The Young in One Another's Arms Page 17

  “Yes.”

  “The doctor says you’ve got to get some rest. You go with him, Boy, and come back in an hour or so for me.”

  “The other one …” Tom said. “The other one’s all right.”

  Boy, without a word, took Tom’s arm and directed him down the hall.

  Finally Ruth could turn her attention to Gladys and the child.

  “Oh, Ruth, Ruth!” Gladys said, reaching up her arms.

  Ruth, in that fierce, needful embrace, only needed one arm. Gladys still held her, locked, to ask about Mavis, to be sure nothing dreadful had happened to her.

  “I said, ‘Tom, don’t lie to me, just don’t lie to me; that’s the only thing I can’t stand.’”

  “She’s a bit shaken up, but she’s fine. She thought she ought to come home to us, better than phoning, and Tom was all right and here with you …”

  “You wouldn’t lie to me …” Gladys said, holding Ruth off now, looking hard into her face.

  “Not about anything important, Gladdy, you know that.”

  “It’s hard,” Gladdy then said softly, “crying for so much. Tom says we have a baby. We have to be glad for her. He’s such a good person. A kid needs at least one good parent.”

  “Have you seen her again?”

  “Yes, and she’s just fine. Oh, but it scares me. Think how close they were. Think how separate she is now …”

  “Like all of us,” Ruth said firmly. “Who does she look like?”

  “You,” Gladys said at once.

  A pain tore in Ruth’s chest. “She can’t look like me.”

  “Well, I know, but she does. She has marvelous, fierce eyes.”

  “All babies do.”

  “Tom said I could name her. I want to call her Ruth.”

  She must have a name of her own, a face of her own. Clara? Clara, you refused, and it was no protection for Claire. Nothing is.

  “May I?”

  “Boy says Ruth’s a sad name.”

  “It’s a loving name,” Gladys said. “Oh, fuck, Ruth, don’t you cry!”

  Before Ruth left the hospital, she was allowed to see the baby. She did not see then the fierce eyes which had given the baby her name. She was asleep, her small, ancient face remote, storing up reserves after the violent shock of birth, the first invasion of air from which had to follow a thousand tests of the tiny intricate mechanism expelled, deprived, required, little Ruth, born so literally in the shadow of death.

  Boy was with Gladys when Ruth got back.

  “Well, what do you think of her?” Gladys asked.

  “I think she’s going to look like Tom.”

  “But have more sense because she’s a woman,” Boy said.

  “Tom really is all right, isn’t he?” she asked them. “That’s a bad cut over his eye.”

  “He’s all right,” Boy assured her. “He’s already giving me hell for shutting up Jonah’s, giving the café a bad reputation, etc., etc. I told him he didn’t have another mouth to feed for at least a couple of months and to take it easy. I think he read somewhere about a tribe where the men have all the labor pains and do all the moaning and groaning while the women just get on with it. One of these days I’m going to take away his library card and see if we can get his head straight.”

  Ruth telephoned Clara to say and to hear over again for each one, yes, they’re all right, yes, we’re all right, yes, everyone is all right.

  “I think we’ll be home on the night ferry. Don’t let Mavis do anything silly before we get there.”

  “She’s got to drive the school bus in the morning,” Clara said.

  “So she does.”

  “She’s all right.”

  It was a long trip back by the island ferry, which put in at Pender and Mayne before it finally arrived at Galiano at just past six, but it gave Ruth and Boy time to put together their separate segments of the afternoon.

  “I’ve got a note for Mavis from Tom,” Boy said. “I told him she was thinking of clearing out.”

  “Did you tell him to write it?”

  “Yeh, you know, he wasn’t in a very practical frame of mind, thought maybe he ought to go to jail or a shrink or both, even has this theory about acting out the war he wouldn’t fight, having his own Vietnam right here in Canada, getting himself shot at, ravaging native women, all that negative manhood finally strangling his own baby boy. He told me maybe the only solution to it all is to lock up or shoot every white man there is. I told him eating that sort of shit was a luxury he couldn’t indulge in since he already had one woman mad as hell at him and another that was going to be if he didn’t get his head straight and get it straight fast. I said to him, ‘Man, you just made yourself an ugly mistake, a mess. You don’t eat it; you clean it up, and that don’t mean giving Mavis or me or anybody a treatise on the failure of Western man; it means telling her you’re sorry and making her believe it.’”

