The Young in One Another's Arms Page 19

  In Gladys’ arms Ruthie tugged at her bottle, and in her softening eyes Ruth saw again her father’s laughter. Clara sat, watching the helicopter through her field glasses.

  “Obscene,” she said in a tone as factual and impartial as if she were identifying a new bird.

  “Who told you, Gladdy?” Mavis asked.

  “Boy. He said he wasn’t going to be around to play decoy forever, and I should know one or two of the basic facts of life.”

  “Do you understand them?” Mavis demanded.

  Ruthie turned her head from the bottle and began to cry.

  “Just feed her,” Ruth said.

  Mavis turned and walked out of the room.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Gladys said. “I know that.”

  “Feed the baby.”

  “You and the police, Gladdy,” Clara said, her frail head shaking itself.

  The helicopter the next day hovered a Christmas greeting, but did not land.

  “Merry Christmas to you, too!” Ruth shouted, and the next day, “Happy Boxing Day!” but then she grew accustomed to it, a routine as accountable as the hourly ferries through the pass. Coon Dog did not. He barked murderously every time.

  “It gets to seem like a daily message from Boy,” Mavis said.

  She had taken up most of Boy’s chores, dinner deliveries, weekly trips to town for supplies, while she and Gladdy divided his hours at the café with Tom. She was the first, therefore, to be aware that other islanders did not grow as quickly resigned to police surveillance as they did.

  “There are rumors,” she admitted to Ruth and Clara at their nightly ritual, “and questions. It’s not the helicopter so much as the patrol car. Funny, in the summer most people seem to want police on the island, but now they resent it. They don’t say anything to me about resenting Boy, but I think some of them do. A couple of people have canceled their dinner orders.”

  Tom couldn’t be sure the slight fall-off in trade at the café wasn’t just the January slump, and he was probably being hypersensitive about increased references to hippies.

  “‘Mind you,’ they say, ‘we like most of our own hippies, but some of them … the sort that bring the law onto the island …’ That stupid helicopter delivered two parking tickets to some kids up at Coon Bay the other day.”

  One morning Gladys came in tight-lipped and white with only three of the five children she and Mavis usually took care of.

  “What is it?” Ruth asked.

  “Oh,” Mavis said, “it’s nothing. Their mother’s just high out of her mind on something or other.”

  “She says I’m a witch,” Gladys said, “and that’s why my baby died.”

  “And Boy’s a nigger,” one of the children offered.

  “Do you know what ‘nigger’ means?” Mavis asked.

  “Bad.”

  “It means black.”

  “He’s cocoa,” another child said, fondness for the drink and the man in his voice.

  The heavy snow came late, finally grounding the helicopter. The next morning all five children were waiting for the bus, and that afternoon the two who had canceled dinners signed on again along with half a dozen new customers. Mavis traveled with a shovel to dig herself in to her customers, to make paths to their woodpiles and outhouses. Twice in the week she had to call the doctor, once for a heart attack, once for a winter cold tipped into pneumonia.

  “Oh, Clara,” she said, “I’m glad you’re not snowed in out there or in Queen’s Court either.”

  “Vanity, mortal vanity is what it is,” Clara said. “We’re a nuisance wherever we are.”

  Then Ruth, Mavis, and Clara all seemed to pause and listen, for they were so used to Boy’s picking up any biblical possibility and making a comic sermon out of it that they did not know what to do with their small assertions without him.

  It was well into February before the rain began again, the slush more traitorous than the deep snow had been. Now Mavis came home with reports of broken arms, cracked hips, car accidents, but for Ruth the first ominous wonder was a yellow crocus under the eaves of the house.

  “Spring,” she said to it, and she looked out across the thin, old snow on the lawn as if it hid not simply the sodden grass but the human wreckage of all her life. Then the noise in her head was in the sky, and Coon Dog began to bark. The pilot of the helicopter gave her a grave salute as he hovered for a moment over the orchard.

