The Young in One Another's Arms Page 5

  Ruth cleared a space on Gladys’ unmade bed and sat down.

  “Why do you want me to talk about it?” Gladys demanded. “You’re not a fucking shrink! You’re only my landlady.”

  Ruth shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  “Well, what do you want me to say? That I’ve screwed things up for everybody? I’ve already had that lecture, before the fact. I’m a prick collector, as Mavis says, with a cunt for a brain.”

  “That doesn’t really sound like Mavis … or Dickens,” Ruth said, smiling.

  “No, I’ve got the only foul mouth in the house.”

  It was, actually, a very sweet mouth, soft with sympathy and humor and pleasure most of the time, trembling now to refuse tears.

  “What’s happened isn’t your fault, Gladdy.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “But it’s so obvious what happened. How else could the police have found him if Stew hadn’t reported him?”

  “Do you know that?”

  “I might as well know it,” Gladys said. “Stew’s really freaked, Ruth. He’s in terrible shape.”

  The tears did begin then, but Gladys put a fist against her mouth and closed her eyes to stop them.

  “Why can you eat or drink or work or argue or just about anything else with people, but not … screw? Why is it such a big deal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So, since there’s no solution, it isn’t a problem, right?”

  “That’s what I like to think,” Ruth admitted.

  She went to Gladys then, offering the holding arm she had. Gladys turned into the gesture, pressed her face against Ruth’s spare body, and wept. Ruth stroked her hair, a shining, lively tangle, and stared down with intent eyes to keep this particular girl before her who still needed comfort, never mind how little real good it could do.

  In the morning the young were variously contrite and ready to forgive each other if not themselves. Tom had information about what they might do to help the protest committee. He, Mavis, and Gladys would go to a meeting together that night.

  “Is it safe for you, Tom?” Gladys asked, in concern she would have been scornful of a day before.

  “Safe enough,” Tom said. “Something’s got to be done.”

  “What about Stew?” Joanie asked.

  “I phoned this morning,” Gladys said. “He’s under such heavy sedatives he won’t know whether he has visitors or not for the next day or two.”

  “Just the same,” Joanie persisted. “Shouldn’t somebody …?”

  “Shall you and I go?” Ruth suggested. “We could just look in.”

  Ruth was not accustomed to Joanie’s company anywhere but in the house. As they walked along the street toward the bus stop, Ruth was aware of a furtive attention from knots of teen-aged boys. She wondered if a street so friendly to her could, at the same time, be this kind of uncomfortable, undeclared contest for Joanie or Gladys. Perhaps the street itself was beginning to change. Ruth liked neither possibility. Purposefully she spoke to people as she passed them, her eyes insisting on being met.

  “Do you know everyone in the neighborhood?” Joanie asked.

  “I like them to think I do.”

  “I guess I’m not very friendly.”

  “I guess I wasn’t at your age either.”

  But walking alone had never frightened Ruth, whether through night woods or along the docksides of the cities of Portland and Seattle. Something in her face, as if she’d suffered her whole life from the beginning of it, warned people against interfering. If she did not make contact, none was made. She had to ask for trouble, and she often had, usually finding it at the hands of a man who did not enjoy being abusive but felt a masculine suspicion of the small kindness Ruth could read in his face. Joanie read pocketbooks instead, which were even more carefully guarded from commitment than a kind nature.

  “I thought at least Mavis would come to see Stew,” Joanie said when they had settled themselves on the bus. “She doesn’t usually go to those sorts of meetings.”

  “No, I never thought I’d see Mavis involved in that sort of thing either.”

  “I’d be afraid to go,” Joanie said.

  “Would you?”

  “Tom said it wouldn’t help Arthur anyway.”

  “No, but it might still help Tom and all the others up here.”

  “Lots of people I know think they shouldn’t be allowed into Canada. I guess I thought that, too, but then, when you think about Arthur or Tom …”

  Ruth watched Joanie’s puzzled face, unexamined categories of judgment breaking down before the simple experience of eating breakfast and dinner with particular people day after day. And she could offer this kindness to Stew though she didn’t approve of him either or what he suffered from.