  The need to sleep came to Ruth suddenly, and she did not resist it, floated on the surface of it, so that when the dreams came of wounds, of falling, of loss, she could run them backwards until everyone she had loved or needed was restored to her, father, husband, daughter, until she held two new children as she had held her own in two strong, protective arms.

  Boy woke her when it was time to get off the ferry at Sturdies Bay. As they walked up the dock to the bus, people greeted them with questions about the closed café, about Gladys. Ruth and Boy paused to explain because, though they had lived on the island only a few months, it had become their community with a right to know the details. Ruth was not shy to speak about the death of the boy child; she found it more difficult to tell the living child’s name. Boy said, “Ruth,” with none of the reluctance he had once had at the name. Between them, they managed.

  When they arrived home, Mavis had dinner ready and was sitting drinking a glass of sherry with Clara. The scratches across Mavis’ face faded in comparison with Tom’s stitched eyebrow. Her self-consciousness about them was slightly embarrassed, her reserve restored. Boy did not immediately give the note he carried for Tom. Ruth did not know when Mavis received it. The attention through dinner was on Gladys and the baby, and after dinner each retreated into that part of the experience which was his or her own.

  Ruth walked out into the gentle evening and took up Tom’s favorite position at the edge of the cliff where she could watch the last of the fishing boats working their way home against the tidal currents in the pass—out there among the superior killer whales which Tom had caught in the net of his imagination and offered to Boy or Gladys or anyone who would listen.

  Gladdy had called him “good” this afternoon, a word Ruth had also used, not always with irony, to separate herself from her husband, and she heard again old Mrs. Weedman biting those words into her tear-soaked handkerchief, “You’re such a good man,” at her father’s embarrassed back. For her mother, goodness was no excuse. It could kill, like anything else. A margin of safety was all her mother ever aspired to, to cajole, avoid, outwit, to admit nothing. She would not have been surprised at any of the damage done in the name or strain of virtue. “It doesn’t matter why you do it, if you do it …” “Oh, for pity’s sake!” she’d cry, always in irritation, so that even now pity was for Ruth the final, bullying shrew, the humiliation.

  I can pity the strong, like Tom (the poor cowboy all covered with gore). I can pity the dead child. Oh, I can pity the living earth. But for life’s sake, I can’t pity Mavis or the living child. I can’t.

  “It’s about time to put Clara to bed,” Mavis said, standing behind Ruth.

  “Yes,” Ruth said, turning back to the house.

  “Ruth, I want to apologize for all that melodrama this morning.”

  “For pity’s sake,” Ruth burst out. “We’re all all right.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Clara watched through the field glasses an eagle attack a gull. “The eagle is a hideous, magnificent bird. I wish Puss weren’t white; she’s so easy to see. Mind you, it makes
her bad at catching birds as well. Mating and killing don’t look all that different up in the high air, but the birds aren’t confused about it. Why are we?”

  “Stop reading that bad bible of yours and see Tom and Mavis out there cleaning up the yard,” Ruth said.

  “They’re making friends again, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think it occurred to her to feel sorry she’d hit him until she saw him this morning.”

  “It’s an ugly cut. What did she hit him with, do you suppose?”

  “Her beloved brandy bottle. She said at least she’d proved a point: you can’t be raped by a good friend as long as you’re in the company of a brandy bottle. She could have killed him.”

  “I think she intended to.”

  “Boy’s all right down at the café by himself, is he?”

  “Until dinnertime. Tom will go down then.”

  Tom and Mavis were walking back toward the house now, holding hands, a habit of affection Boy had taught them all, which made them look not so much like lovers as like the presently reconciled children they were.

  Later Mavis explained, “We’re going to tell her we had an insane row and leave it at that.”

  “Accurate,” Ruth said.

