The Young in One Another's Arms Page 14

  “If it were bigger …” Gladys said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Boy grinned. “Buy it and tear it down.”

  Once they had explored the place, asked all the questions they could think of from the details of financing to the frequency of power failures, they had spent only an hour.

  “What are we going to do for the whole day?” Boy asked.

  “See the island,” Tom said.

  Ruth wasn’t sure why this tiny island reminded her of the redwood landscape of her childhood. In miniature it seemed done to scale, Douglas firs tall enough to dwarf the hills, here called mountains. The little valley that crossed the island was about the size of the valley she had grown up in, though it had been more dramatically defined by the river as well as the hills. Here there was the sea at the end of every road whether they arrived at the shore or on a hilltop, and on that gentle spring day it did not seem to imprison so much as embrace this island and all the others they could see, a colony of lands in friendly sight of each other, stretching down into American waters.

  “What kind of a tree is that?” Gladys asked.

  “A madrone,” Ruth answered, remembering the walking sticks her father had cut to carve designs into the hard, green wood through its peeling red bark.

  “An arbutus to Canadians,” Mavis corrected. “How did I fall among such a crew of outlanders?”

  “I don’t think I was ever properly introduced to a tree before in my life,” Boy said. “How do you do, arbutus?”

  When they came upon the graveyard, Boy’s fear of the place made him noisier and more boisterous than ever.

  “Look at dat!” he crowed. “The local Chinese grocer!”

  “This grave says ‘Japanese,’” Gladys said, studying the one next.

  “Probably the only piece of land we didn’t expropriate during the war,” Mavis observed.

  “Wonder how many Indians and niggers is buried here,” Boy said, “under white men’s names. Least these little yellow jackets keep their sting.”

  Tom had gone further and found a path through the fringe of trees to the rocks that overlooked the west entrance to Active Pass, the chief shipping lane through the islands. He was watching one of the large Vancouver Island ferries and absently rubbing his damaged shoulder when Ruth came to join him.

  “I like it here,” he said quietly. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said, “I feel at home.”

  Three eagles played in the high air above them.

  “They live here,” Tom said, “up on Mount Galiano. Old lady would like that, wouldn’t she?”

  And the graveyard, or perhaps I’m the only one it matters to, a place finally to bury my dead.

  “I think that’s Indian land across the way there on Mayne Island, a deserted reservation,” Tom said.

  Boy came skidding down to join them. “Gladdy said I ain’t got no business being so loud in a graveyard, but we could be the last human noise there is on this sweet earth before aerosol cans and the jet stream take away the veil from the sun and radiate us into angels. Then, when the Martians come, there won’t even be no common-cold germs to kill them. Spose they’ll know which of us killed each other and which of us died of the sun?”

  “The small-change philosopher,” Tom said, putting a large, gentle hand on Boy’s head.

  “Who with Ruth’s nickels and dimes now has to teach the sociological fry cook how to run the last café on earth. Man, we’re important people.”

  “But where are we going to live?” Gladys asked as she and Mavis joined them.

  “Took God seven days to make the world, Gladdy. Give us at least two to make our own,” Boy said. “We’ve got some adding and subtracting ahead of us ’fore we know where we are.”

  It was several weeks before they were ready to pose that question seriously. Tom had dutifully looked into a number of other possibilities, sometimes alone, sometimes joined by the others, who, after the day on the island, were as ready to find fault with anything else as he was, who overlooked with him the obvious problems of the café. The formal decision to buy the café was made in Queen’s Court with Clara, who had put maps of the Gulf Islands and Galiano up on her wall so that she could explore the geography of a real place to end her life, which she did not intend to do now until after she’d seen another child born.

  That night, as Ruth prowled the farmhouse with her familiar insomnia, she came upon Tom reading in the living room. She had been aware of this new habit of his on several other nights and had avoided an encounter, but now that the decision was made, perhaps he needed to talk about it.

  “Are you worried about it?” she asked, standing behind the chair opposite him.

