The Romantic (7 page)

Before going away, Aunt Verna commits herself to one more search. For a housekeeper, a temporary one, naturally, since the file remains Unsolved, Fully Open.

“I can burn a meal,” I argue and am told that, grown up as I am, there is a law against children my age being left by themselves. But I mustn’t worry, I won’t be overly supervised. The housekeeper will arrive midmorning, she’ll clean, shop, make my lunch, wash our clothes, do the ironing and fix supper. As soon as my father gets home at six o’clock, she’ll be on her way.

“No reason for her to lollygag here all evening,” Aunt Verna says. “And you won’t have to put up with her on weekends, either.” She sounds annoyed, as if her successor is already throwing her weight around.

There are many applicants. On three different afternoons I meet the three finalists, who are like the three bears: one hefty and blond, one tiny and dark, one medium-sized, brown-haired and pretty. Or to put it another way: one a cheerful chatterbox, one a nervous near-mute (who lost the lining of her throat in a botched adenoid operation), one who says, calmly, about as much as you’d expect. I don’t like the hefty, blond, cheerful chatterbox. She reminds me of Maureen from school, a covert persecutor; she talks a little too zealously of fattening me up. The medium-sized, calm, pretty one seems the obvious choice, until she is about to leave and I catch her glancing at herself in the hallway mirror and see a momentary absorption, a receding from everything but herself, and a chill goes through me.

So it’s the tiny, dark, nervous near-mute. Mrs. Carver. She may well be the best cook anyway. At her second interview (the interview that included me) she arrived with a cold meat loaf wrapped in aluminum foil, a potato salad in a Mason jar and a paper bag containing homemade shortbread cookies. Each of these offerings she excavated from an enormous navy purse and slipped to Aunt Verna in the manner of somebody passing smuggled goods. That evening Aunt Verna, my father and I wolfed the food down and pronounced it delicious (which it may or may not have been; as Aunt Verna pointed out, compared to
her
cooking, a dog biscuit tasted like a gourmet meal), but we still felt
that Mrs. Carver’s difficulty with speech, pitiable though it was, counted against her. Then, the next day, the pretty candidate fell out of the running and we came around to the view that a tiny, silent woman might be just what we wanted: not apt to be much of a disruption, not apt to bore us with her life story.

‘You’ll hardly know she’s here!” Aunt Verna yelled. “You’ll have to watch you don’t step on her!”

April first, April Fools Day. My father takes Aunt Verna to the airport at dawn, Mrs. Carver arrives some time later, after I’ve gone to school. I come home at noon and don’t have to shove the front door against a mound of boots and shoes. The landing is empty. The tiles gleam. Since these are unmistakeable signs of my mother, my knees buckle in the moment before I notice Mrs. Carver standing at the top of the stairs.

“Oh, hi,” I say. I kick off my boots. My jacket I throw over the bannister, as I’ve got into the habit of doing.

Mrs. Carver starts wringing her hands. Her eyes, magnified by thick glasses into great brown puddles, circle wildly.

“What?” I say, frightened.

She jabs her finger in the direction of the closet. I think she’s trying to tell me that somebody is in there. An intruder!

“Hang it up,” she whispers.

“Oh.” Breath returns to my chest. “Okay. Sorry.” I open the closet door to another surprise. Coats on hangers. Hangers on the rod. Shoes on the floor, all lined up.

The kitchen is still in the throes of reclamation. The oven door sprawls open, racks lean against the wall. There are
cups and plates all over the counter because she’s laying down new shelf paper. But the table (where only yesterday you had to push aside unpaid bills, pencil stubs, dirty dishes and who knows what else to clear a spot for yourself) has nothing on it except for my lunch: a glass of milk, an eggsalad sandwich quartered on the diagonals, a few sliced carrot sdcks, two small pieces of chocolate cake and an apple that has been cored and sectioned.

“Everything’s cut into pieces,” I observe, making the curious association between this fact and her name.

She motions me to sit.

“What about
your
lunch?” I ask.

She gestures at an empty plate and glass near the sink.

“You’ve already eaten,” I say.

She nods. I feel an ember of satisfaction leap between us. I am beginning to decipher her.