  “Accurate enough.”

  “And you and Tom?”

  “Well, we have enough sense to be afraid of each other now. Would you call that ‘a new respect’? And we’ve decided to talk to each other, or try to. He probably feels more cosmically guilty than he should, more at home there than at home, and he thinks I’m more cosmically angry than I should be. I don’t really understand why I could have killed him without a qualm and still I’m sorry to see him hurt. I guess, if, by accident, you don’t kill something, your instinct is to take care of it.”

  “I sometimes wonder,” Clara said, subject of Mavis’ gentle hands at her nightly sponge bath, “if you’d all do better without such a persistent audience.”

  “I doubt that any of us would have survived the test,” Mavis said, “but I think lately we’ve been playing to the nonexistent gallery and should quit. Maybe with little Ruth around, we’ll all begin to grow up. What do you think?”

  “I think little Ruth will,” Ruth said.

  “Ruthie,” Clara decided. “That’s easier.”

  “Here we are,” Boy’s voice began, “the soldier of fortune and his importunate batman, home from a very romantic dinner for two by candlelight.”

  “Candlelight?”

  “The power went out again,” Tom said. “I’m glad it didn’t here. It’s too bad generators are so expensive. Even so, I think we could pay for it pretty quickly by feeding everyone in the neighborhood every time the power failed.”

  “Public service at a profit,” Boy said.

  They went out into the kitchen for beer.

  “I will be glad when that baby comes home,” Clara said.

  An unusual number of people, perhaps thirty, met the water taxi on Friday, the booze boat it was called that day because on Fridays people could order liquor and the boatman would pick it up at the SaltSpring liquor store. Some of them actually did collect bottles, but most were candidly waiting to welcome the newest island resident, little Ruth Petross, who came off the boat in her father’s arms, followed by her newly lithe and slender mother. There were bunches of flowers from the finest of the island gardens; there were hand-knitted baby blankets, sweaters, booties. One of Jonah’s most regular customers, a single man who worked on the road crew, had made a mobile of pine cones and driftwood, owls and pussycats putting out to sea.

  A happy, slightly embarrassed Gladys was being so loaded down with gifts that Boy and Mavis and Ruth had to help receive them. The welcome had taken them all by surprise, not because the island had ever seemed unfriendly but because they had been working too hard and had been too much absorbed in their own company to make any real friends in the few months they had been here, or so Ruth would have thought; yet here they stood among a large number of friends, most of whom had obviously planned this reception some weeks ago. On an island whose main population was pensioners, the birth of a child was obviously a rare and special occasion, and this child, a survivor, was at once inside a circle of human protection. She tolerated the attention, frowning over the high wall of her father’s shoulder with intent disapproval. A baby has to be taught to smile. Finally the crowd moved in a slow procession up the dock. Boy reached the bus first, deposited his share of the presents, and ran back to Jonah’s. The others got into the bus to take the baby home to Clara, into whose arms she settled at once.

  “Now doesn’t she look like Ruth?” Gladys said, smiling down at her fierce-eyed baby.

  “She is Ruth,” Clara said, “Ruthie.”

  “A real islander,” Mavis said, bringing in a second load of presents.

  “I’ve got to go to work,” Tom said. “I’m sure that whole crowd went back to the café, and Boy’s cooking is enough to lose us all Ruthie’s new friends.”

  When he had gone, Gladys turned to Mavis and held her hard and long.

  “You’re never to leave me,” she said then, “no matter what.”

  The happy, impossible requirements of love had returned to the house. Mavis was in no mood to protest. Ruth and Clara smiled on them. Only the baby went on fiercely frowning at her mother, a hard, mistrustful scrutiny, an absolute judge.

  “Sometimes you terrify me,” Gladys said to her, taking her from Clara’s arms. “You’re so little, and you’re so yourself, and you’re so wet. Come help me change her, Mavis. Come see how lovely she is under all these clothes.”

  “She’s going to have a top-heavy family, that little one,” Clara said, “two mothers, two fathers, a doting granny, and great-granny.”

  “Today it felt as if she belonged to the whole island.”