  He shut his book and put it aside, which Ruth took as an invitation to sit down.

  “I guess so,” Tom said. “I’ve talked a lot of people into a lot of things.”

  “We’re not really playing follow-the-leader.”

  “That would be easier,” Tom said. “Ruth, if Gladdy doesn’t like it, if she decides after a while it’s not her sort of thing, I want you to know that wouldn’t change it for me.”

  “That’s nothing to promise, Tom.”

  “No, just something to know.”

  “But, what about the baby?”

  “I don’t know. She might leave it with me.”

  “Have you two had a fight?”

  “Not exactly. But Gladdy just doesn’t like conventions, and, though she’s great on planning the future of the whole bloody world, she thinks her own ought to take care of itself. Or at least I shouldn’t take care of it. If Mavis does get a job, I’m not sure Gladdy wouldn’t go with her.”

  “With Mavis?”

  “They sort of … got it together, you know, while I was in the hospital.”

  “Mavis?”

  “They’ve always mattered a lot to each other, and I guess women know how to need each other in certain ways. Mavis is a special person for me, too. I don’t know where Boy and I get the idea that friendship and sex don’t mix, gay or straight. The only difference between Boy and me is that I want some kind of commitment. It’s not that I want to be possessive, really. If Mavis is part of it for Gladdy, I can cope with that, but I don’t think Mavis wants to be just part of our lives, or maybe she’s afraid of it. I can’t talk to her now. If she does come along, I’m going to look like a man with a harem when really Mavis and I are part of Gladdy’s. All right, but what if we aren’t enough, even so?”

  “Are they together now?”

  “That’s right,” Tom said. “Sort of every third night.” He laughed.

  “Are you sure about the island?”

  “It’s a bad cartoon, isn’t it? But I can’t help it, Ruth, I want to try.”

  The house they found might have been built for them. It was forty years old, a farmhouse originally, but one of the owners had been an artist with a large family, and the outbuildings had been attached to the house and turned into additional living quarters and a studio. It stood on rock overlooking Active Pass, surrounded by ten acres of arbutus and fruit trees. Half up for sale, the owner would prefer a lease for minimal rent in exchange for good caretaking and repair.

  “We could grow our own vegetables,” Tom said.

  “And chickens,” Mavis said.

  “Do you know anything about chickens?” Boy demanded.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Well, I do,” he said glumly, “and it don’t take no Ph.D. in English to deal with the stupidest creatures on God’s earth, next to the goat, which can’t teach its kid the difference between its tit and its ankle.”

  “I thought you were a city boy.”

  “I am, but I once spent a month on a detention farm, a ghetto holiday, it’s called.”

  “Can we really afford it?” Gladys asked, her face amazed with pleasure. “A place like this?”

  “Put your accounting hat on, Boy,” Ruth said, “right now.”

  If they could buy the café outright without a mortgage, Ruth�
��s disability pension and Clara’s allowance from Hal would pay the rent and the utilities with enough left over for modest emergencies.

  “The café’s got to feed us,” Boy said.

  “It will,” Tom promised. “At least that.”

  “Come with us, Mavis,” Gladys said. “You just have to now.”

  Mavis let Gladdy hold her look for a moment and then she turned to Tom.

  “Please,” Tom said.

  “Time to stop playing hard to get, Mavis,” Boy said.

  “What would I do?”

  “Everything,” Gladys said, “just like the rest of us.”

  Ruth watched Gladys, whose need for freedom would always have to be a world of enough alternatives not to seem as confining as it was. She was their spoiled child, their gaiety, their center of desire, and Mavis’ only hesitation now was the approval of the others.

  “Clara needs you, too,” Ruth said.

  “It’s crazy,” Mavis said, “but I do want to.”

  The owners of the café were only too glad to accept a cash offer, and, though Ruth had no illusions about it as a business, if it provided occupation for them and fed them, that was all she asked of it. Arranging the lease for the house took longer. The absent owner, a widow who could not live there alone but could not quite bring herself to sell the place, wanted to be sure she was not renting to hippies.