  “Will you go?” Joanie asked.

  “Where?”

  “On the protest march they’re planning.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me,” Ruth said.

  They arrived at the hospital and were directed by an officious nurse who made it seem a reluctant personal favor to tell them where Stew was.

  “I’m afraid of hospitals, too,” Joanie confessed.

  “We all are; it’s natural.”

  Stew was in a room by himself. As they went in, he seemed asleep, but then he turned toward them, and his eyes were open.

  “Hello, Stew,” Ruth said.

  He looked at her, but she knew he did not see her, his mind blind with whatever sedative he had been given.

  “Hi, Stew,” Joanie said, nervously cheerful. “We came to see you.”

  “Gladys and Mavis are at a meeting tonight. They sent their love.”

  “Can you hear, Stew?” Joanie asked.

  Nothing disturbed the surface of his face. Ruth brushed the hair back on his forehead, so like Gladdy’s own hair. Twins they’d seemed more than lovers and should probably have observed the taboos of kinship.

  You don’t have to fly, Stew. None of you do. There isn’t any way out of the maze that’s human.

  “We’ll come back soon.”

  “Has he lost his mind?” Joanie asked once they were out of doors again.

  That sounded to Ruth violently physical, like losing an arm, the wrong way to put what was happening behind Stew’s serene eyes. Going out of his mind was a better cliché, a journey he had been taking intermittently for a couple of years, lifting up out of himself on the notes from his clarinet to escape all the inadequate complexity of thought, even of feeling, wanting to be neither troubled nor touched.

  “He’s a sick boy,” Ruth admitted, “a very sick boy.”

  The next day, before any of them had an opportunity to see him again, Stew was transferred to Riverview, the mental hospital, where only his family was allowed to visit him.

  Tom, Mavis, and Gladys painted placards, made telephone calls, and marched in the streets with dogged energy which left them muted at home. Nothing any of them could do would bring Arthur back, an unhoped-for miracle they had irrelevantly linked with Stew, whose sentence now seemed as harsh. When, after a few days, the television cameras could no longer be attracted, Tom and Gladys kept on going to meetings, but Mavis went back to her thesis, brooding on the morality of plot. Joanie had a new and hopefully developing relationship with a blue convertible. Willard, who had not missed a step in his routine, still kissed Ruth goodbye in the morning and called, “Have a day, Mrs. Wheeler,” but he could not restore Clara. She felt the grief in her bones and could not make the effort to join them at dinner any longer. Nor was she much interested in Dickens or Eiseley, and Gladys didn’t even offer to read articles from the radical press. Clara ebbed into the winter in which she intended to die.

  The house next door, as well as the house on the corner, was vacant now. They no longer listened for geese but instead for the shattering of glass. One rock was heaved into Stew’s empty bedroom. After that, Ruth made sure to leave a number of lights burning. She sat w
ith Clara through longer periods of the night when it would be easiest for Clara to slip away for good from her pain. Ruth did not venture out now except to patrol the block, her face under the streetlight stern, her eyes sharp with dark, glittering watchfulness. If she had lived by herself, the current of change would already have caught her up and carried her elsewhere. But there was Willard, there was Clara, and even the others seemed increasingly dependent on the house and each other, survivors together of lost battles.

  A week before Christmas, like a premature nightmare of Santa Claus, Ruth’s husband suddenly arrived, chucked his hat and coat in the hall closet, went in to greet his mother, then carried his suitcase back into Ruth’s bedroom, calling to her in the kitchen, “I could use a drink.” Joanie, standing puzzled in the living room, said, “Who is he?” Willard looked up from his paper and made one of his rare offerings: “Mr. Wheeler.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hal Wheeler should have been a physically big man. Long-torsoed, heavy-shouldered, he looked at least six feet tall when he was sitting down, but when he stood up he strained to reach five feet six inches: bandy-legged, the only detail about his father Clara could clearly remember. A short-legged man, like a short-legged dog, has to make a lot of noise around the house. If he’s a bastard as well, his father a myth instead of a restraint, he will need to be a hero among men, a bully with women, an authority on everything from septic tanks to international finance. Clara would not, even so, have found her son so difficult to like if she had not felt guilty about him. She had given in to the short-legged bully, his father, but then she had been too proud to force him into marriage. Clara loved her son and felt sorry for him.