  “It’s a good place,” Clara said, “for all of us.”

  Tom and Gladys had obviously come to some understanding together that Ruthie was not simply theirs but a member of the community. Either of them relinquished her easily to be changed, bathed, walked when she was colicky. The only possessive one in the household was Coon Dog. They had worried that he might be jealous, and sometimes he was, but of other people, not of the baby. He guarded her constantly, growled if a stranger wanted to admire her when they were out for a walk.

  “That poor, mixed-up dog,” Boy said. “He thinks he’s her mother. I’m her mother, Coon Dog, can’t you get that straight?”

  “Is that why you never stay off the island any more?” Gladys asked him.

  “Well, I’m into a new phase, called the politics of survival. Mavis always was warning me I’d meet up with an off-duty policeman in them steam baths, and I did meet a real dicky-dick one night who wanted to mix business with pleasure. ‘I ain’t got no business, man,’ I said. He was kind enough to reply, ‘Then you ain’t got no business here.’ And I got to thinking just maybe he had a point. I like this little island, and I like this little baby, and you all, too. Why not stay alive and well? Lust ain’t a big thing after all.”

  “Isn’t it?” Gladdy asked.

  “Look at it this way, if we can live here and not give a good goddamn about all those historic events goin’ on down there in our motherfucking country, I can get along without the steam baths, too. I don’t need it, any of it.”

  “Hasn’t Boy told you?” Tom asked in a tone of mock innocence. “He’s a volunteer fireman now.”

  “This here stupid white boy thinks I’m sublimating like mad with that great big fire hose, while he goes to them meetings just to be a heeero.”

  “We don’t give a good goddamn any more, do we?” Gladys said over the teasing of the two men.

  “Well, the war’s over,” Boy said. “Who wants to go home?”

  Gladys looked over at Tom, suddenly seriously studying his own hands. “You want to go home sometimes, don’t you?”

  “No,” Tom said. “This is home now, and there’s plenty to do here.” />
  “For you,” Gladys said. “But what about me? What about Mavis?”

  Tom looked over at Mavis.

  “I’ve started an after-school prison camp for my four worst passengers,” Mavis said. “If I can save the world from them, I guess that’s enough to do … for now.”

  “Oh, Mavis, you never had any politics to give up!” Gladys said impatiently.

  “Neither did you,” Mavis replied.

  “Don’t you realize, Gladdy, we’re not dropouts, we’re refugees?” Boy asked. “Tom and I say we don’t want to go home, and we don’t, but there’s no real amnesty down there for either one of us, and there’s no way to live like a human being even if there were. He’d have to play white man and I’d have to play nigger. Even over there on the mainland, now, what’s there for you to do? What’s there for Mavis? You were the best teacher that school had, and what was that to them? Mavis has this fine, impressive Ph.D. Who wants it or her? You do have some choices, sure. You could go on welfare like a good radical. You could picket the school board, even get your head busted for TV or get shot at. But we’ve all tried that. What good is it?”

  “I know,” Gladdy said, “but sometimes I look at Ruthie and think, what happens if Galiano isn’t big enough for her and meanwhile we’ve let the rest of the world go to hell?”

  “It’s not going to be a hard winter just out there in the world,” Ruth said from the edge of the conversation. “It’s going to be a hard winter here on the island.”

  “Way prices are going up and jobs disappearing,” Boy said.

  “But aren’t we just sitting here saying, ‘We’re all right, Jack’?” Gladys asked.

  “We’re trying to be all right,” Tom said.

  “And we may be running a soup kitchen before this winter is over,” Boy said, “for more fun than profit.”

  “Well, I’d like that,” Gladys said.

  “Pray for a severe depression,” Mavis said. “It’s the only thing that will make Gladdy happy.”

  “Silly as that sounds,” Clara said, “a lot of people were happier with less.”

  “Now, don’t get me wrong,” Boy said. “I don’t like being poor, and I never have and I never will. Money’s no misery in my pocket. Niggers never did get out of the depression, and you’ve got to admit, Miss Clara, about the only real fun of it was getting out of it.”