  “If I could say you were a family …” the real estate agent suggested dubiously.

  “We are,” Tom said, “four generations of us soon.”

  “And I’m a faithful old family slave who refused emancipation,” Boy explained.

  “You’ll sign the lease yourself?” the real estate agent asked Ruth.

  “That’s right.”

  “It makes me so fucking mad!” Gladys said, fortunately after they had left the office, “that you have to be fifty before anyone will trust you.”

  “But I think we’re going to get it,” Tom said. “I think we really are.”

  “Imagine what a place like that would cost in the city,” Mavis mused. “I think we ought to celebrate the recession.”

  In their pleasure, Gladys forgot her irritation and joined in the mock parade Boy was leading back to the car, Coon Dog barking frantically to be let out for the game.

  When they got back to the farmhouse on the mainland, Hal was waiting for them, sitting on the front steps playing with the kitten.

  “See you still don’t have the sense to lock your doors,” he observed to Tom, who was the first out of the car.

  “How are you, Hal?” Tom asked coolly, keeping a firm hand on Coon Dog’s collar so that he wouldn’t jump.

  “Oh, I keep from getting shot at,” Hal said, looking past Tom to Boy.

  “Boy,” Tom said, “this is Hal Wheeler, Ruth’s husband.”

  “Massa’s come home,” Boy said with a deep bow.

  “I thought we might go along over and see Mother,” Hal said to Ruth.

  “Fine.”

  They had not backed out of the drive before Hal began, “Now what the hell is all this anyway?”

  “Have you seen Clara?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen her. First she chewed me out for not coming back for the shoot-out at the house. I told her I didn’t need to find out what was going on. As usual, I could read all I wanted to in the newspapers or watch it on TV. What else can you expect of a houseful of half-wits and deserters and tarts? But you won’t listen to me, never would, and you don’t care a damn what’s happening to me with my wife’s face smeared all over the papers, bawling at the police for clearing out a slum. ‘That your old lady, Hal? Jeesus!’”

  “There wasn’t any reason for you to come back.”

  “I was way the hell and gone in the North,” Hal said more quietly. “I didn’t see the damn paper until a week after. It shook me up. I can tell you that. If you’ve got a woman who grieves like a stone, what are you going to do about that, eh?”

  “Nothing,” Ruth said.

  “Nothing,” Hal repeated, glancing over at her. “You look all right.”

  “I am all right.”

  “Then she tells me she’s getting out of Queen’s Court and going to live on some island with you and that crew of, of …”

  “Hippies?” Ruth supplied wryly.

  “Hippies and niggers!”

  Ruth sighed.

  “And she says I’m supposed to pay for it!”

  “I would have asked you if I’d needed to,” Ruth admitted. “In fact, all I need is the money you pay for Clara at Queen’s Court.”

  “So all of you can live on it?”

  “In a way,” Ruth said, “but let me really tell you about it.”

  He did listen then, grudgingly, with an occasional explosive remark.

  “When I said ‘the country,’ I didn’t mean an island. You can’t even build a road to an island, not over twenty miles of water!”

  “It’s a nice boat trip.”

  “In good weather. What if Mother’s sick? What if she needs to get to the hospital?”

  “There’s an ambulance boat, there’s a seaplane, and it doesn’t worry Clara. She doesn’t want to be kept alive.”

  “That’s obvious!”

  “Hal, I need to get away from this city, and I need Clara with me. We both need young people around. If the café does any kind of business, after a year or so we wouldn’t need your money …”

  “It’s not the money. But I work hard for it, Ruth, and why I should turn it over for a bunch of no-good, dope-smoking …”

  “They’re as much my children as Claire was.”

  “That little nigger, too?” Hal asked bitterly.

  “Boy, too.”

  Ruth had not spoken so openly to Hal in years. She had fought free and then stopped fighting and simply endured his occasional invasions. Now, puzzled with herself, she was asking him not only for his help but for his understanding.

