More in Anger (9 page)

That afternoon, Opal had finished planting her glads, and now she surveyed the patted earth outside the dining room window with satisfaction. The hardest work was done; she could simply wait until she saw green shoots poke through the earth, as the plants began their work making the tall, strong stalks. When she held the bulbs in her hands each spring, she was amazed and awed each time at God's handiwork. How could such an unremarkable-looking brown, wrinkly, rootlike thing produce such spectacular flowers?!

Now she had changed out of her gardening clothes and straightened up the bedroom. She could smell supper cooking in the kitchen. She'd asked Audrey, their new girl, to have their meal ready for six. Maybe she was going to work out after all. Now that girls no longer lived with the people they worked for, Opal had found them less reliable, more likely to be late arriving and doing their work, though never late when departing. Audrey would be changing into her street shoes and slipping out the back door at the earliest possible moment.

Right before dinner, the florist delivered Opal a lovely rose corsage, a Mother's Day gift from May. How happy its arrival had made her! She would ask Mac to help her pin it on when he came down for dinner. What a perfume it had! She would wear it to church in the morning. What a fine daughter May was! She never missed an important date, and she never failed to write or telephone every week. Thank goodness for one daughter with a heart and a conscience. Opal's mouth tightened into a straight line. She hadn't heard from Pearl. Or the granddaughters. In fact, there hadn't been a word from any of them for ages, not for Mac's birthday last month or Mother's Day now. What was the matter with them?

This morning Audrey had helped Opal carry the bulbs up from the basement, and before he left for an afternoon golf game Mac had helped her prepare the soil, turning it over with a gardening fork. It would be a while before she saw signs of growth: the weather all week had been chilly, and looked to continue that way for a while yet. This morning, before she had gone outside, there had been rain, and then as she finished and was coming back in the house, some snowflakes had started falling. In May! Well, you never knew in this climate. Now, though, as she turned to go into the dining room for dinner, she saw that the sky was clear and there were stars coming out.

Opal took her place at the table and waited for Mac. She was hungry. Her hands fidgeted in her lap. The telephone hadn't rung once today. Well, perhaps tomorrow. After supper, and a cup of tea in the living room with Mac, Opal drew the drapes across the living room windows, across the stars and the deep blue sky, and went up to bed.

Their next trip to Beresford was no better than the last, except that the children were older. It rained the whole time and the sky was so dark and gloomy that the atmosphere both inside and out was truly oppressive. Pearl complained endlessly about her lot, and about Tom and all that he was not doing that Pearl thought he should be doing. Tom was uncommunicative. Tom shirked his responsibilities. Every day, the wife of Tom's medical partner went off in her pickup truck to spend the afternoon in the beer parlour (how sordid! thought Opal). The four girls sulked and wailed and fought and clamoured for attention Pearl did not give them, until Opal felt she couldn't hold her tongue one minute longer, though she had.

At home, Mac spent much of his time fishing, or golfing, or reading up in his study, while Opal puttered about below. Mac liked spending time alone more than she did. But they did go out together. Just last Tuesday they had gone to the Jubilee Auditorium to see the National Ballet, and the performance was on the whole pretty good, Opal had thought, especially the part called “Offenbach in the Underworld.” But Mac had not cared much for the second part, which featured five male dancers wearing ballet tights. If she and Mac hadn't been in the middle of the row, he might have got up and left. In the car on the way home, Mac had ranted about the performance and how he did not get much
of a kick out of seeing men cavorting around in tights. Indeed, he said, once or twice he had felt like bursting out laughing. Thank goodness, thought Opal, that he hadn't.

Well, Mac was in better humour overall these days, why she could not say, but as a result so was she. He hadn't flown into a rage since who knew when, and he got more upset about golf scores than about anything else. There were good things about getting older, though not many, as far as Opal could tell. She disliked the weight she had gained; she disliked how much more difficult it was for her to get around, even to go up and down the stairs. When the last girl had quit on them, Mac had suggested doing without, but she had put the kibosh on that in a hurry.

Both she and Mac had felt pretty tired after their Christmas vacation in Beresford. Between the two of them they must have washed and dried a thousand dishes. Every time they turned around there were more to do, stacked up by the sink. Their dishwashing machine was on the blink, Pearl said, and the repairman hadn't shown up. Pearl was still adding to her long list of Tom's failings, the most recent entry being that he was lazy. It did not seem so to Opal. Tom appeared to be busy as could be, coming and going from the hospital and going out on calls in the middle of the night in addition to his office hours, but Pearl did not see it that way. Any word Opal or Mac might murmur in Tom's defence was construed by Pearl as a word against her. “You
always take his side,” Pearl would have objected had Opal said a word, and yet another topic would be closed and another source of tension added to the growing heap.

Pearl never seemed to respond to any of the little affectionate advances Tom made, which didn't help matters, and the goingson of the children, who seemed particularly unruly—as if Pearl was letting them run wild and waiting for him to take charge in the discipline department while he clearly felt otherwise—obviously got on Tom's nerves. The children were not even required to remain at the table from the time they sat down until they finished their meals. Tom would get fed up and go off to the living room and play the piano for an hour, off in his own little world, as if that was the only peace and enjoyment he could find in his own home.

Opal would have to write a note to May and then include it with the letter Mac had already written, which was lying on the sideboard. He communicated with May more often than she did; their relationship seemed to be the best of them all.

June 1960

Dear May,

Well, the papers this last week have been swamped with advertisements of “Father's Day.” Thank goodness I warned Pearl and you off this Father's Day business years ago, so that I will not have to look forward to thanking either
Pearl or you for a Power Mower or a high-powered rifle.

I have omitted in my last two or three letters mentioning
Doctor Zhivago.
I struggle with it every night for half an hour or so after I go to bed. Possibly I have no true literary taste, but where this book gets its reputation is beyond me. Really I find it very boring but I soldier on in the hope that it may improve. I am two-thirds of the way through now.

I have now finished the story of Hannibal. What a general! Greater even than Napoleon, I believe. I enjoyed not only the reading of it but also translating the copious notes in Latin and Greek by Livy and Polybius respectively. Over the course of my reading I have developed a great interest in Hannibal. He was such a marvellous man and yet ended his life in frustration.

Our garden is looking quite nice now. However, the gardener is slipshod in his work and so the garden does not have the well-clipped look it should have. (One certainly has to be content with very little nowadays from workmen and cleaning women. I wonder what it will be like twenty-five years from now.) The gardener put the pansies and sweet peas in last week. Your mother's glads are appearing and we have a few leaves on the trees. Everything is behind, though, as the weather has been rather cool much of the time recently.

I took a great deal of interest in the Democratic and Republican conventions, as I think did most Canadians. The last-minute alliances between Kennedy and Johnson
for the Democrats and Nixon and Rockefeller for the Republicans left most Canadians like myself somewhat mystified.

Love,

Dad