  “Ruth?” Gladys called. “The real estate agent’s here to see you.”

  Ruth turned back into the house.

  “She’d decided to sell. She wanted to give you notice, but I told her nobody would be looking for property for another couple of months anyway, and it wasn’t a good idea to leave the place untended. I said how well you were taking care of it. I told her what good tenants you were.”

  “We have a lease until June,” Ruth said.

  “I told her that, too.”

  “Why is she suddenly in a hurry?”

  “Oh, she’s a silly old woman. She’s heard rumors. She doesn’t want the responsibility …”

  “We need another year,” Ruth said, “just one more year …”

  “I tried,” the real estate agent said. “She really doesn’t want you in the house. She thinks she could break the lease, under the circumstances. I don’t think she will, but she won’t renew it.”

  “Perhaps she could sell it to the police,” Ruth said wryly over the noise of the helicopter still hanging above them. “It seems to be their favorite spot on the island.”

  “I want you to know, Mrs. Wheeler, that nobody else wants you off the island, any of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And whatever it is about Boy, he was very good to all of us.”

  “It won’t be easy to find another place … like this.”

  “No, but something will turn up.”

  Ruth shut the door on that kindly bearer of bad news and turned to Clara and Gladys.

  “This movie sometimes runs forwards and sometimes runs backwards,” she said.

  “What was it Boy called us?” Clara asked quietly. “Displaced persons? Refugees?”

  “I’m so sick of it!” Gladys said. “So sick of it all!”

  Ruth and Clara watched her slam out of the house, startling Ruthie awake. Ruth went to her and scooped her up out of her crib. She was heavy now for Clara’s arthritic knees; so Ruth held her on her own lean, trousered lap. She and Clara were the only ones constantly aware that Ruthie was a radio receiver for all the emotions in the household, and when she was with them, they willed a calm, amused shelter for her, which served to calm them, too. Coon Dog butted his large head into Ruth’s lap as well.

  “It’s all right,” she said to him.

  Mavis and Tom came home together, already having heard the news.

  “It isn’t the end of the world,” Tom said firmly. “We don’t really need a place as big as this, and it was going to be a problem eventually, fencing off the cliff, fixing the roof.”

  “There’s a farm up island,” Mavis added. “Someone said the owners might be looking for tenant caretakers—inland but good soil, much better than this.”

  They were both watching Gladys, who sat on the floor, her tangle of hair screening her face, playing with Puss.

  “Gladdy?” Mavis called to her.

  “I’m going to Toronto next week,” Gladdy said, still not looking out from behind her hair.

  “Alone?”

  “With Ruthie. Mother’s sent me a ticket. They all want to see the baby.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. It depends …”

  “Of course, your mother wants to see the baby,” Clara said.

  No one else offered a comment. Given pause, they did not know what to do without Boy there to take it. What sort of noise would he have made? He was the only one who had found it easy to rebuke Gladys, but her wanting to see her family was natural enough. She couldn’t very well time it for a period o
f calm in this household. There seemed to be so few. Still, her trip was read by everyone in the room as a desertion.

  “Tom,” Ruth said later, “I’m sure Mavis and I could manage if you went along with them, for a week or two anyway, and there’s money for the fare.”

  “I’m not invited,” Tom said.

  “Surely …”

  “Ruth, I told you last summer: Gladdy’s plans don’t affect mine.”

  “She’s not leaving us, is she?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she does. She does want to see her family, and she wants to get away.”

  “Tom?”

  “I can’t hold her. I don’t even want to any more. She’s got to figure it out for herself.”

  “And Ruthie?”

  “Haven’t you heard about kids’ lib? We don’t own them either. Oh, she’s right, Ruth, in so many ways she’s right, but I can’t do anything more about it than I do.”

  It was Mavis who took Gladys and Ruthie in to the airport on her way to pick up supplies, leaving Ruth and Clara with an oddly empty day on their hands.