  He did not feel sorry for himself. He was a hero on the road gang, riding tall on his great earth-moving machines, which could shove around boulders and tree stumps the size of a house and take the cheek out of a mountain. For twenty-five years he had worked pushing roads deeper and deeper into the British Columbia wilderness preparing the way for other men to mine and lumber off, to build working towns, mills, foundries, to make B.C. the richest goddamned province in the country. And he made enough money at it to come into town a hero as well, a roll of bank notes in his pocket large enough to impress any kind of drinking partner and buy the sweetest pair of tits in the place if he felt like it. That’s how he spent a weekend in Prince George or Kamloops.

  In Vancouver, on his rare visits, he had to be that harder thing: a family man, a son, a husband, for twenty-two years a father. Though he blamed Ruth for his long absences, she suspected a basic decency in him kept him away from that role for long periods because he was so bad at it. But she and his mother and even his daughter had been bad at teaching him how or letting him be. Each had wanted something from him that he simply couldn’t give, a space of her own in his presence. Hal was not an ungenerous man, but he couldn’t give space to anyone easily and to women, never.

  Aside from Willard, Tom was the only one in the household who had experienced one of Hal’s visits before.

  “Gladdy will kill him,” he said quietly to Ruth.

  “No one has over the years,” Ruth said. “I don’t imagine she will, but maybe you’d better all go to the pub tonight.”

  “Did you know he was coming?”

  “I never do, but he won’t stay long, two or three days maybe.”

  She took the drink he had ordered into her husband. He was just coming out of the bathroom, naked to his waist, the grizzled hair on his chest damp from washing, a toothpick in the side of his mouth, a habit he’d acquired when he gave up smoking.

  “It was a shame to put money into fixing up that bathroom,” he said, hoisting his trousers a little self-consciously, probably because he’d put on a bit of weight.

  “I suppose so,” Ruth said.

  “Mother’s poorly.”

  “She has a lot of pain.”

  “You’re keeping about the same.”

  “Yes, I’m all right.”

  He took a clean shirt out of his suitcase and put it on. Then he picked up his drink from the dresser and tilted it at her before he took his first swallow. She liked the shape of his head, but it reminded her of the sharp pleasure she had taken in seeing it repeated in the infant head of their daughter. She’d had his smile, too, lopsided, with one deep dimple, not matched on the other side of his mouth. It was like a movie running backwards, the face of a dead child living on in her father’s.

  Tom had set a place at the other end of the table, left empty since Clara had given up the effort of eating dinner with them. Hal took it as if he had been sitting there every evening for years. Then he looked at Joanie.

  “There will be no curlers at my table,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Joanie said, startled. “I’m … I’m going out tonight.”

  “I said, there will be no curlers at my table.”

  Joanie looked at Ruth, who said nothing, and then excused herself from the table.

  “When I first saw the news, I thought it was you they got,” Hal said then to Tom.

  “Did you?”

  “Don’t know why Canadians have to put up with so much American bellyaching.”

  “I was bellyaching,” Gladys said, “and I was bellyaching because I’m a Canadian.”

  “Nobody’s ever going to send you to war. Women don’t know what a country is. It’s a crime they should vote. Look at Ruth here. She’s supposed to be a Canadian. There’s a housing shortage in this country, did you know that? There’s a job shortage. She’d give the whole damned country, never mind her house, to the Yanks if she had her way.”

  “The house is being torn down,” Gladys said. “If women could vote where it counted, if women ran the city, somebody might fucking well pay some attention to the housing shortage.”