  “They won’t stay, you know. They’ll get bored, and they’ll take off. That sort always does. I see plenty of them on the road gangs, one paycheck and that’s it. And what will you do then, stuck with a café even you admit won’t return decent money on your investment?”

  “There’s always help,” Ruth said.

  “How can you go on thinking that? How many times do you have to get broken to learn?” he shouted in frustration and concern.

  “’Til I’m dead,” Ruth answered.

  They were parked by this time in front of Queen’s Court.

  “I guess I’ll have to be dead before I learn there’s no point in arguing with the both of you. If you’ve got to be women, I wish you’d change your minds just once in the right direction.”

  “I think I have,” Ruth said, smiling.

  She found that even Hal’s presence didn’t dampen her excitement as she hurried to Clara to tell her about the house, and Clara listened with such delight that even Hal could continue to protest only in silence.

  “Do you think I might get, well not binoculars, because they’re too heavy to hold, but opera glasses maybe … for watching the birds?”

  “What you need is a wheelchair built like a tractor for those country roads,” Hal said.

  “I do need a wheelchair,” Clara admitted. “It’s come to that.”

  “We might be moving in ten days, if the lease goes through,” Ruth said.

  “I’ll be ready anytime,” Clara said. “Doesn’t it sound marvelous, Hal?”

  “You know what it sounds like to me,” Hal said.

  Leaving Clara, Hal grumbled all the way to the car. Then he stood like a cartoon of aggressive belligerence and confronted Ruth.

  “I’m not taking you back to that broken-down country slum tonight. We’re going to a decent hotel.”

  “I don’t have anything with me,” Ruth protested.

  “I’ll buy you a dress, and then we’ll go somewhere for dinner and behave like human beings for a change.”

  The toothpick tilted up. The dimple deepened.
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  ’Til death do us part, Hal, maybe the only thing you can say about me is “One thing about my old lady; she never turns down a good screw,” and maybe the only thing I can say about you is, “In bed he doesn’t screw. It’s the one place he knows how to make love.”

  When Hal dropped her off at the farmhouse the next morning, Ruth felt comically guilty, as if Gladys might confront her with the immorality it was to keep on going to bed with a man she couldn’t talk to, husband or not, but Gladys had gone to work. Only Mavis was at home, far too lost in her own moral brooding to require any explanations from Ruth.

  “Where’s Boy?” Ruth asked.

  “He’s gone off on some sort of secret mission of his own,” Mavis said. “If we don’t get him out of this city soon, he’s going to be dumped across the border or shot in the head, probably by some off-duty policeman at the steam baths.”

  “He could be with Clara watching TV.”

  “Why doesn’t someone offer me a job and fish me out of this craziness?” Mavis demanded.

  “Would you take it?” Ruth asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mavis admitted, “but I’d like the choice.”

  The following morning in the mail, Mavis was offered a job teaching remedial English in the Maritimes. After a night with Gladys, Mavis wrote to refuse the job.

  “She said, if I took it, she’d go with me,” Mavis said to Ruth.

  “Tom thought as much.”

  “Did he? I don’t know, Ruth. I don’t know how this can work either. It’s like all those desert-island jokes, isn’t it?”

  “A bad cartoon, Tom called it.”

  “Did he?”

  “You’ll have to learn to talk with Tom again,” Ruth said.

  “I used to think he was unrealistic. Is he a saint or just a … a weak fish?”

  “You know his answer to that.”

  “The weak fish that saved the world! But if I don’t love him, if I don’t love Gladdy, I don’t see how I’ll ever be able … This isn’t the way I thought it would be. Gladdy was beside herself, and it seemed the only human thing to do. That’s not true either, is it? I’ve always wanted her. I just didn’t think she’d ever want me, not with Stew and then Arthur … and then Tom, and I thought what a mess it would be. I was right about that anyway.” Mavis paused and looked at Ruth. “Boy says my only problem is that I haven’t had an education for catastrophe, but my instincts are okay.”