  “Well, I left for good and all,” Clara said firmly, “and I didn’t get away with it. Why should Gladdy?”

  “She’s less stubborn and more willful.”

  Clara sighed. “I hardly have a chance to rest my eyes between the seasons now. I’m not really tired of seabirds, but it might be nice to be inland for a change.”

  Without the baby, without Gladys’ nursery children under foot three times a week, Ruth hadn’t enough to occupy her in the house. Most afternoons, therefore, she pulled on boots, slung her windbreaker over her shoulder, and went out into the fickle March weather, predawn snow still on the ground at the north edge of the woods, small, nearly secret violets in the spring grass, the salmonberry in bloom, the deciduous trees pulsing with sap. Wind gusted on the bluff cliffs, on the shore, sending occasional small but fierce hailstorms rattling through the trees and onto the stones, bouncing on the turf. Sometimes Ruth took shelter under huge cedars, but more often she took the weather like a tree herself. Always as a child her fantasy had been of something washed ashore or onto a high rock, but she had not drifted here, like a log storm-broken from a boom, marooned and placid. She had chosen this place with the stubborn intention of taking root, and so had Tom. If they had to move from their cliff inland, they could. Boy had been blasted away, and now Gladdy had gone in a moral high wind which might finally wrench Mavis loose, too, but she and Tom and Clara would stay.

  It is not a safe place. There is no such thing. But I’ve chosen it, my last compensation.

  Because they would almost certainly have to move by June, there was no point in the garden they had planned or in the long-term repairs they had considered. Without work to do on the place, Tom wouldn’t be spelled during the daylight hours, and he was restless when he got home at night. The old habit of nightly reading to Clara, often neglected in the past months for counting the day’s take, for tending Ruthie, for preparing for some special event or other, was rediscovered, but Tom found it hard to keep his mind even on the books he had chosen. Mavis offered to play chess, and sometimes Ruth, in her sleepless wanderings, would find them still absorbed in a game at two or three in the morning, though Tom had to be up by six-thirty to open the café, Mavis soon after to drive the school bus. There by the dying fire, in concentrated conflict, they waited.

  “Sometimes I feel like a character out of D. H. Lawrence, and I’ve never approved of him,” Mavis said.

  “Why?” Clara asked.

  “Oh, it’s all so homey and elemental and intense. He wins a game. I win a game. But really the war between the sexes is all over, for us anyway.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s been any word from Gladdy?”

  “None.”

  “We could phone, couldn’t we?”

  “Tom won’t. Oh … I won’t either.”

  The daffodils bloomed. The alders quivered into tassels. The deer came back to browse. The household worked and waited, counting small profits at the end of March. Mavis was doing the books.

  “How long is it now?” Clara asked Ruth.

  Since Claire, since Arthur, since Willard, since Hal, since Boy, or since Gladdy and Ruthie? Where do you begin?

  “Since we’ve had a letter from Hal?”

  “Nearly a month,” Ruth answered. “It’s going to take him a long time to give in to coming to the island.”

  “I could ask him.”

  If I cannot have my heart’s desire, bring any one of them home, from the mainland or the dead, any one I’ve ever waited for, as a sign, even my own husband, even your son.

  “If you like,” Ruth said.

  Clara must have been writing the letter at about the time the accident occurred, the road grader tipping out of control, Hal falling. Look out! Look out, Hall Progress will finally fall on you, too. He’d been flown in to Vancouver before they telephoned Ruth. A badly fractured hip and leg, the necessity of at least two operations before Hal could walk again. But a heart attack had caused the accident. The operations now might kill him.

  Ruth sat with Clara for half an hour before she caught the evening ferry.

  “Are you going to make the decision or is he?” Clara asked.

  “He is if he can.”

  “If he can’t?”

  How often Ruth had wished through the years that she could take the lives of those she cared about into her own hands, make the safe and sane decisions for them that would keep them alive. Now, faced with that possibility, helplessness in contrast was a blessing.

