul, boil the water for the elaborate preparations of another of her elaborate teas?

“This is for strength,” she says, offering to share the dense, crimson results. “And compassion.”

“Interesting combination,” Nora says dryly. “Quite particular.”

“Thanks, Beth, but no,” Sophie says. “It smells good, though.”

This is just habit. It’s the way they have fallen into protecting Beth from each other, even though they both tend to assume, on no great evidence, that Beth herself is oblivious. They suppose her more or less immunized against irritation and insult, maybe by her teas but more likely because staring into mirrors, and staring into herself as reflected in Nora’s most tempest-inducing work, must have rendered her dull-witted. Smooth and unreachable as the figure on canvas, in glass. Baffled by her own skin.

It’s a good thing Beth is beautiful, and in a particular way that is useful. Otherwise, what is the point of her?

Sophie has plenty of points. Or as Philip said to Nora not long ago, “I don’t know how we managed without her.” Whereas of Beth he never got beyond what he said in the first place, which was, “I don’t know what you see in her.” Now these three women of different sizes, shapes, ages, gifts and purposes, but all dressed similarly in black, take their usual places at the kitchen table. The empty chair is large, the silence astounding. Finally Sophie sighs. “Should we get those sheets changed, Nora? We could, if you want. We could even start sorting his things while we’re at it.”

This is the kind of sharp gift for absorbing details and spitting them out that makes Sophie such an excellent assistant,
but—how shockingly tactless and precipitous, any notion of launching into closets and drawers, going through Philip’s underwear, his jewellery, his shirts, sweaters and pants, discarding some, saving the rest for keepsakes or for the poor. A brutal use of these first few hours without him. Nora frowns hard. Sometimes Sophie’s history manifests itself in strange ways; like an old wallpaper pattern under paint, it shows through in certain lights.

Still, considering what Nora slept through last night between those white cotton sheets, it would be pushing whatever governs these matters, assuming anything does—maybe good luck, maybe bad—to lie between them again. She nods. “I wouldn’t mind turning the mattress as well. In a while.”

“Oh, please don’t talk this way,” Beth cries. Well, she would.

“We should try to eat, then,” Sophie suggests. As she would. Sophie is tall, and also no sylph, having grown increasingly roly-poly, from a tidy size twelve to a blooming sixteen, in her four years in this house. “I thought I’d let myself go and see how far I got,” she has told them. She got this far: to this table, with this full body, on this harried, startled morning. “I’ll make toast.”

More and more toast, slice after slice, wholewheat and heavy and lavish with butter—even Beth chews and swallows and reaches for more until soon a whole loaf has, like Philip, vanished. Crumbs lie scattered over three black laps and the pine tabletop and the blue-tiled floor at their feet, and still they are hungry. People don’t stock groceries with such ravenous emergencies in mind, so when their collective desires shift to the sweet they do not have on hand the chocolate ice cream, vanilla cakes, muffins flecked with raisins, cookies
stuffed with jam, also butter tarts, also cinnamon rolls, that they crave. Even Beth lusts after sugar despite considering sugar, like coffee, ruinous.

Better to eat than to think. Or to feel. Not uncommon in the event of any great shock.

Did caffeine, sugar, other bad habits cause Philip to die? That strong, big-shouldered,
physical
man, was he tipped over by one weakness too many? He didn’t have many bad habits really.

Sophie shivers, and abruptly she is leaning over, throwing up on the blue-tiled kitchen floor, no time to bolt for the bathroom. Just as swiftly Beth, of all people, is on her feet, narrow hands holding back Sophie’s brilliant red hair. “I’ve got you, it’s all right, let go, it’s all right, I’ve got you.” None of this takes long. In only a couple of minutes Sophie is shaking her bent head out from under Beth’s hand and sitting up straight again.

“I’m sorry. I’m okay now. I’ll clean up.”

Beth says, “You stay still, I’ll take care of it.” And she does, with paper towels and warm water. Another highly unlikely event.

“Are you so very upset, then?” Nora asks Sophie.

“Too much toast.”

“I see.”

This time the silence that follows is broken by Beth. “We could,” she ventures, “have some kind of ceremony.”

“That’s called a funeral,” Sophie replies, tartness already recovered—how quick she is! “If you want ceremony, it’s already kind of built into the system.”

“It’s a nice thought, Beth, I’m sure,” Nora adds. “We’ll have to do something. I can’t quite think what.” Or where. In this horrible town, open to its horrible people, a place, nevertheless,
that Philip said was lodged in his bones—what is her current duty to him and his bones?

He was born here. Then his parents, leaving behind their own histories, including their respective mothers and fathers, moved off in search of more promising and ambitious prospects, but he came back every summer for romping holidays with four doting grandparents. As he described it, he was familiar on a daily basis with the bakery that sold hand-made cream puffs. He fished with one grandfather and that grandfather’s buddies and played cribbage with his paternal grandmother who was, he said, short and un-athletic but “a killer at cards.” His other, more sinewy grandmother threw baseballs for him to hit, and his other grandfather, a man of few words but many skills, helped him build a go-kart for himself and spice racks for his grandmothers, and watched him produce his first carving which was, Philip said, in theory a duck.

Hard to suppose those summers were so entirely idyllic, or even that there were very many of them, just a few childhood seasons, but although he grew up and away, and one by one his grandparents died, he retained an unshakeable sense of the basic kindliness of the place, of the careless affection of its residents, of the rare and splendid combination of freedom and cosseting of those summers. And so fifteen years ago he returned, a grown man with his second and more interesting wife, like a boomerang, a homing pigeon, one of those things that turn back to where they began.

He even remembered this house. “It was like a castle,” he told Nora the first time they toured it. “A combination of creepy and mysterious and glamorous. I don’t know who lived here then, but I remember being impressed. A little scared of it, too.”

And where were his parents during those summers? “Actually, I have very little idea. I suppose they worked. And they took holidays, just not here. Here was mine. I lived for those summers.” Even in recent hateful faces, he recognized familiar features and with familiarity, basic harmlessness.

When they moved here, besides being generally in a cheerfully whither-thou-goest frame of mind, Nora saw for herself the town’s excellent prospects, and its charms, and believed that tucked away here she might work without distraction and with a graver concentration than was previously possible. In practical terms, she saw it as a place where, still young and starting again, they could live fairly well compared with the exorbitant city, and where they would be far from any further eruptions and fomentations from Philip’s first wife. Moreover, she thought it unlikely either she or Philip could get into much trouble here.

Now look how much trouble he’s got himself into.

An artist should be able to perceive what is not obvious, so it’s embarrassing, really, that when they first drove here together, and saw this big red brick house for sale, and not only spent some hours examining it, inspecting it, rapping on its walls, climbing into its attics, ducking through its cavernous basement, but also strolling randomly around the streets noting the tidiness, the orderliness of homes, the care obviously expended on the many gardens, the inviting cosiness of the shops, and their variety—well, it’s something of a professional shortcoming that she felt no tremors, foresaw no darker impulses.