I take my seat and she abruptly climbs on a chair and gets back to scrubbing the cupboard shelves. She is so small and jerky, like a little kid, but she’s not young, she’s forty-five years old. I know this from Aunt Verna’s interview notes. I know that she was born in Kingston, that she is the widow of a bankrupt inventor (whose best ideas—the electric typewriter and the electric curling iron—were stolen out from under him) and that she has a twenty-two-year-old daughter who got married last June and is now living in Port Hope.

I await her signal: a questioning glance, or maybe she’ll come right out and ask. I am accustomed, during lunch, to describing my day so far, either a fairly honest account, which is what Aunt Verna demanded, or—what my mother
liked—a joking, exaggerated version. But Mrs. Carver just goes on cleaning, and by the time I have finished two sandwich quarters I understand that there will be no conversation. I slump in my chair, relieved. I take a good look at her.

From the back you can see that her short black hair is thinning, alarmingly so at the crown. And that it’s dyed. In the pink terrain of her balding spot the white roots blaze. She wears the same short-sleeved yellow blouse she wore to her second interview. Stained under the arms, nylon. Her black skirt is a thin flannel. “Cheap fabrics,” I think but without my mother’s derision. Poor Mrs. Carver, with her dead failure of a husband and her unlined throat. Driving a beat-up sedan, forced to clean other people’s cupboards in order to pay the rent on her downtown apartment. Several weeks ago, when Aunt Verna and my father were discussing the need for a housekeeper, I heard Aunt Verna say,“A girl Louise’s age needs a woman around the place.”

Now, here she is, the woman I needed. Better than a slob, I tell myself. Or a chatterbox. Better than that bossy chatterbox lady. I think of who else I might have ended up with. Mrs. Bendy! Well, better than
her.
Better than an alcoholic with a face like a can of worms.

Within three days Mrs. Carver has the house in order, if not up to my mother’s standards. For all her incessant cleaning, Mrs. Carver lacks the perfectionism of the scouring angel who appreciates that dirt floats before it settles and that it settles even on vertical surfaces. Thus you vacuum the air and walls. As far as possible you banish landing pads: picture frames, knick-knacks. The last thing you would ever do
is transfer, from the back of a kitchen cupboard to the centre of the coffee table, an intricate china basket holding three china cats. The day this basket appears I pick it up and say provocatively,“A magnet for dirt.”

Mrs. Carver rapidly wipes her hands on her apron, which I take for a raided “Yes, I realize that and I’m not happy about it but I’m only trying to cheer the place up.” Then she dashes back into the kitchen.

During my mother’s reign I was tidy so as not to trigger a sarcastic remark. Now my fear is that I will be adding to Mrs. Carver’s seemingly countless worries. Which isn’t a very prohibitive fear. As I never did before, I leave things out on my dresser—a deck of cards, a pack of crayons. When I play with my dolls, I don’t just dress them, comb their hair and put them back in the toy box, I carry them around, sit them in front of the television. I eat my lunch in front of the television and Mrs. Carver frets only if I neglect to use a plate, and even then I am given an opportunity to
perceive
that she frets (by her sharp intake of breath or her hands rubbing together) and to go and get the plate myself before she scurries into the kitchen to get it for me.

My father, who sees her for no more than a few minutes a day, keeps trying to engage her in conversation. I berate him afterwards and he looks stricken and says he’s just being civil, for Pete’s sake. But he is touched by her, it’s hard not to be. He helps her on with her threadbare twill coat. From the front door he watches her drive off in her hulking old Ford and wonders how she can see over the steering wheel.

And then, the very next afternoon, he greets her with,
“What’s for supper, Mrs. Carver?” and she rolls her eyes behind her glasses and whispers: “Pork chops, peas, potatoes” (for instance), and he says,“How’s that?” and she tries again: “Pork chops, peas, potatoes,” which he still doesn’t hear. Or he does and blithely goes on to ask what kind of potatoes, and I am driven to intervene.

“Scalloped potatoes,” I hurl at him,“grilled pork chops, boiled frozen peas, okay?”

“Fine,” he says sheepishly. “Sounds delicious.”

I translate her gestures as well. In no time, I have figured out how to read her twitches and flutters. I attribute my success to the investigative techniques I picked up from Aunt Verna, who told me such things as: liars rub their noses and blink either too much or too little; people who aren’t lying outright, but nevertheless have something to hide, rub their chins and look to the left. Watch the eyes, the mouth and the hands, Aunt Verna advised. I do, and it is clear to me that Mrs. Carver is both honest and full of secrets.