  Mavis brought in coffee.

  “If Hal doesn’t want to risk it, Ruth, if he’d rather … we can take care of him here. He doesn’t like any of us much, but we haven’t tried very hard either. You say I’m a good nurse.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Ruth said. “Thank you.”

  Ruth stood on the aft deck of the ferry watching the island grow smaller and smaller. She had not left it since Ruthie was born.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  If Hal had ever been hurt or sick before, Ruth did not know it. Though she had tried to think about the decision that confronted him, the conversations she had held in her head were with the energetic barrel-chested bantam of a husband she had always contended with, toothpick cocked at her, dimple signaling. As she was led down the long orthopedic ward by a nurse, she had to control irrational amusement rather than dread, for all the men here looked done up for a cartoon or a farce, great leg casts suspended in the air, bandaged heads, and they assisted her mood, calling out cheerful crudities as if this were a beer parlor instead of a hospital ward. So much at home most of them must have been here a long time, but they were nothing but movie extras waiting for the comic lead to be brought in.

  At the end of the ward was a curtained-off space, and there in an adult-sized crib lay a small old man, cheeks sunken in, breathing heavily. Ruth turned back to tell the nurse, but in the second before she spoke the mistake, the shape of his head recalled her eyes to him.

  “We’re keeping him as comfortable as we can,” the nurse said.

  “Did he lose his teeth as well?” Ruth asked.

  “Oh, no, we just take the bridge out.”

  “Bridge?” Ruth looked away from the nurse in sudden, guilty embarrassment. She did not even know Hal had a bridge.

  I’ve got to pretend. I’ve got to behave as if this hurt man is my husband. I can’t let her know I’m not sure.

  “I’ll bring you a chair.”

  Alone, Ruth finally really looked at the man in the crib, and still she could not believe it was Hal lying there, a much older brother perhaps, even his long-forgotten father, but Hal? She had never seen him sick, not even with a hangover. If it hadn’t been for the handsome curve of his skull, she would have rushed out of that curtained cubicle and said, “It’s a mistake. It’s the wrong man.” But she was now inside the farce, had a part in it, a humiliation to suffer, just for someone’s amusement. The nurse handed h
er in a chair. She sat down on it and stared, but she could not make Hal’s face of the face before her, and what if he woke and saw her there, a perfectly strange woman with a face of stone? She would terrify him.

  He groaned and turned his head slightly.

  “Hal?” she said softly, doubtfully.

  He opened his eyes, and, though they were bloodshot with bewildered pain or drugs, she knew at once that they were Hal’s eyes in this otherwise strange face.

  “Ruth,” he said, and immediately closed his eyes again.

  Then the unrecognizable lips began to tremble and tears leaked out from under the lids of his eyes. Crying? Hal crying? She was afraid to touch him, but she had to. She reached out her hand and cupped his head, forcing herself to look, too, to learn this face until she could recognize it. It was as if the tears had changed the landscape of his flesh, made deep gullies in his cheeks, washed out the dimple. She began to brush them away gently with the palm of her hand and felt the crying go deeper into his chest.

  “It’s all right now,” she said. “It’s all right, Hal.”

  Gradually the tears stopped, then the catching breath in the chest.

  “It hurts,” he said softly, the voice of a bewildered child.

  “The nurse can probably give you something soon.”

  He opened his eyes again, and the familiarity of them forced Ruth to stop tears of her own for a man she had never known except in his pride and his anger. She had not even known him in his grief. Now reading the pain and fear, for his sake she would have turned away if she could, but she had to share this with him. He couldn’t do this alone.

  “Are they …?” he began. “Have they decided?”

  “We have to decide.”

  “What the hell …” he protested weakly, turning his face away.

  “You don’t have to have the operations. They can …”

  “I wouldn’t be able to walk; that’s what they said.”

  “Well, Clara can’t either …”

  “She’s an old woman. What good would I be?”