  “If there’s one thing worse than a woman in curlers,” Hal said slowly, “it’s a woman with a foul mouth.”

  “We’ve already tried washing it out with soap,” Mavis said good-humoredly, “and it doesn’t work; so there’s no point in suggesting it. Gladdy does have a point, though, don’t you think?”

  “This house should have been torn down years ago,” Hal said, uncertainly deflected. “The whole neighborhood should be high rises by now.”

  “Would you live in one?” Ruth asked.

  “Why the hell should I live in one?” Hal asked.

  “That’s the way I feel,” Ruth said. “It’s the way Clara feels, too, but there doesn’t seem to be much choice.”

  “You could live anywhere you wanted,” Hal said. “Move to the country if you want space. As for Mother, she’s going into a home as soon as I can find one.”

  “A home?” Ruth repeated. “It would kill her.”

  “She needs to be looked after,” Hal said. “I’ve made up my mind.”

  There was no point in arguing with him before an audience, particularly one where he had no allies, which had always been the circumstance in this house, but the silence Ruth kept was tense with unspoken protest around the table.

  “She is being looked after,” Mavis finally said in a low tone.

  “I don’t need advice at my own table.”

  “It fucking well isn’t your table!” Gladys burst out.

  Hal got to his feet, dwarfing himself in fury. Willard, who sat between him and Gladys, went right on eating. Tom stood up, too, comfortably tall.

  “Come on, Gladdy,” Tom said quietly. “It just makes it unpleasant for Ruth.”

  Gladys gave Ruth a look of disbelief, got up, and left the room with Tom. Mavis followed them.

  “I sometimes wonder where you find them,” Hal said.

  “Sit down and eat your dinner,” Ruth said. “Have some more chicken, Willard, now that there’s plenty.”

  “Still selling shoes, Willard?”

  “That’s about it,” Willard said.

  “Where are you going to go when they pull this old barn down?”

  “The future looks after itself.”

 
“I suppose it can,” Hal said, settling again to his dinner, “but now and then it needs a little help.”

  Hal and Ruth took coffee in to have it with Clara, who had made an effort to look comfortable and cheerful in her bed.

  “Ruth here thinks it would kill you to go into a home; so you’d better set her straight.”

  “I want to go, Ruth,” Clara said. “I asked Hal to look after it for me.”

  “Now is that clear?” Hal asked.

  Ruth looked at Clara, her companion through all these years. They both knew a home would kill her. That was why she could not have asked Ruth as she could her son, who seemed to Ruth ironically at that moment the unselfish one, ready to do his mother’s bidding at some cost to himself. Ruth, given the opportunity, would have fought. She had been fighting through all those unspeaking nights, keeping her need before Clara, refusing to measure the pain. Do you have to? Ruth wanted to ask. Clara had had low points before and recovered her little strength and large spirit. Surely she could again.

  “Let me go, Ruth.”

  “It’s not up to Ruth. You want to go. I said you could go. That’s all there is to settle.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said.

  “Ruth?”

  “I understand.”

  Hal was forcefully cheerful, full of tales of his exploits, a ready line of new jokes, old in their intention to set men up and put women down. The classic pose is Mrs. Murphy with her tit caught in a wringer, Mr. Murphy with an eager wrench in his hand. As Ruth brought Hal his third drink, he cupped a hand under her buttocks and squeezed, the sureness of ownership in his gesture. Ruth had never denied him in that as she had in every other manly essential from his wallet to his politics. She was always mildly surprised that he still wanted her.

  “You’re such a woman in bed,” he said. “I don’t forget that.”

  I don’t forget you either, she might have said, but one of the things he enjoyed in bed was that he did all the talking, telling her what he wanted, what she wanted, with such candid eagerness that she did want and want badly to come to him and did, but, as he slept heavily beside her, she wondered if she could endure his other needs for more than another day without laughing at him or throwing something at him. Poor bastard … he’d come home to help her as well as his mother.