I have also concluded that she is afraid of dying of a heart attack from the shock of a loud noise, which is how her husband died. If I drop a spoon or slam a drawer, she clutches her chest, and she is constantly on high alert for a knock at the front door, even though knocks are rare and—on the odd occasion that they do materialize—brief, because in her canine way she has already heard the footsteps and has dashed down to the landing, whipped open the door and startled somebody into a silence
she
won’t be the one to break. Other kinds of sharp sounds have her dashing to a window. If what she sees excites her, she’ll hiss and wave me over, and we peer out like captives or spies.

Often the exciting thing is only a dog, or one of the Dingwall boys. “Only” to the uninformed observer. To Mrs. Carver, who knows about omens, somebody’s black dog on your property is bad luck. A yellow dog is good luck, as is anything yellow: a yellow bird, the sight of a person in a yellow coat or hat, a yellow car going by. A yellow car with a licence plate that has one or more threes in it is an especially good sign—three, not seven, being the lucky number. There are signs almost everywhere you look. At the good ones Mrs. Carver smiles—the only time she does smile—and you get a glimpse of the dimples and straight white teeth that must have attracted her husband.

Thanks to Mrs. Carver I know about the Richters from the day they arrive. One Thursday afternoon in early December, coming home from a meeting of the Smart Set Club, I find Mrs. Carver in her coat out on the front walk. She points, and I turn and see, parked down the street, a big yellow van into which three men in yellow overalls have just disappeared. “Holy cow,” I say at so much good luck. A mirror-fronted cabinet emerges from the van and coasts above a hedge that hides the men from view. The mirror is like a fallen sheet of sky, just hanging there, just floating along on its own.

“The O’Hearns must have moved,” I say. Immersed as I’d been in my current serial daydream (which has me as a beautiful Egyptian princess and the members of the Smart Set Club as my slaves), I’d failed to notice the van.

“Oh!” gasps Mrs. Carver. The setting sun is caught in the mirror.

“It’s like an orange,” I say. A moment later the orange bursts and then vanishes as the cabinet reaches the end of the hedge and the men beneath reappear.

I look at Mrs. Carver, who, as you’d expect, is smiling. “They’ll be nice people,” I say about the new neighbours as I try to imagine how the good luck will reveal itself.

Mrs. Carver nods deeply.

“Very
nice,” I say.

The next afternoon, I come home from school to an unprecedented event: neighbours inside the house, and one of them—Mrs. Dingwall—being somebody my mother swore would cross our threshold over her dead body. The other two are Mrs. Dingwall’s four-year-old twins, Gord and Ward, whom I find lying on our living-room floor in front of the blaring television. I cross the room and turn the volume down and they gaze up without expression. Because they are prone to such wordless stares and because they have no eyebrows, I’m not convinced they’re sane. ‘You don’t want to go deaf,” I say, but it’s poor Mrs. Carver I’m thinking of.

Now I can hear Mrs. Dingwall’s voice rolling out of the kitchen. “Oh,” she sighs when I enter and say hello. “Here’s Louise.” She gives me a few slow blinks. Her eyes are the same watered-down gold as the twins’, ginger-ale-coloured eyes, but unlike the boys’ they reach out to you, her entire round face reaches out, sloshed in gloom and craving. She has on one of her husband’s old shirts over those baggy red slacks of hers, which my mother used to call clown pants and said Mrs. Dingwall should be shot for even owning let alone wearing outside the house.

I go to the other side of the table, where Mrs. Carver sits very straight in her chair and furiously kneads the red food-colouring bud in a bag of margarine while ogling the disaster of crumbs, sugar and spilled milk surrounding Mrs. Dingwall’s coffee cup. Two lemon cookies are left in the tin, which was full at lunch. I ask if I might have one.

“Help yourself,” answers Mrs. Dingwall. “I just came over for a little visit with Mrs. Harver here.”

“Carver,” I say.

“Carver? Oh. Well, that’s me for you, deaf as a post on account of the drops I used to take for my ear infections. If it isn’t one darn thing it’s another. With this cold weather, it’s my lungs acting up.” She produces a cough. “Anyways, I was just asking what your dad might have told you about the people who bought the O’Hearns’ place.”

“Why would he know anything?”

“According to Mr. Dingwall …” She glances at Mrs. Carver. “That’s my husband of going on nineteen years. Bill. Anyways, he says that where your dad works they drew up the whatchamacallits, the mortgage papers.”